by Taylor Armerding
Eighteen months ago, President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced, with considerable fanfare, an agreement aimed at curbing economic espionage...
So, with Xi due to meet with President Trump in early April, an obvious question is:
Has the agreement been effective?...
The reviews on that are mixed...
Robert Silvers, writing on the Lawfare blog, called the statement,
“a landmark concession” by the Chinese, and said in the months since, multiple researchers and analysts had concluded that the agreement, “coincided with a significant downturn in Chinese hacking activity.”...
FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence, concluded that while “unprecedented action by the US government” was a factor in the decline,
it actually began in the middle of 2014 – more than a year before the Obama/Xi agreement...
John Quinn, former Far East specialist for the CIA, a more tempered view of the impact of the agreement. “I would characterize it as a work in progress, but a good start,” he said....
Israel Barak, CISO of Cybereason, means the conclusion that economic espionage has decreased is “problematic.” “Fewer attempts might mean they already have access,” he said. “The amount attributed to cyber crime in manufacturing, health care and other industries is constantly on the rise.”...
As
Kevin Murray, director at Murray Associates, put it, “once someone starts closely watching the cookie jar, the thief is forced to become more crafty.”
Murray, however, contended that the private sector needs to be much more effective in protecting itself. He pointed CSO to a 2015 blog post in which he declared:
“We fight like hell for our freedom, but we let the world pick our intellectual pockets.”
Murray said the “punish-the-spy” model isn’t enough – that corporations should be held accountable as well, for failure to protect their assets.
“
We need a law creating business counterespionage security standards, with penalties for inadequate protection,” he said, arguing that the US already, “successfully employs the same concept with medical and financial record privacy.”
more
It's the summer of 1972 and the U.S. is in the middle of pulling off the most daring, covert, and dangerous operation of the Cold War. Only a few months before, the signing of SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty) limited the number of nuclear missiles of the world's two largest superpowers. Yet even with this well-publicized US/Soviet détente in place, a submerged American submarine rests mere miles from the Russian coastline.
Robert Silvers, writing on the Lawfare blog, called the statement, “a landmark concession” by the Chinese, and said in the months since, multiple researchers and analysts had concluded that the agreement, “coincided with a significant downturn in Chinese hacking activity.”...
In the days before reconnaissance satellites, balloons were seen as a safer alternative to proposals for manned overflights, and less provocative than plans to attach cameras to cruise missiles. But the audacity of the balloon program also reflected the tremendous appetite for recon information in Washington. In his 1991 history of the Moby Dick program, as it was known, Curtis Peebles describes how “the reconnaissance balloon had the highest national priority of 1-A. The only other project to share this priority was the hydrogen bomb. Knowledge is power.”
Some privacy-conscious folks are already doing that—but many aren’t. If you want to keep your ISP from looking over your shoulder for data to sell to advertisers, here are three relatively simple actions you can take to get started.
The files, reviewed by ZDNet, contained a range of personal information, such as names and addresses, ranks, and Social Security numbers of more than 4,000 officers. Another file lists the security clearance levels of hundreds of other officers, some of whom possess "top secret" clearance, and access to sensitive compartmented information and codeword-level clearance.
Worries about espionage could lead not just political officials but also business executives to steer clear of properties owned by Anbang and other foreign companies. It’s common knowledge that governments —including the US, France and China — spy on foreign businesses. more
The problem is that most computers automatically trust every USB device that's plugged in, which means malicious code can run without warning.
Consumer Reports will use new standards to evaluate the quality of "internet of things" gadgets based criteria such as how secure products are and what sorts of disclosures are made when a device is collecting your data. The goal: For consumers to feel safer, and to not have to worry about the real threat of (for example) hackers taking over their baby monitor. more
