An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: U.S. Customs and Border Protection is refusing to tell Congress what legal authority the agency is following to use commercially bought location data to track Americans without a warrant, according to the office of Senator Ron Wyden. The agency is buying location data from Americans all over the country, not just in border…
Tag: Homeland Security
Russians Who Pose Election Threat Have Hacked Nuclear Plants and Power Grid
The New York Times reports:
Cybersecurity officials watched with growing alarm in September as Russian state hackers started prowling around dozens of American state and local government computer systems just two months before the election. The act itself did not worry them so much — officials anticipated that the Russians who interfered in the 2016 election would be back — but the…
Trump Scrambles To Loosen America’s Biometric Data and Gig Worker Regulations
“Facing the prospect that President Trump could lose his re-election bid, his cabinet is scrambling to enact regulatory changes affecting millions of Americans in a blitz so rushed it may leave some changes vulnerable to court challenges,” reports the New York Times: The effort is evident in a broad range of federal agencies and encompasses proposals like easing limits on how…
Trump Administration Announces Overhaul of H-1B Visa Program
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News: The administration of President Donald Trump on Tuesday moved to impose major new limits on use of the controversial H-1B visa, intended for jobs requiring specialized skills and widely used by Silicon Valley technology firms. The new rules are expected to reduce the pool of skilled labor and raise costs for…
Trump Cracks Down on Visas. Indian Firms May Benefit.
As the president clashes with the courts, some companies and investors say tougher limits on temporary work visas will help push jobs overseas. From a report: When President Trump suspended a raft of visa programs in June, including temporary permits for highly technical foreign workers known as H-1B visas, he portrayed the order as a victory for the American work force….
Some Coronavirus Vaccine Trials Resort To Pen and Paper After Ransomware Hits Software
A software company supporting hundreds of clinical trials — including coronavirus vaccine trials — has been hit by a ransomware attack that “has slowed some of those trials over the past two weeks,” reports the New York Times. Employees “discovered that they were locked out of their data by ransomware…” eResearchTechnology (ERT) said clinical trial patients were never at risk, but…
Two Leaders of Videogame Piracy Group Arrested
On Friday America’s Department of Justice announced: Two leaders of one of the world’s most notorious videogame piracy groups, Team Xecuter, have been arrested and are in custody facing charges filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle… The indictment alleges the defendants were leaders of a criminal enterprise that developed and sold illegal devices that hacked popular videogame consoles so they…
Ransomware Attacks Take On New Urgency Ahead of Vote
A Texas company that sells software that cities and states use to display results on election night was hit by ransomware last week, the latest of nearly a thousand such attacks over the past year against small towns, big cities and the contractors who run their voting systems. From a report: Many of the attacks are conducted by Russian criminal groups,…
DHS Admits Facial Recognition Photos Were Hacked, Released On Dark Web
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) finally acknowledged Wednesday that photos that were part of a facial recognition pilot program were hacked from a Customs and Border Control subcontractor and were leaked on the dark web last year. Among the data, which was collected by a company called Perceptics, was a trove of…
Foreign Hackers Cripple Texas County’s Email System, Raising Election Security Concerns
Last week, voters and election administrators who emailed Leanne Jackson, the clerk of rural Hamilton County in central Texas, received bureaucratic-looking replies. “Re: official precinct results,” one subject line read. The text supplied passwords for an attached file. But Jackson didn’t send the messages. From a report: Instead, they came from Sri Lankan and Congolese email addresses, and they cleverly hid…