WORLD ROUNDUPWho Will Fill Europe’s Leadership Vacuum? | A U.K. Deportation Plan Cost $900 Million. Only Four People Left, and more
· Who Will Fill Europe’s Leadership Vacuum?
Paris is cheap and Berlin has no strategy. For serious leadership, look to Warsaw
· A U.K. Deportation Plan Cost $900 Million. Only Four People Left.
Britain’s last Conservative government spent almost a billion dollars on its controversial plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, the newly appointed minister for immigration said Monday
· Anjem Choudary Nicknamed Hurricane After Osama bin Laden
Hate preacher has been found guilty of directing a terror organization after trial in which he gloated over deadly natural disasters
· German Spy Agency ‘Too Short-Staffed to Deal with Russian Threats’
Intelligence service severely hampered by low morale, sickly employees and budget pressures, sources claim
· How Russia-Linked Malware Cut Heat to 600 Ukrainian Buildings in Deep Winter
The code, the first of its kind, was used to sabotage a heating utility in Lviv at the coldest point in the year—what appears to be yet another innovation in Russia’s torment of Ukrainian civilians
Who Will Fill Europe’s Leadership Vacuum? (Bart M. J. Szewczyk, Foreign Policy)
The recent elections to the European Parliament and French National Assembly shook the political landscape in Europe. Though the European Union’s center has held, its power base has shifted.
A U.K. Deportation Plan Cost $900 Million. Only Four People Left. (Megan Specia, New York Times)
The previous British government spent far more than previously announced on a contentious plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, it was announced on Monday.
Anjem Choudary Nicknamed Hurricane After Osama bin Laden (Martin Evans, The Telegraph)
On Tuesday he was found guilty of directing a terrorist organization and encouraging support for it through online meetings.
German Spy Agency ‘Too Short-Staffed to Deal with Russian Threats’ (James Rothwell, The Telegraph)
Germany’s equivalent of MI6 is reportedly struggling with staff shortages, low morale and sickly employees despite facing unprecedented challenges from Russia and other rogue states.
How Russia-Linked Malware Cut Heat to 600 Ukrainian Buildings in Deep Winter (Andy Greenberg, Wired)
As Russia has tested every form of attack on Ukraine’s civilians over the past decade, both digital and physical, it’s often used winter as one of its weapons—launching cyberattacks on electric utilities to trigger December blackouts and ruthlessly bombing heating infrastructure. Now it appears Russia-based hackers last January tried yet another approach to leave Ukrainians in the cold: a specimen of malicious software that, for the first time, allowed hackers to reach directly into a Ukrainian heating utility, switching off heat and hot water to hundreds of buildings in the midst of a winter freeze.
Industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos on Tuesday revealed a newly discovered sample of Russia-linked malware that it believes was used in a cyberattack in late January to target a heating utility in Lviv, Ukraine, disabling service to 600 buildings for around 48 hours. The attack, in which the malware altered temperature readings to trick control systems into cooling the hot water running through buildings’ pipes, marks the first confirmed case in which hackers have directly sabotaged a heating utility.
Dragos’ report on the malware notes that the attack occurred at a moment when Lviv was experiencing its typical January freeze, close to the coldest time of the year in the region, and that “the civilian population had to endure sub-zero [Celsius] temperatures.” As Dragos analyst Kyle O’Meara puts it more bluntly: “It’s a shitty thing for someone to turn off your heat in the middle of winter.”
