Homeland security strategy; designer bugs; avoiding a World War Web, and more

“Designer bugs”: how the next pandemic might come from a lab (R. Daniel Bressler and Chris Bakerlee, Vox)
Why we need to take the threat of bioengineered superbugs seriously.

TSA unveils cybersecurity roadmap (Frank Konkel, Defense One)
The agency identifies four priorities and six goals to address

Hoarding threat information ‘not a competitive advantage,’ DHS official tells corporate leaders (Sean Lyngaas, Cyberscoop)
Companies that view cybersecurity as a competitive advantage and fail to exchange threat data make the broader private sector more vulnerable to hacking, a Department of Homeland Security official has warned.
“Cybersecurity, infrastructure security, is not a competitive advantage,” Bradford Willke, a top official in DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said Tuesday.

Avoiding a World War Web: The Paris call for trust and security in cyberspace (Arthur B. Laudrain, Just Security)
On Nov. 11 at 11:00 a.m., more than 70 world leaders walked towards the Arc de Triomphe in Paris to commemorate the centenary of the end of the First World War and to honor the 19 million people who lost their lives in it. French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a charged speech denouncing nationalism and urging all leaders to pursue peace through multilateralism. On November 12^th 2018 at the Internet Governance Forum, Macron unveiled France’s first international initiative to that end, the “Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace.”

The U.S. got Canada to arrest a top Chinese tech executive (Emily Stewart and Alex Ward, Vox)
The arrest of Huawei’s Sabrina Meng is a “warning shot” in US-China relations.

Cyber-espionage group uses Chrome extension to infect victims (Catalin Cimpanu, ZDNet)
Suspected North Korean APT uses Google Chrome extension to infect victims in the academic sector.

Washington State workers to install equipment to monitor slow-moving landslide (Alec Regimbal, Yakima Herald-Republic)
Geologists say the 20-acre, 200-foot-deep mass could continue sliding for years, if not decades, and will likely fall bit by bit into the quarry pit owned by Columbia Asphalt. It will not become a fast-moving, catastrophically damaging landslide, they say.

A conversation with former DHS official who resigned over family separation (Nick Schwellenbach, POGO)
Scott Shuchart was, until this summer, a top official at the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL). He quit after he said high-level DHS officials ignored legal and policy concerns that CRCL raised regarding DHS’s separation of immigrant children from their parents after crossing the border. He wrote about this in a Washington Post Outlook piece, and appeared on 60 Minutes.

DHS wants a custom cyberthreat warning network (Justin Lynch, Fifth Domain)
The Department of Homeland Security wants to create a social network that businesses can use to exchange advanced knowledge of cyberattacks, an effort that echoes what a number of private sector organizations have created but is intended to operate on a larger scale.
In a pre-solicitation statement, the agency said it wanted to develop software to help small and medium-sized businesses communicate with each other and identify hacking attempts.