Security News for the Week Ending June 26, 2020

Anonymous Gonna Rise Again. Question Mark?

A hacker or hackers claiming to be affiliated the non-group Anonymous has posted a million documents coming from over 200 police departments and other law enforcement agencies. While the documents do no purport to show illegal activities, they are likely both embarrassing and also confidential. The fact that the police could not protect their own information is probably not great for their reputations either. Credit: Wired

Republican Senators Create Bill to End Use of Warrant-proof Encryption

Senators Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn say that they plan to introduce a bill that will require service providers and device manufacturers to insert backdoors into their software and devices so that cops can decrypt the devices when they want to.

They have not published the bill yet and we have no idea whether it will get any traction, so who knows, but the main issue is that there is nothing to stop bad actors from installing software from web sites in countries that don’t really case about what Mrs Graham and Cotton or Ms. Blackburn want. Sure you will catch stupid crooks, but we catch them anyway. Credit: ZDNet

Pentagon Creates List of Companies Controlled by Chinese PLA

There is a 1999 law that requires the Pentagon to produce a list of companies controlled by the Chinese military. Always prompt, 21 years later the Pentagon has produced that list. Huawei is one of those companies, of course. At this point it is not clear what the White House will do with that list, but we assume that it will be used to add pressure to China. Credit: Time

Feds Ask FCC to Deny China Access to New Fiber Optic Cable from US

Team Telecom, that federation of executive branch agencies that has been completely toothless in stopping China from compromising our telecom has finally decided that to feels its Wheaties. Renamed CAFPUSTSS, they say we should not drop an undersea fiber cable in Hong Kong for China to tap. The proposed cable would have a speed of 144 terabits per second, otherwise known as way fast. If the White House has its way, the cable will go from the U.S. to the Philippines and Taiwan and bypass Hong Kong. Google owns the Taiwan segment and Facebook owns the Philippines segment, but China owns the proposed Hong Kong segment. Credit: CSO Online

Hackers Use Captcha to Thwart Detection

Captcha, those annoying puzzles/questions/pictures that websites use to try and distinguish bots from humans, is now being used by the baddies. The hackers are putting their malware, like infected spreadsheets, on websites behind a captcha, likely to try and avoid detection by the good guys. If the good guys automated testing cannot complete the captcha, it won’t test the content behind it, leaving it available for victims to download and get infected. Credit: ARS Technica

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