Medical-Targeted Ransomware Is Breaking Records | Challenges and Opportunities of High-Risk Pathogen Research | A January 6 Rioter Is Leading an Armed National Militia from Prison, and more

That’s because hatred has found a new home in the mainstream, rendering niche groups such as Islamophobic outfits increasingly obsolete, he said.
“The bottom line is, the way we associate to express and amplify hatred has changed,” Levin said in an interview with VOA. “Up-and-coming bigots of all sorts will find an array of xenophobic bigotry and conspiracism within general mainstream platforms.”

Medical-Targeted Ransomware Is Breaking Records After Change Healthcare’s $22M Payout  (Andy Greenberg, Wired)
When Change Healthcare paid $22 million in March to a ransomware gang that had crippled the company along with hundreds of hospitals, medical practices, and pharmacies across the US, the cybersecurity industry warned that Change’s extortion payment would only fuel a vicious cycle: Rewarding hackers who had carried out a ruthless act of sabotage against the US health care system nationwide with one of the largest ransomware payments in history, it seemed, was bound to incentivize a new wave of attacks on similarly sensitive victims. Now that wave has arrived.
In April, cybersecurity firm Recorded Future tracked 44 cases of cybercriminal groups targeting health care organizations with ransomware attacks, stealing their data, encrypting their systems, and demanding payments from the companies while holding their networks hostage. That’s more health care victims of ransomware than in any month Recorded Future has seen in its four years of collecting that data, says Allan Liska, a threat intelligence analyst at the company. Comparing that number to the 30 incidents in March, it’s also the second biggest month-to-month jump in incidents the company has ever tracked.
While Liska notes that he can’t be sure of the reason for that spike, he argues it’s unlikely to be a coincidence that it follows in the wake of Change Healthcare’s eight-figure payout to the hacker group known as AlphV or BlackCat that was tormenting the company.

A January 6 Rioter Is Leading an Armed National Militia from Prison  (David Gilbert, Wired)
Years after being accused of swinging a baseball bat at police officers during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Edward “Jake” Lang is now using encrypted messaging channels to create a nationwide network of armed militias in all 50 states.
Though he has been in prison for over 1,200 days, Lang is working with a network of election deniers and conspiracists to promote the North American Patriot and Liberty Militia, or Napalm for short. The group officially launched last week with 50 state-specific militia groups on Telegram.
Lang claims that the Telegram groups already have 20,000 members, including pastors, farmers, former military personnel, and currently serving sheriffs. However, multiple experts who reviewed the channels tell WIRED that figure was wildly overestimated, and that the real figure was closer to 2,500 members. But a group this size, they warn, is still large enough to cause a serious threat. And while unarmed members are welcome, the group is, at its core, a pro-gun organization. “We are pro open carry, pro always have it on you, rather than waiting for somebody else to be able to defend your life,” says Lang.

Scientists Weigh in on the Challenges and Opportunities of High-Risk Pathogen Research Around the World  (Matt Field, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
The COVID pandemic illustrated the grave, global threat that a novel pathogen can pose. It also brought to the fore an uncomfortable idea that had long circulated in some corners of the life sciences: that modern experimental techniques, including research that creates more transmissible or virulent pathogens to understand disease better, could pose their own threat to human health. There is no firm evidence that this sort of work—often labeled as “gain of function”—led to the COVID pandemic, which emerged near an epicenter of bat coronavirus research, but the pandemic nonetheless has put techniques like those used at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology and other biosafety labs under the spotlight.
The US Congress has been holding hearings with scientists and science funders involved in these pursuits. Countries have been reforming or implementing changes to their biosecurity policies. And entities, including the Bulletin, have convened scientists and other researchers to examine the ethical and technical aspects of how high-consequence pathogen research is conducted and to explore how oversight of such research might be reformed.
For this commentary package, the Bulletin has asked researchers involved in a Bulletin-organized task force known as the Pathogens Project to weigh in on these issues and highlight gaps in biosecurity, biosafety, and other areas related to pathogen research that might otherwise be overlooked. Their responses are below. Additional responses will be published as they are ready.