Service Members Targeted in Identity Fraud Scheme
Five individuals were indicted for the reprehensible crime of defrauding U.S. military veterans and current service members of their benefits. The five accused of the fraud are identified as Robert Wayne Boling Jr., Fredrick Brown and Trorice Crawford, all U.S. citizens; Allan Albert Kerr, an Australian citizen; and Jongmin Seok, ... Read More
Former Google-Waymo Engineer Levandowski Charged With IP Theft
Some 18 months after Uber cleared the air with Waymo (an Alphabet/Google company) via a civil settlement then worth $245 million in Uber stock, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) unsealed a federal grand jury indictment of Anthony Levandowski, the individual central to the entire intellectual property (IP) theft of ... Read More
Commerce Bureau Pegs More National Security Risks
The Department of Commerce’s U.S. Bureau of Industry and Commerce (BIC) has added 17 organizations from 11 countries to its “entity list,” citing national security concerns. Presence on the list means the organization or enterprise is presumed to be acting counter to the national security interests of the United States ... Read More
Chinese Accounts Punted Off Twitter, Facebook for Dissing Hong Kong
Influence operations are not limited to Russia, as evidenced by the Chinese efforts to cast the Hong Kong protests as tantamount to the equivalent of a terrorist-backed activity. On Aug. 19, Twitter and Facebook both took to their blogs and revealed how they were attempting to clean up their own ... Read More
FBI Orders Up Social Media Monitoring Tool
In an interesting turn of events—and no doubt tangentially connected—the FBI and the White House are contemporaneously calling for the monitoring of social networks to detect mass shooting- and terrorist-related threats. Let’s look at the FBI’s proposal. The FBI has issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a “Social Media ... Read More
Hong Kong Violence Instigated by Jason Bourne
A message was sent to Washington via China Daily July 25, when Beijing warned about bringing Taiwan and Hong Kong into the greater U.S.-China trade discussions. Then the fun started. The social network Twitter saw numerous allegations levied against individuals present at the Hong Kong demonstrations that the protesters were ... Read More
Business Email Compromise Continues to Plague
It seems that an annual jaunt through the success cybercriminals are having with business email compromise (BEC) and fleecing money from companies, organizations and governmental entities is a requirement. Last year we asked the question, “Are you vulnerable to BEC fraud?” defining BEC and sharing with you the activities of ... Read More
China Targeting USG Employees Via Anthem Hack
The recent indictment of two Chinese nationals for the 2015 hack on Anthem that compromised more than 78 million health records, including 4 million U.S. government employees, moves the provenance of the intrusion from the theoretical to reality: China conducted the hack. Simultaneously, China also hacked the U.S. Office of ... Read More
Who’s Watching Your Infosec Team?
The phrase, “Who watches the watcher,” has been around since about AD 100, taken from the Latin phrase, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes,” found within the Satires of Juvenal. In the context of security, specifically corporate cybersecurity, it applies to those charged with keeping their corporate environment technologically safe, the information ... Read More
Huawei Fallout: UK Defence Minister Sacked Over Leak
The surprising U.K. government position which we referenced in our prior piece on Huawei being a national security proxy for China wasn’t supposed to have been public knowledge. The information concerning the April 23 government meeting was, according to Prime Minister Theresa May, to be closely held and not for ... Read More
