OUR PICKSThe $10 Trillion Case for Decentralized Cybersecurity | The Good News About Vaccine Hesitancy | Software Supply Chain Risk, and more

Published 6 February 2023

··  The Inside Story of How the U.S. Shot Down the Chinese Balloon
Intelligence analysts distinguish between secrets and mysteries

··  Cybersecurity Budgets Are Going Up. So Why Aren’t Breaches Going Down?
Growing sophistication of hackers is only one of the reasons

··  The $10 Trillion Case for Decentralized Cybersecurity
As long as cybersecurity is centralized, it will always fail

··  Software Supply Chain Risk Is Growing, but Mitigation Solutions Exist
Software supply chain risk has emerged as a leading concern for private sector firms and government agencies

··  Responding to the Firearm Violence Crisis: Are Some Newly Enacted Laws Making Things Worse?
While some restrictive gun laws reduce gun violence, other more-permissive gun laws worsen it

··  Could a Chatbot Teach You How to Build a Dirty Bomb?
Despite being programmed to align with human values, could ChatGPT be tricked into doing harm

··  The Pentagon Saw a Warship Boondoggle. Congress Saw Jobs.
The Navy wanted to save $4.3 billion over the next five years, but lawmakers were not interested

··  An Even Deadlier Pandemic Could Soon Be Here
Bird flu — known more formally as avian influenza — has long hovered on the horizons of scientists’ fears

··  The Good News About Vaccine Hesitancy
The future of vaccination in America may be no worse than its recent past

The Inside Story of How the U.S. Shot Down the Chinese Balloon  (David Ignatius, Washington Post)
The public spectacle of a spy balloon floating over America has been an embarrassment for the Biden administration, to be sure. But the administration can claim that it waited for the most opportune moment to destroy the balloon and capture its secret payload — and that the strange affair was a net intelligence plus for the United States.
Thus, from an intelligence standpoint, Pentagon officials believe that the strange week-long balloon voyage was ultimately of more benefit to the United States than to China. By waiting until the balloon was over U.S. territorial waters, the Biden administration was able to maximize the likelihood that the pod could be recovered while minimizing the risk that Americans would be injured by falling debris.
The Pentagon official said it weighed as much as two or three buses and could have caused considerable damage if it had hit land. If it had fallen over Montana, 2,000 people could have been in danger from scattered debris.

Cybersecurity Budgets Are Going Up. So Why Aren’t Breaches Going Down?  (Hacker News)
Over the past few years, cybersecurity has become a major concern for businesses around the globe. With the total cost of cybercrime in 2023 forecasted to reach $8 Trillion – with a T, not a B – it’s no wonder that cybersecurity is top of mind for leaders across all industries and regions.
However, despite growing attention and budgets for cybersecurity in recent years, attacks have only become more common and more severe. While threat actors are becoming increasingly sophisticated and organized, this is just one piece to the puzzle in determining why cybercrime continues to rise and what organizations can do to stay secure.

The $10 Trillion Case for Decentralized Cybersecurity  (Lawrence Wintermeyer, Forbes)
A recent Gartner report identified cybersecurity mesh as a leading trend for 2023, but stopped short of looking at a decentralized mesh that can remove the centralized mesh’s points of failure. While zero trust and cybersecurity mesh strategies offer the flexibility and composability to accommodate moving boundaries and limit attack surfaces, the underlying device architecture is still centralized. (Cont.)