Security News

Wireless cellular industry trade association, 5G Americas, announced Igal Elbaz, Senior Vice President, Wireless and Access Technology of AT&T has been re-elected to serve as Chairman of the 5G Americas Board of Governors for 2021. "In his first year at the helm, Igal provided significant dynamic leadership for 5G Americas through the shocking global challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic," said Chris Pearson, President of 5G Americas.

Cyble announced that Richard Sands, former IT Security Director of Yum! Brands, will be joining Cyble as the General Manager for the North America region. Richard's addition to Cyble's leadership team is expected to bolster the market reception of its services and add new impetus to the company's growth.

Cyberbit announced a new partnership with Optiv to bring simulation-based SOC Team training to Optiv clients throughout North America. Through this strategic partnership, Optiv will offer the Cyberbit platform to train cybersecurity teams from "Zero to hero," developing skills in cyber labs before responding to real-world cyberattacks, simulated in a virtual SOC within the cyber range.

China poses the greatest threat to America and the rest of the free world since World War II, outgoing National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe said Thursday as the Trump administration ramps up anti-Chinese rhetoric to pressure President-elect Joe Biden to be tough on Beijing. "It offered nothing new but repeated the lies and rumors aimed at smearing China and playing up the China threat by any means," Hua said at a daily briefing on Friday.

Six men have been named as Russian military hackers and accused of spreading malware, disrupting the Olympics in retaliation for Russia's doping ban, and meddling with elections as well as probes into Novichok poisonings. Targeted South Koreans, athletes, the International Olympic Committee officials, and more, with spear-phishing and malicious mobile apps in the run-up to the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

If you're wondering which bugs in particular miscreants are exploiting to break into, or attempt to break into, US government networks, wonder no more. "CISA is aware of multiple cases where the Fortinet FortiOS SSL VPN vulnerability CVE-2018-13379 has been exploited to gain access to networks," explained Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in its advisory.

Two US government tentacles this week snared John McAfee, accusing the one-time antivirus mogul of tax evasion and breaking securities law. McAfee was cuffed in Spain, and is awaiting extradition to the US. McAfee is set to face trial on ten criminal charges of tax evasion and willful failure to file tax returns, brought by the Dept of Justice.

The H-1B One Workforce Grant Program will give up to 30 grants to training organizations to upskill US citizens for "Middle to high-skilled H-1B occupations... including information technology and cyber security" and so "Train a new generation of workers to grow the future workforce." The announcement comes one week before new restrictive visa rules are due to take effect that will greatly reduce the number of foreign workers that will be admitted to the US through the H-1B work visa.

For two years, IBM has been deploying confidential computing capabilities in the IBM Cloud and Rohit Badlaney, vice president of IBM Z Hybrid Cloud, said it is the only public cloud with "Production-ready confidential computing capabilities able to protect data, applications and processes." IBM's platform is now used in heavily regulated industries like healthcare and banking, with high profile customers like Bank of America and Daimler taking advantage of confidential cloud computing capabilities.

Just as America was getting a grip on improving the security of its electronic ballot boxes, the coronavirus pandemic hit, throwing a potential surge in remote voting unexpectedly into the mix, the Black Hat hacking conference was told today. In his keynote address to the now-virtual infosec confab, Georgetown Professor Matt Blaze said election officials will likely have to deal with a larger-than-normal number of citizens voting by mail, rather than in person, and all that entails, as people are encouraged to socially distance and stay away from crowds to curb the COVID-19 virus outbreak.