Our picksDomestic Terrorism Warning System for DHS | Immigration-Related Biometrics Collection | U.S. Gov. Advisories Help Russian Hackers, and more
· DHS Launches Warning System to Find Domestic Terrorism Threats on Public Social Media
· Ransomware Attacks Like the One that Hit Colonial Pipeline Are Increasingly Common
· US, UK Agencies Warn Russian Hackers Are Adapting Based on Government Advisories
· Your Old Mobile Phone Number Could Compromise Your Cybersecurity
· Israel’s Version of Moving Fast and Breaking Things: The New Cybersecurity Bill
· What We Know about the Pipeline Ransomware Attack: How It Happened, Who Is Responsible and More
· Boko Haram Boosts Plans to Have Separate Islamic Country, Lures Borno, Yobe Residents
· Far-Right Using COVID Conspiracy Theories to Lure Young - UK Police
· French Military Leader Asserts Islamic State Is ‘Regenerating’ Underground
· DHS Drops Proposal to Expand Immigration-Related Biometrics Collection
DHS Launches Warning System to Find Domestic Terrorism Threats on Public Social Media (Ken Dilanian, NBC News)
The Department of Homeland Security has begun implementing a strategy to gather and analyze intelligence about security threats from public social media posts, DHS officials said. The goal is to build a warning system to detect the sort of posts that appeared to predict an attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 but were missed or ignored by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the officials said. The focus is not on the identity of the posters but rather on gleaning insights about potential security threats based on emerging narratives and grievances. So far, DHS is using human beings, not computer algorithms, to make sense of the data, the officials said. “We’re not looking at who are the individual posters,” said a senior official involved in the effort. “We are looking at what narratives are resonating and spreading across platforms. From there you may be able to determine what are the potential targets you need to protect.” The officials didn’t describe what criteria or methods the analysts would use to parse the data. They said DHS officials have been consulting with social media companies, private companies and nonprofit groups that analyze open-source social media data.
Ransomware Attacks Like the One that Hit Colonial Pipeline Are Increasingly Common (Economist)
The groups behind such attacks are targeting bigger organizations and demanding heftier payouts.
US, UK Agencies Warn Russian Hackers Are Adapting Based on Government Advisories (Mariam Baksh, Nextgov)
The adversary is changing its tools to avoid detection while attacking the vulnerabilities governments issue warnings about.
Your Old Mobile Phone Number Could Compromise Your Cybersecurity (Sarah Katz , Tech Xplore)
The Department of Computer Science and Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University has conducted a study and released a paper assessing the security and privacy risks of phone number recycling by mobile characters in the United States.
Such a risk could pose a threat to many users, as every time you change your mobile phone number, your carrier will recycle your previous number. They ‘recycle’ the number by assigning it to a new phone and corresponding customer. The carriers report doing this in order to avoid ‘number exhaustion,’ or a situation where all possible numbers have already been used for each mobile phone.
