Our picksZTE threat; Pentagon’s ID verification scheme; predicting volcanic eruptions, and more

Sure, sell to ZTE — just don’t buy from them (Nicholas Weaver, Lawfare)
ZTE is a Chinese telecommunications company that is effectively under a corporate death-sentence, recently banned from any purchases of U.S. goods for inclusion into their products. Trump’s later tweets suggested that negotiations over ZTE were linked to the possibility of a broader U.S.-China trade deal, but both Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Trump’s top economic adviser Larry Kudlow stated that the ZTE issue was a question of enforcement separate from trade. Let’s start with buying ZTE. Any basic precautionary analysis should say that any infrastructure that the U.S. depends on should not be controlled by Chinese or Russian software—full stop. This is why I was so glad when the U.S. government finally began to purge their systems of Kaspersky software. Russia or Chinese governmental systems would not willingly run on Cisco or Symantec software for the same reasons.

House panel advances State Department bug bounty bill (Sean Lyngaas, Cyberscoop)
The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday advanced a bill that would establish a bug bounty program at the State Department, the latest effort by lawmakers and security gurus to encourage agencies to use ethical hackers to secure their networks.

How relying on oil makes us more vulnerable to cyberattacks (Nathan Sproul, Fortune)
What’s the difference between a major American city and a wartorn country? Besides the matters of development, peace, and affluence, unobstructed access to resources may come to mind. The contrast is stark, but an American city could become like a war zone quicker than you’d imagine. All it would take is a successfully hacked electrical grid.

Botnets ‘competing’ to attack vulnerable GPON fiber routers (Zack Whittaker, ZDNet)
Vulnerable fiber internet routers now under attack from competing botnet herders.

The Pentagon has a big plan to solve identity verification in two years (Joseph Marks, Defense One)
The plan grew out of efforts to modernize the Defense Department’s ID cards.

Firefighting efforts ramp up in central Washington as season gets longer each year (Luke Thompson, Yakima Herald-Republic)
Firefighters dealt with a 50-acre brush fire in West Valley on Sunday, and said it felt like the start of another active season.

How volcanologists predicted Kilauea’s explosive eruption (Adam Rogers, Wired)
Kilauea and its sibling volcanoes, sitting atop a “hot spot” in Earth’s crust, are where volcano observation started, and they’re literally a textbook case of how close observation with high-tech sensors can teach scientists to forecast disaster, and by forecasting it, avert it.