Self-Promoting Cybersecurity Firms | Cloning DARPA | Risks of Using Geoengineering to Address Climate Change, and more

Organizations that don’t pay ransoms can spend months rebuilding their systems; if customer data are stolen and leaked as part of an attack, they may be fined by regulators. In 2018, the city of Atlanta declined to pay a ransom of approximately fifty thousand dollars. Instead, in an effort to recover from the attack, it spent more than two million dollars on crisis P.R., digital forensics, and consulting. For every ransomware case that makes the news, there are many more small and medium-sized companies that prefer to keep breaches under wraps, and more than half of them pay their hackers, according to data from the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky.

SolarWinds and Colonial Pipeline Crises Showed 7 Ways to Respond to Cyberattacks  (Edward Segal, Forbes)
In their responses to the recent cyberattacks against SolwarWinds and Colonial Pipeline, the two companies, the federal government, and others demonstrated several crisis management best practices.
Business leaders should keep these best practices in mind when they have to deal with cyberattacks—and other crisis situations—at their companies and organizations.

A Growing Number of Governments Hope to Clone America’s DARPA  (Economist)
They will not succeed unless they adopt the spirit which motivates it.

Michael Flynn Denies Calling for Violent Military Coup Despite Video Footage  (Jamie Ross, Daily Beast)
Michael Flynn is trying his best to take back his apparent endorsement of a violent military coup in the United States—despite his comments being caught on video. On Sunday, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser appeared at a Dallas QAnon conference and was asked by an audience member “Why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here?” Flynn responded: “No reason. I mean, it should happen here.” After his comment was reported by media outlets, Flynn rushed to Telegram to disavow his own comment. “Let me be VERY CLEAR,” he wrote. “There is NO reason whatsoever for any coup in America, and I do not and have not at any time called for any action of that sort.” He then went on to add annotations to what he said to make it appear like an innocuous statement, writing that his intended message was: “There is no reason it (a coup) should happen here.” QAnon believers have cited the Myanmar coup as an example of how Trump could be reinstated as president.

The SolarWinds Hackers Aren’t Back—They Never Went Away  (Lily Hay Newman, Wired / Arstechnica)
A new phishing campaign is less an escalation than a regression to the mean.

The Risks of Using Geoengineering to Address Climate Change  (Michelle Grisé et al., RAND)
In 2009, a Chinese weather bureau sought to end a drought by firing sticks of silver iodide into the sky. This led to massive snowfall and highway closures. This example highlights just one risk of geoengineering—the large-scale manipulation of environmental processes in order to counteract the effects of climate change. As the prospect of using geoengineering grows, a new RAND paper examines the geopolitical risks it poses and how to manage them.

Climate Change, Extremism among Military Threats Targeted in DoD Budget Request  (Stephen Losey, Military.com)
The Biden administration is addressing extremism in the ranks, as well as climate change, in its first proposed Defense Department budget.
The budget would set aside $30.8 million to help the Pentagon improve tools to identify and address extremism among troops, and enhance training at all levels.
It also includes $9.1 million to take initial steps to fight extremism and insider threats, building on findings from the military’s report on the 2019 shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, by a Saudi pilot; it was determined he had self-radicalized.
The budget also declares climate change a “national security priority.”
The military must adapt to the ways the natural environment is changing, the Pentagon said, and take action to reduce how the military contributes to negative effects on the climate.