Russian Intelligence Hacking Tradecraft | U.S. Power Grid Security | Oregon Arson Fugitive, and more

“Locally it involved the arson of a Detroit Ranger Station, Oakridge Ranger Station, Cabel West in Redmond. Most famously is Vail ski resort arson. Overaker was involved in all of those actions and has been a fugitive since 2004,” Suttles told FOX 12. According to the FBI, the Vail ski resort remains the largest eco-related arson in history. The Bureau believes that Overaker was responsibile for shoplifting many of the components “The Family” needed to build their firebombs. Overaker is the one remaining member of “The Family” to evade justice after an FBI operation led to a national takedown of every other member in 2004.

U.K. Terror Offender Monitoring Rules Lawful  (Dominic Casciani, BBC)
The High Court has upheld the Ministry of Justice’s power to impose tighter curbs on the movements of convicted terrorists in the wake of the Fishmongers’ Hall attack. Two judges rejected challenges from an associate of the man who carried out the 2019 attack saying he had been largely treated lawfully, except on one specific issue. Omar Latif, from Cardiff, said officials had placed greater and illegal restrictions on his life after he had been released, amid fears of copycat attacks. Latif’s former associate, Usman Khan, stabbed Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt at a conference at Fishmongers’ Hall in London after he had been earlier released from prison. Inquests into the circumstances of their deaths are continuing. In a comprehensive ruling, judges said officials had acted legally when they changed and toughened Latif’s license conditions. While the court ruled that Latif should have had the opportunity to make representations, officials had recognized and corrected that mistake long before the matter came to court. Latif was jailed in 2012 for his role in a terror cell operating across England and Wales that had aspirations to set up training camps in Pakistan and carry out bombings in the UK. Usman Khan was one of the people jailed alongside Latif.

A 23-Year-Old Coder Kept QAnon Online When No One Else Would  (William Turton and Joshua Burstein, Bloomberg)
Two and a half months before extremists invaded the U.S. Capitol, the far-right wing of the internet suffered a brief collapse. All at once, in the final weeks of the country’s presidential campaign, a handful of prominent sites catering to White supremacists and adherents of the QAnon conspiracy movement stopped functioning. To many of the forums’ most devoted participants, the outage seemed to prove the American political struggle was approaching its apocalyptic endgame. “Dems are making a concerted move across all platforms,” read one characteristic tweet. “The burning of the land foreshadows a massive imperial strike back in the next few days.” In fact, there’d been no conspiracy to take down the sites; they’d crashed because of a technical glitch with VanwaTech, a tiny company in Vancouver, Wash., that they rely on for various kinds of network infrastructure. They went back online with a simple server reset about an hour later, after the proprietor, 23-year-old Nick Lim, woke up from a nap at his mom’s condo. Lim founded VanwaTech in late 2019. He hosts some websites directly and provides others with technical services including protection against certain cyberattacks; his annual revenue, he says, is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Capital’s ‘Complex’ Power Structure Keeps Causing Chaos Under Pressure  (Elizabeth Howe, Defense One)
U.S. Army processes updated after last June’s protests failed again during the Jan. 6 riot.

NSA, FBI, DHS Expose Russian Intelligence Hacking Tradecraft  (Shannon Vavra, Cyberscoop)
The U.S. government warned the private sector Thursday that Russian government hackers working for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) are actively exploiting five known vulnerabilities to target U.S. companies and the defense industrial base.
The National Security Agency, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) urged system administrators to patch immediately against the vulnerabilities the hackers, also known at APT29 or Cozy Bear, are exploiting.

White House Rushes to Strengthen Security of U.S. Power Grid as Hacking Threats Grow  (Shaun Courtney and Michael Riley, Insurance Journal)
A White House plan to rapidly shore up the security of the U.S. power grid will begin with a 100-day sprint, but take years more to transform utilities’ ability to fight off hackers, according to details of a draft version of the plan confirmed by two people.
The plan is the policy equivalent of a high-wire act: it provides incentives for electric companies to dramatically change the way they protect themselves against cyber attacks while trying to avoid political tripwires that have stalled previous efforts, the details suggest.

Future Trends: Far-Right Terrorism in the UK – A Major Threat?  (Rhys Martin. Global Risk Insights)
Since the late 1990s, the threat to UK security from far-right terrorism has been considered to have been of minor concern compared to Islamist or Northern Ireland-related terror. However, within the past few years there has been a growth in concern about rising levels of far-right extremism. With the ideology spreading via the internet amongst a young audience, is it possible that far-right terrorism could become the major domestic threat to UK security?