Cyberwar Make the World Safer? | Cyber Insurance & Ransomware Costs | Social Media & the Taliban, and more

While the Taliban is banned from holding accounts or spreading propaganda on most big online networks, its takeover of the government means the tech giants will soon have to decide whether to expand its access or grant it the ability to manage Afghanistan’s official state social media channels. They may also have to make decisions about whether to keep up or flag content that both praises and criticizes the group, with potentially perilous consequences for those posting it. The events unfolding in Afghanistan underscore how difficult it is to make quick judgments on who deserves to have a voice on social networks during dangerous and fast-moving international crises. Facebook and other platforms tout their mission of fostering a robust and free-flowing political debate while only lightly moderating content, and have been accused of censorship for blocking posts expressing some extreme views.

Cyber Insurance Market Encounters “Crisis Moment” as Ransomware Costs Pile Up  (Tim Starks, Cyberscoop)
It’s a sure sign of trouble when leading insurance industry executives are worried about their own prices going up.
Two separate CEOs of major insurance giants remarked in recent weeks about a considerable jump in cyber insurance premium prices: AIG’s chief executive said rates increased by 40% for its clients, while Chubb’s chief executive said that company was charging more, too.
Rather than welcoming the trend, Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg offered a warning. Those price increases, he said, still don’t reflect the grave risk that a catastrophic cyber event poses. “That is not addressing by itself the fundamental issue,” he said.

How Trust, Connection and Understanding Can Shape the Future of Cyber  (Tim Li, Cyberscoop)
Cybersecurity incidents continue to make headlines, challenging public agencies in the US to modernize cybersecurity defenses to protect citizens and the country.

The Mother of All Difficult Foreign Policy Decisions  (Albert Hunt, The Hill)
The most momentous foreign policy decision made by an American president — Harry Truman’s to drop atomic bombs on Japan — remains controversial more than three quarters of a century later.

Could Cyberwar Make the World Safer?  (Cybele C, Greenberg, New York Times)
During the Cold War, the United States, China and Russia sat on stockpiles of world-ending weapons. Now, these same countries routinely employ an array of offensive cyberweapons, though not quite to their full power grid-zapping, water system-clogging, society-crippling potential.
Indeed, despite its many consequences and dangers, there is no documented instance in which cyberwarfare has directly killed anyone (although it has come close).

ShadowPad Malware is Becoming a Favorite Choice of Chinese Espionage Groups  (Ravie Lakshmanan, Hacker News)
ShadowPad, an infamous Windows backdoor that allows attackers to download further malicious modules or steal data, has been put to use by five different Chinese threat clusters since 2017.
“The adoption of ShadowPad significantly reduces the costs of development and maintenance for threat actors,” SentinelOne researchers Yi-Jhen Hsieh and Joey Chen said in a detailed overview of the malware, adding “some threat groups stopped developing their own backdoors after they gained access to ShadowPad.”