Background Almost a year ago as of this writing, the Russian state initiated a new and astoundingly brutal campaign against Ukraine. While Russia had effectively been at war with Ukraine since not long after the Revolution of Dignity, late February 2022 initiated a far wider, nastier, and inhumane phase of Read more…
In the early hours of 24 February 2022, Russian forces initiated offensive, kinetic action against multiple targets across Ukraine. While shocking given the naked brutality of these strikes, this invasion represented the culmination of a months-long build-up, and arguably the final phase of a conflict that started in 2014. As Read more…
Questions concerning responsibility for the current epidemic of ransomware events are common, and seek to identify some concrete party to hold accountable for incidents. Yet the immediate perpetrators – largely (but not exclusively) criminal gangs operating in Eastern Europe and Russia – either represent too remote an entity for blame, Read more…
TrickBot was in the news quite a bit in early October 2020. Starting with reports of TrickBot disruption in late September 2020 subsequently linked to United States Cyber Command (USCC), events ramped up with an independent coordinated infrastructure take-down organized by Microsoft coming shortly thereafter. There are many avenues of Read more…
Media, social feeds, and other sources of news are awash with stories of the “first death linked to ransomware” following an incident in Düsseldorf on 09 September 2020. Since the event, authorities in Nordrhein Westphalen have launched an investigation treating the death as “negligent homicide”. At the time of this Read more…
I recently made a joke online relative to a major – and very respected, if geopolitically controversial – security company advertising its revised “Cyberthreat Real-Time Map”. As many members of the security community are aware, “threat maps” – referred to derisively as “pewpew” maps – are heavy on eye-candy but Read more…
My country, the United States, has experienced days of disruption and discord not witnessed since the late 1960s across multiple municipalities and regions. Adequately parsing and analyzing these events, their motivations, and what lasting impacts they may have will be the work for others. Instead, these chaotic events identify a Read more…
Two recent articles appeared concerning possible implications of or prompts for the 01 May 2020 Executive Order on the US electric system. Notably, the Executive Order was quickly followed by a US Department of Commerce investigation into the supply of electrical transformers. While the latter would appear related to typical Read more…
A new Twitter account appeared on 27 May 2020 for “NSA Cyber”, claiming the following: “Welcome to the intersection of threat intel, vulnerability analysis, and technical expertise! All to better equip you against malicious #cyber activity.” This was a very interesting development, and a separate effort from the US National Read more…
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread throughout much of the world, I’ve covered how this slowly unfolding catastrophe will impact the business climate of information security, why cost-saving reductions in network defense may be deeply undesirable, and how responses to certain actions in a pandemic landscape will be difficult Read more…