Security News for the Week Ending April 2, 2021
SolarWinds Hackers Got Emails of Former Acting Illegal Head of DHS
Chad Wolf, former temporary acting head of DHS, that a federal court said was illegally appointed, has another item for his resume. When the Russians hacked DHS by way of SolarWinds, they obtained Wolf’s emails. Try to comprehend, for a moment, the intelligence value to Russia of whatever was in his email. DHS has not commented on that subject, but suffice it to say, this is not good. Credit: Cybernews
US Special Operations Command Buys Location Data
SOCOM paid $500,000 to buy data harvested from apps on your phone. The company, Anomaly 6, is pretty secretive. The WSJ picked up the contract info, so they are probably getting more attention than they had gotten in the last year. Founded by ex-military and location industry execs, it seems to have contracts with DoD and the intelligence community. SOCOM says that the $589,500 deal was an evaluation of their data for an overseas environment. SOCOM does a lot of work tracking down bad guys in the Middle East and Africa, so you can probably connect the dots. No one is saying and this is likely no more illegal than SOCOM buying pens from Staples – for better or for worse. Credit: Vice
A Potential Resume Generating Event
Strategic Command, the folks responsible for launching nuclear missiles, sent the following Tweet
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Is this a launch code on Twitter? No. but here is a real world danger of Work From Home. Note to self – lock your computer before leaving.
Intel Sued Over Capturing User Keystroke data
Have you ever visited a web site, started filling out a form but didn’t submit it, and the site owner contacted you anyway. The way they do that is via software on the web site that records your keystrokes as you type. One of the companies that does that is Intel. Another is Google. There is a current class action lawsuit in Florida that accuses Intel of wiretapping. I’m not a lawyer, but that seems like a stretch. Still, if you are using keystroke monitoring software on your website, you probably should watch this lawsuit closely. Credit: Threatpost
Sierra Wireless Withdraws Financial Guidance Completely After Ransomware
Sierra Wireless, a major Internet of Things vendor, reported that they were the target of ransomware last week. As a result, they halted production at their manufacturing plants. Not only did the attack shut down many of their internal systems, but it forced the company to withdraw the financial performance numbers that they had released just a month earlier. There are a couple of potential reasons why they shut manufacturing down. One of those reasons might be that they are concerned that the attackers were able to compromise code going into those products and they did not want to be the next SolarWinds. Credit: SC Magazine
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