Russia detains prominent opposition politician in widening crackdown
By Metro US

Posted on June 1, 2021

FILE PHOTO: Andrei Pivovarov, chief of Open Russia opposition group, attends a forum of independent members of municipal councils in Moscow

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Dmitry Gudkov, a prominent opposition politician and former parliamentarian, was detained by Russian law enforcement officials on Tuesday, TASS news agency reported, part of a broader crackdown on Kremlin critics.

While a sitting lawmaker in the lower house of parliament, Gudkov was expelled from the Just Russia party in 2013 for helping organise anti-Kremlin protests. He later went on to join Russia’s liberal opposition and oppose President Vladimir Putin.

In a social media statement earlier on Tuesday, Gudkov, 41, had said police were searching a cottage he was staying in and were also targeting former and current members of his staff.


TASS, citing unnamed sources, reported that Gudkov had been detained for 48 hours on suspicion that he had failed to pay debt under a lease agreement for a non-residential building in 2015-2017. Gudkov could be jailed for up to five years if charged and found guilty by a court, TASS said.

His detention is the latest in a wider crackdown against opponents of the Kremlin ahead of a parliamentary election in September. Opposition politician Alexei Navalny is the highest profile Kremlin critic to be jailed.

Gudkov suggested on the Telegram social media platform earlier in the day that the reason the authorities had come for him was political. “I don’t know the formal reason for this,” wrote Gudkov. “But the real (reason) is clear.”

His father Gennady, also critical of the Kremlin, described the searches as “a special operation to eliminate Gudkov’s team”.

Separately, Russian authorities raided the apartment of opposition activist Andrei Pivovarov earlier on Tuesday, a day after he was hauled off a plane and taken into custody.

Police removed Pivovarov, director of Open Russia, a now defunct opposition group linked to exiled former oil tycoon and Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, from a flight that was about to take off to the Polish capital Warsaw from St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport late on Monday.

His team said police questioned him, searched his apartment and opened a criminal case against him on Tuesday for allegedly violating Russia’s legislation on “undesirable organisations”.

“These situations show us that they are afraid of us, and we are a majority,” Pivovarov’s Twitter account said.

The state Investigative Committee in the southern region of Krasnodar said it had opened a case over an online post from August 2020 that called for the public to support Open Russia, Interfax news agency reported.

It did gave no details of the post, nor did it name Pivovarov, but mentioned the same charges that his team cited.

Russia declared the London-based Open Russia group “undesirable” in 2017, effectively banning its activities. Its allies in Russia continued their activism under a separate legal entity to try to protect themselves from prosecution.

Last week, however, the group folded its activities in Russia to prevent its supporters from facing criminal prosecution as parliament prepares to adopt legislation that would increase criminal liability for anyone who cooperates with “undesirable organisations”.

The Kremlin says the law is needed to protect Russia’s national security and stave off external interference.

Pivovarov’s detention drew international attention.

“As the international community, we should react to what is happening in civil society in Russia,” Deputy Polish Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz told state-run broadcaster TVP Info.

(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber, Maxim Rodionov, Polina Devitt in Moscow, and Pawel Florkiewicz and Alan Charlish in Warsaw; Editing by Andrew Osborn and Mark Heinrich)

FILE PHOTO: Andrei Pivovarov, member of Open Russia opposition group, attends a demonstration in Saint Petersburg

FILE PHOTO: Andrei Pivovarov, member of Open Russia opposition group, attends a demonstration in Saint Petersburg

Why the Soviets didn’t start a PC revolution
by Vilius Petkauskas
29 May 2021
in Editorial



Data processing workers with a Bulgarian ISOT EC 1035 in 1981.

First in space, Venus and Mars, the USSR did not lack engineering prowess. Why then, a revolution in personal computing happened westward of the Iron Curtain? Ideology played a role, of course, but computers were also just not cool enough.

Long before computers became phones, cameras, or TVs, their primary purpose was war. The power to calculate missile trajectories, nuclear impacts, and resource distribution within hours instead of months was, and still is, a crucial advantage over an enemy.

People in charge of the USSR were fully aware that the British and the Americans employed artificial machines to do their math for them. The official line on cybernetics was hostile, and computer science was denounced as ‘dehumanizing capitalism.’ Secretly, however, catching up was in full swing.

Mera CM 7209 in Chernobyl, Pripyat. Image source.

In 1962, President Kennedy’s top aid warned that if the Soviets manage to turn things around, ‘by 1970, the USSR may have a radically new production technology’ with self-teaching computers and concluded that without a change in pace on the American side ‘we are finished.’

As we now know very well, that did not materialize. So much so that there’s hardly anyone able to name at least a single Soviet computer brand. Understanding the benefits computing provides, it seems exceptionally odd.

According to Slava Gerovitch, science historian and director of the Program for Research In Mathematics, Engineering, and Science (PRIMES) at MIT, the history of computing in the USSR happened in waves. Computers were frowned upon, loved, and distrusted in 40 years.

“Many people in the Soviet Union were suspicious of the government. So, when cybernetics became popular and was approved officially, people started to think that maybe there’s something wrong with it,” Gerovitch told CyberNews.

I sat down with Gerovitch to discuss how ideology might have affected the cyber race, how different Soviet computing was, and why the said socialist revolutionaries did not champion the digital revolution that benefited the West so much.


Many people in the Soviet Union were suspicious of the government. So, when cybernetics became popular and was approved officially, people started to think that maybe there’s something wrong with it,Slava Gerovitch.

Looking back at the early days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union seemingly had technical capabilities to be on par with the United States. I’m talking about the rapid development of the atomic bomb, advanced aviation, and space capabilities. Would it be unreasonable to assume that the Soviets were not far behind the US, at least early on in terms of computing?

The first electronic digital computers were built in the US for the atomic bomb calculations in the mid-forties. The Soviets learned about them and started constructing their own. So, there was a definitive lag from the start.

With rocket development, the Soviets learned a lot from German scientists, so there was some technology transfer. There was a lot of ingenuity on the Soviet side, of course, but the Russians appropriated new technology, developed it, and improved it.

Also, the process of launching new technological initiatives was very different from the US. In the States, the military would present a problem and open funding for qualified academics to submit proposals to solve the problem using that funding. In the Soviet case, it was a top-down decision to assign someone to work on an issue.

So, there was little competition. Later on, as competition emerged when they had established institutions, there was competition among institutions, even in the Soviet system. But in the 1940s, like the work of Sergey Lebedev in Kyiv on the first Soviet electronic digital computer, the MESM machine, was initially his own initiative.

Mera CM 7209 terminal computer. Image source.

Essentially, using the resources he had personally under his control as director of the Institute of Electric Technology in Kyiv. It took a while before the proponents of electronic digital computers won the argument with the proponents of an analog computer in the Soviet Union and could get resources to launch a massive project of building a large electronic digital computer.

So even though the Soviets had had an Institute established for the development of large computers in 1948, initially, the champions of analog computer computers controlled the institute.

For two years, that Institute had had lots of resources. Still, they pulled all those resources into analog computing, and only in 1950, the proponents of electronic digital computing won that argument.

What you said paints a picture that there was a path dependency that started from the initial lag. Is it correct to assume this? Meaning the Soviets were always catching up instead of leading the race in computing?

In one sense, yes. The Soviets already knew that the Americans and the British had working machines, whereas they were trying to build the machines. But they did not know many details about the Western machines. So, they had a fair amount of room for their own invention rather than just coping Western machines. There was some room for interesting, genuine developments.


Cybernetics became a victim of the entire ideological campaign by Soviet journalists, ideologues, and people who are not in any way connected with actual computer development,Slava Gerovitch.

In your book From Newspeak to Cyber-speak, you talk about the Soviet refusal to accept cybernetics. You discuss how the computer in the Soviet Union was taken as a ‘giant calculator’ while the Americans saw it as a ‘giant brain.’ How did that ideological strain limit Soviet advances in computing, if they did at all?

There were two parallel developments. On one side, electronics engineers were working on new calculating machines for the military. This was a respectable activity, with a high priority for the defense industry, meaning the military provided necessary resources.

A parallel development, totally independent of this, was an ideological campaign in the Soviet media against all sorts of ideological targets in the West associated with American imperialism. That included academic theories developed in the West, including cybernetics.

Cybernetics became a victim of the ideological campaign by Soviet journalists, ideologues, and people who were not in any way connected with actual computer developments.

It became clear to the Soviet engineers who were working on computers that they should not in any way associate their work on computers with ‘tainted’ cybernetics. That led to engineers talking about their work as purely technical. Computers were essentially large calculators rather than machines capable of performing a thinking function. That would have put them in danger of being linked with ideologically tainted cybernetics.

While this helped them avoid ideological attacks, it limited their vision for applications of computers. They preferred not to seek contact with scientists working in various fields who might’ve used those computers for running computer simulations to advance other scientific disciplines. The need to avoid ideological complications led to the limited area of applications of computers in this initial period in the early 1950s.

Computers on display in a parade in Eastern Germany, 1987. Image source.

Another factor, maybe even more important, was that computers were available only in defense institutions. So, scientists who could have used computers for simulations either didn’t know about those computers or didn’t have access to them. In essence, engineers were not interested in attracting users from the academy.

That ideological lag ties into the fact that by the late ’70s, the Americans witnessed a revolution in personal computing, while the Soviets could not meet the same speed of change. The Americans had Commodore, TRS, Apple, and all other sorts of machines. There wasn’t anything of that sort in the USSR up until 1983. Does it mean that ideology hindered the spread of computers in the Soviet Union?

The ideological complications with cybernetics and the applications of computers beyond pure calculation ended in the mid-50s when cybernetics was rehabilitated. Instead, it was pictured as a communist science. At that time, it became ideologically very beneficial to be associated with cybernetics.

Cybernetics was mentioned in the 1961 program of the Communist Party. It became ideologically acceptable to use computers for symbol processing and computer simulations. Naturally, scientists were very interested in using computers. And it was a very popular field from the mid-50s to the early-70s.

So, the cybernetics campaign of the ’50s did not have a long-term negative effect. There were other factors at play. By the early to mid-70s, the popularity of cybernetics began to look overreaching, claims started to seem too general, there were too many promises with little to show for it.

Skepticism began to creep in among serious scientists about those early claims of the usefulness of computers. There also was skepticism because cybernetics became ideologically correct. Many people in the Soviet Union were suspicious of the government. So, when cybernetics became popular and was approved officially, people started to think that maybe there’s something wrong with it.

That way cybernetics became a term associated with government-imposed efficiency-oriented control and not with novelty and reform in the sciences. That was particularly evident in economics, where people saw computers being used at various factories to control information and monitor people’s performance more effectively.

\\By the early to mid-70s, the popularity of cybernetics began to look overreaching, claims started to seem too general, there were too many promises with little to show,Slava Gerovitch.

Focusing on personal computing, other factors were at play. Computers are communication devices. You can easily store, transfer, copy, print, and distribute information. That means a computer is a tool for autonomous communication, not controlled by the suspicious government. Therefore, the Soviet government was not terribly keen for personal computers to get into many people’s hands.

Another thing was that PC manufacturing requires a consumer-focused industry which was not a priority for the Soviet Union. So, the quality of parts and components that were produced was not high. Take the Soviet automobile: when you bought one, the first thing you did was starting to fix it.

It was the same with computers. You had to be an engineer to use it. The very concept of personal computing in the West was that it was for general consumers, not necessarily computer scientists or engineers. There were very different environments in which PCs were introduced and to very different audiences.

However, something did change during the mid-80s. With Perestroika, there was an explosion of Soviet-made PCs. Some models were even meant for export. Can the change be linked only to policy changes, or have the Soviet Union increased its technological capabilities?

With Perestroika, the government controls on small economic activity became looser. People could import computers from the West, and suddenly people were allowed to resell computers from the Western countries. They could also buy spare parts in the West, assemble their computers, or assemble their own devices out of Soviet-made parts.

There was room for less controlled economic activity that somewhat met the popular demand for PCs. With less control over communications, people started exchanging emails with the outside world. The need for communication devices and information processing devices rose, and it was met by import and local manufacturing.

A prototype of a home automation system. Image source.

But with the general decline of the Soviet industry and the early post-Soviet period, when the government stopped subsidizing prices, the production collapsed very quickly. From then on, Russia essentially relied on foreign-produced personal computers.

Earlier, you’ve mentioned the divergence in technology development and the notion of cybernetics developing independently from Western ideas. Are there any Soviet contributions to computing that still are noticeable today? For people born after the Soviet Union collapsed, it’s very easy to think that no innovation came from the USSR.

There were some interesting innovations by Soviet computer engineers and software developers. Some of them were the results of necessity and scarcity of parts when the Soviets had to solve complex problems with minimal technological resources. So, they tried to invent new computer architectures that might be more efficient than traditional ones.

For example, our usual computers have zeros and ones, two states for each cell in computer memory. But in the fifties, the Soviets developed three-value machines. This required a different type of programming, a different kind of software. It was a much more efficient use of computer resources.

Also, the Soviets had a tradition of very efficient programming in low-level computer languages, which required many mathematical skills in designing efficient algorithms. Working with low-level computer languages, essentially machine codes, assembler codes, allowed programmers to use computer resources very efficiently. However, it was a very challenging mathematical and logical task to write those programs, debug them, and so forth. It requires a lot of expertise from programmers.

The Soviet programmers are also well-known since, in those early years, they were able to pack compelling and efficient programs into computers that had very little memory. Due to efficient programming, the Soviets were able to solve the problems they needed.

What makes North Korean hacking groups more creative?

Derek B. Johnson

 May 20, 2021 Twitter

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un meets with former U.S. President Donald Trump within the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating South and North Korea in 2019. (Handout photo by Dong-A Ilbo via Getty Images/Getty Images)

When cybersecurity experts talk about APT groups targeting the U.S. and its allies, they usually end up connecting the activity to one of “The Big Four:” Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. While these countries are far from the only ones conducting clandestine operations in cyberspace today, they’re often pegged as the most sophisticated and thus tend to get much of the attention.

But that doesn’t mean they all operate the same way. From a preference for writing custom malware code to pioneering new strategies, North Korean hacking groups have shown an innovative spirit that allows them to punch above their weight despite crushing sanctions.

At the 2021 RSA Conference, Dmitri Alperovitch, former co-founder and chief technology officer at Crowdstrike, said North Korean hacking groups, many of which operate under the umbrella name Lazarus Group, stand out considerably from their other Big Four counterparts in the creativity of their hacking campaign tactics and the way they eschew popular commercial offensive tools.

“They’re in some ways my favorite actor in cyberspace, because they’re just so incredibly innovative,” said Alperovitch, now executive chairman at the Silverado Policy Accelerator.

In the early 2000s, North Korean intelligence agencies like the Reconnaissance General Bureau “pioneered” the concept of destructive cyberattacks in digital skirmishes with their South Korean neighbors, while the country’s 2014 hack of entertainment giant Sony foretold the coming era of hack and leak operations that would be picked up by Russia just a few more years down the line.

Alperovitch said that in recent years, Russian, Chinese and Iranian APTs have increasingly incorporated publicly available commercial offensive hacking tools like Cobalt Strike or open-source tools like the credential harvesting Mimikatz in their operations in lieu of writing their own malware, because they are less expensive and because using commonly available tooling can make it harder to attribute that activity back to a specific nation or actor.

“But the North Koreans have really shied away from that; they’re still focused on custom development. You can almost call it ‘Juche’ malware,” Alperovitch said, referencing Pyongyang’s notorious slogan and ideology for self-reliance and production in the face of a hostile world.

Many countries have incorporated offensive cyber operations into their overall geopolitical strategies, but North Korea was among the first nations to leverage its government hacking capabilities in the cybercrime arena. While some countries use their APT hacking groups as a surgical scalpel or a weapon to carry out targeted goals, Pyongyang uses it as an all-purpose sword to carry out a range of interconnected geopolitical and financial objectives.

“We watched them conduct bank heists around the world. They were targeting, at one point, 16 different financial organizations at once,” said Alperovitch’s co-presenter Sandra Joyce, executive vice president and head of global intelligence at Mandiant.

A miasma of state-connected and adjacent hacking groups are charged with carrying out ransomware attacks, cryptocurrency scams and other moneymaking schemes to help the heavily isolated and cash-strapped country evade economic sanctions and fund the regime. A United Nations report in 2019 estimated that these digital theft and extortion campaigns had transferred more than $2 billion to Pyongyang’s coffers.

North Korea is already cut off from most forms of international commerce by U.S. and global economic sanctions, so it have little to lose by engaging in aggressive offensive operations against other nations. Much of its critical infrastructure is already crumbling and its internet is isolated and closed off from the rest of the world, so it often have little to fear in terms of retaliation in cyberspace outside of China, its pseudo patron state.

“With intensive information and communication technology, and the brave RGB with its [cyber] warriors, we can penetrate any sanctions for the construction of a strong and prosperous nation,” said President and dictator Kim Jong Un in 2013 while visiting the Reconnaissance General Bureau headquarters.

The country’s innovation can even fool some cybersecurity experts. Earlier this year, Google revealed details behind a year-long campaign by North Korean hackers to pose as members of cybersecurity community to spearphish security researchers. The campaign essentially exploited the professional networking and collaboration that regularly takes place between security researchers around vulnerability research to compromise a number of high-value targets who would otherwise have their guard up.

The actors set up their own research blog as a front, in some cases recycling the work of other researchers and, in at least one case, faking a successful exploit. They also created multiple personas and sockpuppet accounts on social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, Keybase and Discord, where they shared posts, promoted the work of others and interacted with researchers over direct messages.

US Colonial Pipeline hack: an earthquake in the critical infrastructure industry
by Pierluigi Paganini
31 May 2021
in Security

© Shutterstock

On May 7, the Colonial Pipeline facility in Pelham, Alabama, was hit by a cyberattack, and its operators were forced to shut down their systems. The pipeline carries 2.5 million barrels of refined gasoline and jet fuel each day up the US East Coast from Texas to New York, covering 45 percent of the East Coast’s fuel supplies.

A few days later, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that the attack against the critical infrastructure operator was carried out by the Darkside ransomware gang.

“The FBI confirms that the Darkside ransomware is responsible for the compromise of the Colonial Pipeline networks. We continue to work with the company and our government partners on the investigation,” reads the statement published by the FBI.

Source: WSJ

The Colonial Pipeline attack caused limited disruptions because of reduced energy demand due to the ongoing pandemic, for this reason the effect on fuel prices has been small. In the aftermath of the hack, FBI and DHS’s CISA published a joint alert to warn of ransomware attacks conducted by the Darkside group.

Darkside, the ransomware gang responsible for the attack, first emerged in the threat landscape in August 2020, and was highly active in recent months, targeting organizations worldwide. According to the report, affiliates of the ransomware-as-a-service group initially gained access to the victim’s network to encrypt files on internal systems and exfiltrate data, then threaten to expose the data if Colonial Pipeline refused to pay the ransom.
The response by the US authorities

The Colonial Pipeline attack had a significant impact on the cybersecurity and critical infrastructure industries. It also affected multiple ransomware gangs, who, fearing direct repercussions from the FBI, temporarily suspended their operations.

The attack triggered an immediate response of federal authorities as well as government agencies, who promoted initiatives aimed at preventing similar incidents in the future.

Immediately after the attack on Colonial Pipeline, Darkside pointed out that it was financially motivated and that there was no political motivation behind the intrusion.

“Our goal is to make money, and not create problems for society,”reads the statement from the Darkside.

The attacks against critical infrastructure also led US President Joe Biden to sign an executive order to improve the country’s defences against cyberattacks.

“The United States faces persistent and increasingly sophisticated malicious cyber campaigns that threaten the public sector, the private sector, and ultimately the American people’s security and privacy. The Federal Government must improve its efforts to identify, deter, protect against, detect, and respond to these actions and actors,” reads the 34-page document.

The document aims at enhancing the level of cybersecurity defences and increasing the resilience of the federal government’s infrastructure against cyberattacks. It proposes a standardized playbook for responding to cybersecurity vulnerabilities and incidents, and urges public and private stakeholders and IT (information technology) and OT (operational technology) service providers to share information related to threats, threat actors and incidents.
How to protect critical infrastructure?

The executive order requests to federal agencies to implement Zero-Trust Architecture and multi-factor authentication, as well as adopt encryption for data at rest and in transit.

The order also focuses on the risks associated with supply-chain attacks that could be mitigated by developing guidelines, using tools, and adopting best practices to audit critical software components. The White House has also released a fact sheet related to the executive order that provides a summary of its content.

At the time of writing, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced new cybersecurity requirements for owners and operators of critical pipelines.

The US authorities stress the importance to report any confirmed and potential cyber-related incidents to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

“The cybersecurity landscape is constantly evolving and we must adapt to address new and emerging threats,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas.

“The recent ransomware attack on a major petroleum pipeline demonstrates that the cybersecurity of pipeline systems is critical to our homeland security,” reads the announcement published by the DHS.

Critical infrastructure owners and operators are now obliged to review their current practices, identify cyber-related risks, and implement remediation measures. DHS also required them to report the results to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and CISA within 30 days.

The events described and the response of the US authorities demonstrate that critical infrastructure operators have to change their approach to cybersecurity. They need a holistic approach that is based on cyber threat intelligence, information sharing and the implementation of new regulations aimed at increasing the security of critical infrastructure.

Colonial Pipeline led to a cyber order for sector operators. Will JBS lead to more?

Joe Uchill

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The Greeley JBS meat packing plant in Greeley, Colorado. (Photo by Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)

Less than a week after the Transportation Security Administration responded to the Colonial Pipeline shutdown with a landmark order for oil and gas pipelines to abide by cybersecurity rules, major food supplier JBS had operations interrupted by its own cyberattack. The United States government traditionally handled cybersecurity on a sector-by-sector basis. How does it respond to a problem that transcends industry boundaries?

JBS is the world’s leading provider of meat, operating in six countries, and producing 32 billion pounds per year. It announced Monday that an “organized cyberattack…may delay certain transactions with customers and suppliers.” It is unclear what the motivations for the cyberattack were, financial or otherwise, but the incident leaves many questioning how government and industry alike can better tackle increasingly glaring security gaps throughout critical infrastructure.

“These past few months have shown us that, in both the public and private sector, we have not done the work we need to do to defend critical IT networks from cyberattacks, which will only become more frequent and more complex in the future,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., told SC Media via email. “As the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I will continue working with the Biden administration to bolster our defenses across our critical infrastructure and other sectors.”

The fact that there are other providers of meat means that an outage at one node of the supply chain is not immediately as dire as the Colonial Pipeline shuttering the major passageway for gasoline on the East Coast. But the food sector is for good reason one of the industries deemed critical by the federal government.

“People want to eat,” said Meg King, director of the Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Innovation Program.

Indeed, the government recognizes 16 critical infrastructure sectors. The Biden administration has only taken regulatory action for one aspect of one of those sectors – pipelines – with an executive order suggesting industry-led changes to a second – the electric grid. But threats go well beyond gas and power. Before Colonial and JBS, a water treatment facility in Oldsmar, Florida was targeted by hackers who attempted to poison the water supply.

But it can be exceedingly dificult for the government to address cybersecurity problems expediently across multiple industries at the same time.

“If Congress is your best option, we’ve got some bigger problems,” said King, herself a former Hill staffer. “This is a problem that is multi-sectoral, which for Congress is really hard because of jurisdiction.”

At the same time, with differing federal agencies designated to oversee the various strains of critical infrastructure, each operating with different regulatory constraints and facing different cybersecurity concerns, a coordinated step forward from the Biden administration across all sectors would also be very difficult.

On Tuesday morning, Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, suggested that Congress move forward on one proposal that would simplify the process: recognizing a new classification of “systemically important critical infrastructure,” or SICI, to define the most critical of critical infrastructures. The Cybersecurity Solarium Commission, co-chaired by Angus King chaired, suggested that SICI be granted greater access to government resources while also facing additional security requirements.

“We keep having wake up calls and we keep not waking up,” he said on CNBC. “Now it’s the food supply. A month ago, it was fuels. It could be energy next. It could be transportation, it could be the financial sector. And we’ve really got to scale up our responses.”

While the Solarium Commission was able to pass more than two-dozen proposals into law last year, SICI was singled out at this year’s RSA Conference by former commissioners, including lawmakers Reps. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc. and Jim Langevin, D-N.H., as a priority for the year ahead.

“SICI legislation would provide someone, presumably the [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] or DHS, with the authority to impose requirements,” said Suzanne Spaulding, a Solarium commissioner, director of the Defending Democratic Institutions program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a former head of CISA’s predecessor, the National Protection and Programs Directorate.

Spaulding noted that many of the ideas narrowly construed for pipeline security in the TSA order could easily apply to a wide swath of extremely critical infrastructure. In fact, she said, Spaulding unofficially made an effort to do something similar during her time at NPPD after Obama’s Executive Order 13636 had NPPD compile a list of infrastructure where a cyberattack would have the most catastrophic effect.

“I wrote a letter to the CEOs of all those entities and said, ‘please designate a point of contact for us to work with.’ So the idea that these critical functions like Colonial Pipeline, need to have a PoC for CISA 24/7, seems pretty fundamental basic,” she said.

That said, there is risk tied to government treating infrastructure too generally, said Tobias Whitney, former senior manager of critical infrastructure protection at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the industry group setting regulatory standards for energy firms. Different infrastructures have different security needs.

To address any regulation in aggregate could lead a security program that “is watered down with requirements not necessarily germane to the sector,” he said.

“But I can definitely understand the other side of the equation, too,” Whitney added. “We’re starting to see continued exploits of the back office and IT networks. Given some of those similarities, it might make sense for some targeted actions.

UPDATED

One-fifth of U.S. beef capacity wiped out by JBS cyberattack 

Marcy Nicholson, Bloomberg News

JUNE 1,2021

A cyberattack on JBS SA, the largest meat producer globally, forced the shutdown of some of world’s largest slaughterhouses, and there are signs that closures are spreading.

JBS’s five biggest beef plants in the U.S. -- which altogether handle 22,500 cattle a day -- halted processing following a weekend attack on the Brazilian company’s computer networks, according to JBS posts on Facebook, labor unions and employees. Those outages wiped out nearly a fifth of America’s production. Slaughter operations across Australia were also down, according to a trade group, and one of Canada’s largest beef plants was idled.

It’s unclear exactly how many plants globally have been affected by the ransomware attack as Sao Paulo-based JBS has yet to release those details. The prospect of more extensive shutdowns worldwide is already upending agricultural markets and raising concerns about food security as hackers increasingly target critical infrastructure. Livestock futures slumped while pork prices rose

JBS suspended its North American and Australian computer systems on Sunday after an organized assault on some of its servers, the company said in a Monday statement. Without commenting on plant operations, JBS said the incident may delay certain transactions with customers and suppliers

“Retailers and beef processors are coming from a long weekend and need to catch up with orders,” Steiner Consulting Group said in its Daily Livestock Report. “If they suddenly get a call saying that product may not deliver tomorrow or this week, it will create very significant challenges in keeping plants in operation and the retail case stocked up.”

Ransomware attack

Impact on meat prices at the grocery store may not be immediately apparent. Retailers don’t always like hiking prices on consumers and may try to resist, according to Michael Nepveux, an economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation.

“How long it goes on will impact to what level consumers start to see something at the grocery stores,” he said in a phone interview.

The White House offered assistance to JBS after the company notified the Biden administration on Sunday of a cyberattack from a criminal organization likely based in Russia, White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Tuesday. Biden directed the administration to do whatever they can to mitigate the impact on the meat supply.

“Attacks like this one highlight the vulnerabilities in our nation’s food supply chain security, and they underscore the importance of diversifying the nation’s meat processing capacity,” said U.S. Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate’s No. 2 ranking Republican leader.

Any substantial disruption in meat processing would further stoke mounting political concerns about the concentration of the meat industry and complaints of the four giant companies that control more than 80 per cent of U.S. beef processing unfairly leverage their power over farmers and consumers.

JBS is the No. 1 beef producer in the U.S., accounting for 23 per cent of the nation’s maximum capacity compared to rival Tyson Foods Inc.’s 22 per cent share, according to an investor report by Tyson. JBS accounts for about a quarter of U.S. beef capacity and roughly a fifth of pork capacity.

JBS closed beef processing facilities in Utah, Texas, Wisconsin and Nebraska and canceled shifts at plants in Iowa and Colorado on Tuesday, according to union officials and employees. In Canada, an Alberta processing plant was expected to resume operations this afternoon after being idled since Monday, a union spokesman said.

Pork and chicken facilities including one in Minnesota were also closed by the owner of Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., the second-biggest U.S. chicken producer, said union officials and employees. At least five of the six U.S. pork facilities were cutting back operations Tuesday, according to Facebook posts from those plants.

“There are at least 10 plants I have knowledge of that have had operations suspended because of the cyberattack,” said Paula Schelling-Soldner, acting chairperson for the national council of locals representing food inspectors for the American Federation of Government Employees. She declined to identify the locations.

Chicago cattle futures slumped as much as 3.4 per cent Tuesday, its lowest since Jan. 12, before trimming losses to 1.9 per cent. The potential slaughterhouse closures at JBS plants exacerbated an existing supply glut. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s midday reports for beef and pork didn’t disclose prices due to “packer submission issues.” However, the CME Group’s pork futures contract jumped by more than 3.5 per cent.

The number of cattle slaughtered in the U.S. fell 22 per cent from a week ago, while hogs were down 20 per cent, according to USDA estimates.

Hackers now have the commodities industry in their crosshairs with the JBS attack coming just three weeks after Colonial Pipeline Co., operator of the biggest U.S. gasoline pipeline, was targeted in a ransomware attack. It also happened as the global meat industry battles lingering COVID-19 absenteeism after recovering from outbreaks last year that saw plants shut and supplies disrupted.

There have been more than 40 publicly reported ransomware attacks against food companies since May 2020, said Allan Liska, senior security architect at cybersecurity analytics firm Recorded Future.

JBS owns facilities in 20 countries. The U.S. accounts for half of the company’s revenue, while Australia and New Zealand represent 4 per cent and Canada accounts for 3 per cent, according to corporate fillings. Brazilian plants are operating normally, a JBS spokesperson said Tuesday by phone.

Backup servers fine

Backup servers were not affected, and the company is working to restore systems as soon as possible, according to a Monday statement from JBS USA. JBS’s shares rose 2.3 per cent Tuesday in Sao Paulo, outpacing the 1.6 per cent gain for Brazil’s Ibovespa benchmark index.

JBS is the largest Australian meat and food processor with a portfolio of beef, lamb, pork, and value-added branded products, according to its website. It exports to more than 50 countries and its Dinmore facility is the biggest beef plant in the southern hemisphere.

Still, the shutdown is a big concern for exports if it drags on, said Matt Dalgleish, manager of commodity markets insights at Thomas Elder Markets, noting Australia ships overseas about 70 per cent to 75 per cent of red meat products from sheep and cattle.

“Given the size of JBS globally, if they were offline for any more than a week, then we’re going to see disruption to supply chains for sure,” he said.

Meatpacking giant JBS believes Russia behind hack that hit plants

The New Arab Staff & Agencies
01 June, 2021
An American subsidiary of Brazilian meat processor JBS told the US government that it has received a ransom demand in a cyberattack it believes originated in Russia, which has forced some plants to cut production

The White House is engaging directly with the Russian government [Getty]

An American subsidiary of Brazilian meat processor JBS told the US government that it has received a ransom demand in a cyberattack it believes originated in Russia, which has forced some plants to cut production.

JBS received the demand from "a criminal organization likely based in Russia" following an attack that has affected its operations in Australia and North America, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said on Tuesday.

The White House statement comes as yet another major US sector finds its operations under duress, less than a month after a major cyberattack temporarily shut down the Colonial Pipeline network supplying about 45 percent of the fuel consumed on the US east coast.

"The White House has offered assistance to JBS, and our team and the Department of Agriculture have spoken to their leadership several times in the last day," Jean-Pierre said.

"The White House is engaging directly with the Russian government on this matter and delivering the message that responsible states do not harbor ransomware criminals."

Brazil-based JBS is a sprawling meat supplier with operations in the United States, Australia, Canada, Europe, Mexico, New Zealand and Britain.

"JBS USA determined that it was the target of an organized cybersecurity attack, affecting some of the servers supporting its North American and Australian IT systems," the company said in a statement Monday.
Numerous plants impacted

JBS said its backup servers were not affected by the incident, but the statement did not offer details on the status of its plants. The company did not immediately respond to AFP queries.

The company's Australian facilities were said to have been paralyzed by the attack, with up to 10,000 meat workers being sent home without pay, according to a union representative.

"It's affecting JBS processing facilities around (Australia)," AMIEU Queensland branch secretary Matt Journeaux told AFP. "They have stood down workers across JBS operations."

Journeaux said there was no word yet from the company on when operations will resume.

Several plants in North America were also affected by the incident.

The Facebook page for JBS' Green Bay, Wisconsin plant said there would be no production Monday. Another plant in Utah was also not operating, said a person who answered the phone and declined to give his name.

A plant in Iowa said four departments would not operate on Monday, while remaining units were working normally, according to its Facebook page.

JBS' Canada division canceled some operations on Monday and early Tuesday, but said on Facebook later in the day that normal production would resume.

The United Food and Commercial Workers local representing workers in Colorado and Wyoming said "kill" and "fabrication" shifts were cancelled on Monday, according to its Facebook page.
Cybersecurity vulnerabilities

Colonial's multi-day shutdown in May sparked panic buying in some eastern states, and ended when the company paid $4.4 million in ransom to the hackers.

The online vulnerabilities of US oil conduits led the federal government last week to impose cybersecurity requirements on petroleum pipelines for the first time.

The JBS and Colonial Pipeline incidents follow a 2020 hack of the SolarWinds software company. Last week, Microsoft warned that the state-backed Russian group behind the SolarWinds attack had re-emerged with a series of attacks on government agencies, think tanks and other groups.

"The cybersecurity landscape is constantly evolving and we must adapt to address new and emerging threats," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement Thursday.

Brazilian town experiment shows mass vaccination can wipe out COVID-19

Residents of the Brazilian city of Serrana line up for their COVID-19 vaccine doses. DIVULGAÇÃO/BUTANTAN INSTITUTE

By Sofia MoutinhoJun. 1, 2021

Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.

A small commuter town surrounded by sugarcane fields in southeastern Brazil, one of the countries hardest hit by COVID-19, has shown that even a vaccine that had low efficacy in some clinical trials can dramatically control the pandemic virus.

As part of an unusual experiment to track the real-world effectiveness of CoronaVac, a COVID-19 vaccine made by a Chinese company, almost all adult residents of Serrana, in the state of São Paulo, received the required two shots between February and April, long before most would otherwise have become eligible for the vaccine. The results were dramatic. Symptomatic cases of COVID-19 have dropped by 80% since the start of mass vaccination, related hospitalizations fell 86%, and deaths plummeted 95%, the research team in charge of the experiment reported during a press conference yesterday.

Meanwhile, cases have risen out of control in 15 other cities nearby. “Serrana is now an oasis,” says Ricardo Palacios, an epidemiologist at the Butantan Institute, a state-owned research center that produces the vaccine in Brazil. “And it has shown us that it is surely possible to control the epidemic through vaccination.”

Some other COVID-19 vaccines have demonstrated greater than 90% real-world effectiveness at preventing serious disease, and they have helped countries bring cases down to very low levels. But there has been concern about CoronaVac, which uses an inactivated copy of SARS-CoV-2 to stimulate immunity. Clinical trials conducted in several countries came up with different efficacy values for the vaccine, the lowest being 50% in Brazil—right at the threshold established by the World Health Organization (WHO) for emergency use of a COVID-19 vaccine. Later studies in Brazil that tried to assess the vaccine’s real-world effectiveness have indicated similar levels of protection.

That’s why the data from Serrana are reassuring to many scientists in Brazil, where CoronaVac makes up 80% of all vaccine doses administered. “These are very encouraging results,” says Ethel Maciel, an epidemiologist at the Federal University of Espírito Santo, Vitória, who was not part of the study. Maciel is especially relieved the vaccine protected the town because a SARS-CoV-2 variant dubbed P1, which originated in Brazil and is now the most prevalent in the country, was also the most common variant in Serrana during the period of the study. Lab studies had suggested P1, which WHO recently proposed renaming delta, could elude protection from vaccines.

WHO announced today that it granted CoronaVac an emergency use listing, a step that should speed the vaccine’s use in many low-income countries. Brazil has the world’s second deadliest COVID-19 outbreak, with more than 461,000 deaths officially, below the United States but ahead of India. Brazil’s vaccination campaign, slow to get off the ground because of scarce vaccine supplies, is still only targeting the elderly and patients with comorbidities. Only 15% of the population has had at least one vaccine dose.

The mass vaccination experiment in Serrana was named Project S—not for the town, but for “secret,” as the plans were initially kept quiet to avoid a massive migration to the town. When it began, one in 20 Serrana residents was infected, and more than 25% had been previously exposed to the virus. The high caseload made the town attractive as a test site, along with its modest population of just over 45,000 people and its proximity to a campus of the University of São Paulo.

The team of about 15 researchers, supported by local authorities and health professionals, first conducted a detailed census. Then they divided Serrana into 25 sections that represented microcosms of people who interact with each other—for example, residents living in the same group of buildings or shopping in the same stores. The researchers then assembled four groups of residents from these clusters and started to vaccinate each group 1 week apart, administering second doses 4 weeks after the first. Only residents 18 years and older who weren’t suffering from chronic diseases and not pregnant were eligible. After 8 weeks, 96% of those, about 27,000 in total, had received two shots.

Although the town was never closed or isolated from neighboring cities, the researchers say they started to see a reduction in transmission almost immediately after the first group got its second dose. By the time the third group received its second dose, and about 75% of the eligible population was immunized, the outbreak was effectively under control.

The researchers suggest the vaccination campaign, combined with the population’s previous infections, may have gotten the town to “herd immunity,” the point at which the coronavirus has difficulty finding new people to infect because so many are already immune. On day 14 after the last vaccination, there were only two cases among vaccinated people and no deaths. “It was amazing,” Palacios says. COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths also plummeted among children and teenagers, none of whom received the vaccine.

No severe side effects were reported. The team says the results will soon be submitted to a journal for publication and it may post a preprint before that. Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, says the experiment “sounds interesting and the outcome makes sense,” but cautions that further data from a published study are necessary to draw conclusions.

Ricardo Gazzinelli, president of the Brazilian Immunology Society, says the results are good news for CoronaVac, but cautions that 2 months of analysis is too short. The research team plans to track Serrana’s residents for up to 1 year to see whether their immunity wanes. If it does so quickly, ending the pandemic using CoronaVac might be hard, because Brazil would probably need to start giving booster shots even before it has fully vaccinated the entire population.

“If the vaccine’s efficacy period is short and we keep the current pace of vaccination, herd immunity will never be reached because when most of the population is vaccinated, a large group won’t be immune anymore,” Gazzinelli says.


doi:10.1126/science.abj7815

Experts sound the alarm ahead of Brazil’s third COVID-19 wave


ALEX NGUYEN
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED MAY 29, 2021

Nurse technician Marlon Samuel cares for a COVID-19 patient in the Intensive Care Unit of a former men’s hospital, which has been converted into a field hospital for COVID-19 patients, on May 20, 2021 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

Weeks after Brazil experienced the COVID-19 pandemic’s deadliest month with 82,266 deaths recorded in April, medical experts in the country are already warning about a third wave.

Over the first few months of 2021, a punishing second wave – partly from the P.1 variant first identified in the city of Manaus – battered Brazil. Facing overwhelmed hospitals as well as oxygen and sedative shortages, the most populous country in Latin America saw April’s death toll surpass March’s record of 66,573 fatalities. But just as some states started to reduce public-health restrictions after daily infections and deaths declined since mid-April, COVID-19 cases are once again rising.

As of May 27, Brazil has confirmed more than 16.3 million cases and more than 456,000 deaths – the world’s second-highest death toll after the U.S. – since the beginning of the pandemic.

For Antonio Flores, an infectious disease specialist and medical co-ordinator for Médecins sans frontières (MSF) in Brazil, the upward trend signals the impending arrival of a third wave. He added that some municipalities are already seeing waitlists for intensive-care beds.

“There will be a third wave,” he said. “We just don’t know how hard and how fast it will hit, but we can say that it’s on the way because cases are going up again.”

There is already fear that this third wave would be devastating.

On top of the fact that Brazil is entering its winter months, a big concern revolves around its sluggish vaccine rollout, which started on Jan. 18. In a country of around 214 million people, the campaign has given out 65.27 million doses – with 20.6 per cent of the population receiving at least one dose and 10.1 per cent being fully vaccinated – as of May 27. The daily vaccination rate for most of May was also lower than the peak in mid-April, only surpassing it on May 24.

This slow pace frustrates Dr. Flores. He said Brazil has the expertise and infrastructure through its national immunization program to do better. In fact, during the swine flu pandemic, it administered more than 89 million vaccine doses in less than four months in 2010.

He attributed the problem instead to the federal government’s lack of co-ordination.

Brazil was slow to secure COVID-19 vaccines. Declining Pfizer’s offer for 70 million doses last year, the country decided to rely on AstraZeneca and Sinovac vaccines, which could be manufactured locally. But it has faced troubles sourcing raw materials for them, forcing some large cities to pause second-dose vaccinations. Brazil also later changed its mind and bought 100 million Pfizer doses in March, but it has only received a small fraction of that order so far.

The challenge is also more than just vaccine procurement.

Since the start of the pandemic, Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has repeatedly downplayed COVID-19: He disparaged mask-wearing and lockdown measures in favour of reopening the economy, promoted unproven drugs such as hydroxychloroquine, and stoked vaccine distrust. These actions are now being investigated as part of a Senate inquiry into his government’s pandemic management.

“There is no magic bullet,” Dr. Flores said. “There needs to be a change of direction from the federal government, and that needs to happen fast.”

Beyond the third wave’s potential physical toll, there are also worries about its impact on mental health.

Pedro Gordilho, a medical student in Sao Paulo, experienced the crushing load of responding to a peaking COVID-19 wave first-hand.

While he spent the first wave studying online, Mr. Gordilho was working as a generalist in the public-health system at the height of the second wave. Most days of the week, he would be testing and responding to COVID-19 patients from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. And until he was vaccinated in April, he would only work and isolate himself in his room at home – a routine that “drove him crazy.”

The stress eventually pushed him to take antidepressants – though he has since stopped – and to seek therapy.

“I always knew I would put myself at risk in certain situations, but I was really scared of bringing a virus that could potentially kill my parents so easily at home,” Mr. Gordilho said, adding that his parents and siblings are still not yet vaccinated.

“It’s been really tiring the past few months.”

Now, he worries for his friends who will be rotating into his former role in the upcoming months with the impending third wave: “Honestly, it can get worse than March and April.”

For others, the stress can also come from facing rising inflation, hunger and unemployment.

Lili Vieira de Carvalho, executive director of the Vancouver Latin American Cultural Centre, sends money back monthly to support her elderly mother who lives in Petropolis, a city near Rio de Janeiro. With the monthly grocery bill for her mother and her two caregivers rising from $200 to $250 recently, she has felt the need to send more home.

In April, inflation was at 6.8 per cent – the highest rate since November, 2016. The costs of staples such as rice and beans have also risen by more than 50 per cent in the past year.

Ms. Vieira de Carvalho added that her family situation is still a “privileged” one. Over the past year, around 19 million Brazilians faced hunger, while more than half the country experienced food insecurity.

“Unemployment is huge. … A lot of people don’t have food to eat. Prices are going crazy,” she said.

Dr. Flores has noticed this challenge, too. He views it as another product of the federal government’s lack of co-ordination: Had it implemented a stronger response from the beginning, Brazil would have seen fewer cases and less long-term economic fallout.

Looking ahead, he said MSF will continue to focus on testing and contact tracing in Brazil’s North and Northeast regions, where the health system is more vulnerable.

“If you let the outbreak rip, the country will be a breeding ground for more variants,” Dr. Flores said.

“So how do you stop variants from emerging? By controlling the epidemic in the community – that’s a basic concept and it needs to be done.”

MSF is also calling on the international community to share resources and waive COVID-19 vaccine patent protections. After the U.S. expressed support for waiving these rights, Canada announced new funding on May 7 to support vaccine production and distribution, but did not state its position on the waiver idea.

Meanwhile, many Brazilians are already looking forward to next year’s general election, as Mr. Bolsonaro’s approval rating plunged to 24 per cent. Leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and centrist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, two former presidents who were rivals, also recently signalled a common opposition against the incumbent.

And others are simply looking to survive this deadly pandemic year in Brazil.

“It’s really hard to have hope, but I try to have hope because that’s the only thing we have right now,” said Mr. Gordilho. “We just hope for the better.”

NASA RELEASES 3D VIDEO OF INGENUITY MARS HELICOPTER’S 3RD FLIGHT
MICHAEL MCCABE
MAY 31ST, 2021



On April 25, 2021, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter performed its third test flight. Recently, NASA engineers converted a video of the flight into anaglyph 3D.

As part of the third flight, the Perseverance Rover’s Mastcam-Z, which is a state-of-the-art dual-camera, zoomable imaging system, captured a video of Ingenuity. NASA recently converted it into 3D. You can view this on NASA’s YouTube channel using red and cyan 3D glasses.

Justin Maki, who is an imaging scientist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has headed the team that rendered the video imaging of Ingenuity’s third flight and had it converted to anaglyph, which is when the frames are optimized for viewing when seen through color-filtered glasses.

“The Mastcam-Z video capability was inherited from the Mars Science Laboratory MARDI (MArs Descent Imager) camera,” Maki said in a NASA news release. “To be reusing this capability on a new mission by acquiring 3D video of a helicopter flying above the surface of Mars is just spectacular.”

This adds an element of depth to another aspect of the historical moments being captured on the red planet’s surface. It also gives the viewer the feeling of standing on the surface of Mars, with the flight happening right in front of their eyes.

NASA and JPL are continuing to pushing the envelope with the Ingenuity. Now that its primary technology demonstration mission is completed, the team has transitioned into an operations demonstration phase.