Journalists Scrutinize QAnon’s Role in Capitol Hill Mob — And Its Hosting Infrastructure

On Thursday Axios tried to assess QAnon’s role in the mob that stormed America’s Capitol building:
Adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, who imagine a vast deep-state cabal of pedophiles arrayed against Trump, have for years insisted that a moment of reckoning for their enemies is imminent. QAnon believers have largely accepted that Trump is waiting for the right time to bring…

How Will America’s Investigators Identify Capitol Hill Protesters?

“Both local police and the FBI are seeking information about individuals who were ‘actively instigating violence’ in Washington, DC, on January 6,” writes Ars Technica. Then they speculate on which tools will be used to find them:
While media organizations took thousands of photos police can use, they also have more advanced technologies at their disposal to identify participants, following what several…

Open-Source Developer and Manager David Recordon Named White House Director of Technology

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team announced that David Recordon, one of OpenId and oAuth’s developers, has been named the White House Director of Technology. Recordon most recently was the VP of infrastructure and security at the non-profit Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Foundation. Before that, Recordon was Facebook’s engineer director. There, he had led Facebook’s…

Is the US Government’s Cybersecurity Agency Up to the Job?

CNN reports that some critics are now questioning whether America’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is equipped to protect the integrity of government systems from adversaries: Some of the nearly half-dozen government agencies affected by the hack have recently reached out to CISA for help with addressing the known vulnerabilities that were exploited in the attack but were told the…

Massachusetts To Ban Sale of New Gas-Powered Cars by 2035

While EVs are still in the single-digit area of overall vehicle sales, they continue to climb and have already surpassed the sales of vehicles with manual transmissions. Now it seems that the electrification investments made by automakers are getting a boost from another part of the country. From a report: Massachusetts is joining California with a plan to ban the sale…

‘Companies Are Fleeing California. Blame Bad Government.’

Bloomberg Editorial Board: Amid raging wildfires, rolling blackouts and a worsening coronavirus outbreak, it has not been a great year for California. Unfortunately, the state is also reeling from a manmade disaster: an exodus of thriving companies to other states. In just the past few months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it was leaving for Houston. Oracle said it would decamp for…

CISA Updates SolarWinds Guidance, Tells US Govt Agencies To Update Right Away

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has updated its official guidance for dealing with the fallout from the SolarWinds supply chain attack. From a report: In an update posted late last night, CISA said that all US government agencies that still run SolarWinds Orion platforms must update to the latest 2020.2.1HF2 version by the end of the year. Agencies that…

Russians Are Believed To Have Used Microsoft Resellers in Cyberattacks

As the United States comes to grips with a far-reaching Russian cyberattack on federal agencies, private corporations and the nation’s infrastructure, new evidence has emerged that the hackers hunted their victims through multiple channels. From a report: The most significant intrusions discovered so far piggybacked on software from SolarWinds, the Austin-based company whose updates the Russians compromised. But new evidence from…

US Cyber Agency Says SolarWinds Hackers Are ‘Impacting’ State, Local Governments

The U.S. cybersecurity agency says that a sprawling cyber espionage campaign made public earlier this month is affecting state and local governments, although it released few additional details. From a report: The hacking campaign, which used U.S. tech company SolarWinds as a springboard to penetrate federal government networks, was “impacting enterprise networks across federal, state, and local governments, as well as…