US CyberCommand recently focused on the Trickbot botnet – an army of 1 million computers run by Russian speaking criminals. The good news – they disrupted operations. The bad news – they didn’t shut it down
DHS has concerns about a ransomware attack on state or local voter registrations to impact preparations for Election Day, or cause confusion and long lines.
Meanwhile, per research from Freedom House, governments around the world have used the pandemic to expand digital surveillance and harvest data from their citizens – dozens of countries have rolled out applications for contact-tracing without legal protections. Quoting Axios:
China, Russia, India, Singapore, Ecuador and Bahrain were among the countries that Freedom House found implemented apps that either send reams of data unchecked to government servers or make invasive data and health documentation demands.
Governments in at least 28 countries censored websites and social media posts to suppress information such as unfavorable health statistics and corruption allegations.
This is accumulating datapoints along the journey. This adds to the security narrative, the techlash one, and the regulation one.
On security, these high level attacks are the ones that drive awareness. And concern. Which leads clearly to the techlash, and from there… regulation.
Your local action is thinking about how you manage trust. It’s an asset you have and cannot squander.
Source: Washington Post
Source: Axios