Tag Archive for: prospect

Planes dropping out of the sky. Your mobile rendered useless, just like your car. As a Netflix film portrays a nightmare that security experts insist is a very real prospect… How will YOU survive on the day an enemy state switches off the internet?

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An oil tanker ploughs into a tourist beach. Planes fall from the sky. Driverless cars run amok. The internet fails and the mobile network dies. Feral instincts take over as people fight for food, water and medicine amid the ruins of civilisation.

That is the nightmare vision depicted in Leave The World Behind, Netflix‘s recent hit film starring Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke as a couple battling societal breakdown when the technology that underpins civilisation collapses.

It’s fictional, but it touches on deep-seated, real-life fears.

The film is produced by Michelle and Barack Obama‘s company, Higher Ground. The ex-president was closely involved in shaping the plot, which dramatises many of the cyber-security issues on which he was briefed during his eight years in the White House.

For our 21st-century lives are almost entirely dependent on complex technologies that many do not understand — and that can so easily be exploited by our enemies.

Maintaining a car, for example, was previously a job for any competent motorist and their local mechanic. Now our vehicles are computers on wheels, their inner workings a mystery.

A scene from Leave The World Behind. The film is produced by Michelle and Barack Obama’s company, Higher Ground
A nightmare vision of the future is depicted in Leave The World Behind, Netflix’s recent hit film starring Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke as a couple battling societal breakdown when the technology that underpins civilisation collapses

We used to navigate with paper maps and landmarks. But with his car’s satnav out of action, Ethan Hawke’s character Clay Sandford is unable even to find his way to the nearby town.

Our telephone system used to run on sturdy copper wires, with handsets you could fix with a screwdriver. Now it is a branch of cyberspace.

So, too, is finance. Remember when a credit card’s embossed number left an imprint on a paper slip? Not any more. Our payment system depends wholly on electronic encryption.

What use is cash in the modern world? In the film, with the internet gone, it becomes a prized asset.

If the technologies we rely on break down, many of us will be as helpless as Hawke’s Clay Sandford. ‘I am a useless man,’…

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Ransomware attack on Prospect Medical Holdings takes down hospital systems in 4 states

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A ransomware attack late last week on Los Angeles-based Prospect Medical Holdings spread to hospitals in at least four other states before the healthcare group took its systems offline to prevent any further spread.

The attack hit hospitals and medical facilities at Prospect Medical Holdings affiliates in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Texas.

Officials with Prospect Medical affiliate Crozer Health Network in Pennsylvania said impacted hospitals included Crozer-Chester Medical Center, Taylor Hospital, Delaware County Memorial Hospital and Springfield Hospital.

CBS News reported that officials at the hospital in Springfield said the hospital had reverted to a paper system because most of the computers are offline and are not expected to come back online until later this week. CBS also reported that two hospitals in Rhode Island — Roger Williams Medical Center and Our Lady of Fatima — were also hit. 

In a Facebook post, Waterbury Health in Waterbury, Conn., said it had experienced a data security incident that disrupted its operations. Upon learning of the incident, all systems were taken offline to protect them and an investigation was launched with the help of cybersecurity specialists.

“Waterbury Health network continues to serve patients at all its locations using downtime procedures, but a few of its outpatient services have been affected, including outpatient blood draw and diagnostic imaging services which were not available Friday and Saturday,” said Waterbury Health.

Industry analysts said this latest attack mirrored the attack last fall on CommonSpirit Health in which the corporate entity was attacked in an attempt to infiltrate the corporate network and spread to affiliates. In both cases, cybersecurity officials took the networks offline to prevent any further spread — a common tactic among cyber defenders.

“Shutting off systems and networks helps prevent spread of the attack,” said Will Long, chief security officer at First Health Advisory. “However, it does not limit the other impacts on the healthcare community.”

Long said when a healthcare system or facility is impacted in a community, patients are diverted to other facilities. The neighboring…

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‘Absolutely terrifying prospect’: How the midterms could weaken U.S. election security

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It’s “an absolutely terrifying prospect,” said J. Alex Halderman, a computer security expert and professor at the University of Michigan who has repeatedly exposed flaws in voting systems but has also debunked Trump’s claims about 2020 fraud.

For years, physical safeguards such as padlocks and cameras have prevented intruders from exploiting the digital flaws that security experts routinely find in election equipment. But this year’s elections could sweep away these safeguards in key battleground states, in yet another example of fallout from Trump’s baseless allegations of vote-rigging.

Larry Norden, senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Elections and Government Program at New York University, said ongoing efforts “to get people in office to provide unauthorized access to election equipment to untrustworthy parties” are putting elections at risk.

Republican candidates promoting Trump’s election conspiracy theories include Pennsylvania gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano — who would get to appoint the secretary of state and has said he could order his pick to “decertify every machine in the state with the stroke of a pen” — and Kristina Karamo, Mark Finchem, Jim Marchant and Diego Morales, who are running for secretary of state in Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Indiana, respectively.

POLITICO requested interviews with all of these candidates. A Karamo spokesperson initially suggested that an interview might be possible but did not arrange one. Efforts to reach Morales’ campaign were unsuccessful. Spokespeople for the other candidates did not respond to emails.

Authorities in several states, including Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan, have scrambled to replace election equipment after pro-Trump officials compromised their security. In Colorado, a grand jury this year indicted a county clerk on charges that she had conspired to breach the security of her office’s voting systems. (The clerk, Tina Peters, later lost the GOP primary for Colorado secretary of state.)

Election offices routinely conduct official audits by scrutinizing paper records and electronic data to ensure that the vote tallies are correct, and these offices…

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SSU dismantles an infowar botnet. HIMARS, atrocities, provocation, and disinformation. A Russian disinformation mouthpiece raises the prospect that there are highly placed traitors in the GRU. Rewards for Justice works toward securing elections from Russian meddling. The case that Russia’s war is genocidal. The case that pan-Slavism has found wayward, but sincere, expression in Mr. Putin’s war.

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At a glance.

  • SSU dismantles an infowar botnet.
  • HIMARS, atrocities, provocation, and disinformation.
  • A Russian disinformation mouthpiece raises the prospect that there are highly placed traitors in the GRU.
  • Rewards for Justice works toward securing elections from Russian meddling.
  • The case that Russia’s war is genocidal.
  • The case that pan-Slavism has found wayward, but sincere, expression in Mr. Putin’s war.

Ukraine claims to have taken down a massive Russian bot farm.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) says it dismantled a large Russian botnet operation that was being used to spread Russian propaganda and disinformation. The bots, about a million strong, were herded from locations within Ukraine itself, in the cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Vinnytsia, BleepingComputer reports. Their output took the form of social media posts from inauthentic accounts associated with fictitious personae. The SSU describes the operation as follows: “Their latest ‘activities’ include the distribution of content on the alleged conflict between the leadership of the President’s Office and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine as well as a campaign to discredit the first lady. To spin destabilizing content, perpetrators administered over 1 million of their own bots and numerous groups in social networks with an audience of almost 400,000 users. In the course of a multi-stage special operation, the SSU exposed the leader of this criminal group. He is a russian citizen who has lived in Kyiv and positioned himself as a ‘political expert.’”

On the other side of the information war, BleepingComputer also reported earlier this week that Ukrainian hacktivists, “Torrents of Truth,” were bundling instructions on how to bypass Russian censorship into movie torrents whose intended audience would be Russian viewers.

HIMARS, atrocities, provocation, and disinformation.

The killing of Ukrainian prisoners of war in Olenivka is by now clearly a Russian atrocity–the prisoners were apparently murdered by their captors. (And we note in passing that the International Committee of the Red Cross still has not been given the access to the prison international law requires.) The prisoners did not die in a…

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