Cybersecurity and Cyberwarfare

Hundreds of cities, large and small, have adopted or begun planning smart cities projects. But the risks are daunting. Experts say cities frequently lack the expertise to understand privacy, security and financial implications of such arrangements. Some mayors acknowledge that they have yet to master the responsibilities that go along with collecting billions of bits of data from residents. Concerns have intensified as Kansas City prepares to expand its technology experiment from downtown to poor neighborhoods on the city’s East Side.

The Los Angeles Times says an unusual cyberattack that disrupted its printing operations and those at newspapers in San Diego and Florida the weekend of Dec 28 came from outside the United States, but it stopped short of accusing a specific foreign government. Computer malware attacks on infrastructure, while relatively rare, are hardly new: Russia has been credibly accused of shutting down power grids in Ukraine and a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia, Iran crippled a casino in Las Vegas, and the United States and Israel attacked a nuclear enrichment plant in Iran.

Two years after a congressional report labeled Huawei Technologies Co a national-security threat, the Chinese firm unexpectedly scored a big-name ally in Washington. It was the Redskins, the capital’s National Football League franchise. Huawei reached an agreement in 2014 to beam Wi-Fi through the suites at the team’s FedEx Field, in exchange for advertising in the stadium and during broadcasts. It was a marketing coup for a company hankering to beef up its meager US business and boost its image inside the Beltway. But the deal didn’t last long.

The Trump administration slapped new sanctions on 18 Russian intelligence agents for a variety of activities, including interfering in the US presidential election, the attempted assassination of a former spy in Britain, and hacking international agencies that combat chemical weapons and doping. The latest round of sanctions bring the total of Russian individuals and entities the Trump administration has sanctioned to 272. Nine officers for Russia’s Main Intelligence Director (GRU) were sanctioned for playing a role in undermining the election.

Apparently, T-Mobile won approval from US national-security officials for its planned takeover of Sprint, bringing the two rivals a step closer to closing their roughly $26 billion combination. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, or Cfius, told the companies that it had cleared the union of the No 3 and No 4 carriers by subscribers after several months of negotiations with company representatives.

Chinese telecom Huawei has again told the Federal Communications Commission that the commission's proposal to exclude some Chinese companies' technology--Huawei and ZTE-- from Universal Service Fund broadband subsidy support is both legally and factually deficient. Government contractors can't buy equipment from Chinese telecoms ZTE or Huawei as part of those contracts, and must submit a plan for phasing out the use of that equipment from its systems. That came with President Donald Trump's signing on Aug 13 of the John S.

Rhode Island is suing Google over a data breach the state said compromised the information of 52.5 million users. That is according to the office of RI General Treasurer Seth Magaziner—the state's pension fund is invested in Google. The pension fund filed a motion with the court to head a class action shareholder suit after it was reported that Google execs had not disclosed the breach, which involved the Google+ attempt by the company to capture some of the social media market.

Republican leaders of the House Oversight Committee released a scathing report about the Equifax data breach on Dec 10, detailing a series of security failures that preceded the 2017 compromise of 140 million Americans’ personal information. A few hours later, committee Democrats released a competing report about the consumer credit reporting agency, lashing out at their Republican colleagues for not demanding new cybersecurity laws to prevent the next major data breach.

According to unnamed sources, the Justice Department is investigating whether crimes were committed when potentially millions of people’s identities were posted to the Federal Communications Commission’s website without their permission, falsely attributing to them opinions about net neutrality rules. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has delivered subpoenas to at least two organizations related to the comments.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said that roughly 500,000 comments submitted during the debate over the controversial repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules were linked to Russian email addresses. The disclosure was made in a statement in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests submitted by The New York Times and BuzzFeed. In the statement, Chairman Pai refers to "the half-million comments submitted from Russian e-mail addresses."