Month: July 2021

At least seven Colombian nationals who were arrested by Haitian authorities in connection with the assassination of President Jovenel Moise received U.S. military or police training.

A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation, told VOA Friday that all seven had been members of the Colombian military at the time they received the training.

“Individuals had been approved for a variety of training activities held both in Colombia and the United States between 2001-2015,” the official said. “Examples of the types of training received were various types of military leadership and professional development training, emergency medical training, helicopter maintenance, and attendance at seminars on counternarcotics and counterterrorism.”

The official said both the State Department and the Department of Defense are continuing to review their records to see if any additional suspects in the assassination have ties to the U.S.

“Their alleged involvement in this incident stands in stark contrast to outstanding conduct and performance of hundreds of thousands of foreign military students that have benefitted from U.S. education training programs over the past 40 years,” the official said.

Word that a “small number” of the Colombian nationals in Haitian custody had gotten U.S. training first came Thursday, though a Pentagon spokesperson told VOA that any such training “emphasizes and promotes respect for human rights, compliance with the rule of law, and militaries subordinate to democratically elected civilian leadership.”

Moise was shot and killed in the predawn hours of July 7 at his private residence in a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince. His wife, Martine, was injured in the attack and is recovering from surgery at a Miami, Florida, hospital.

Interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph told reporters that he has spoken to the first lady several times and that she is doing well.

Haitian National Police Chief Leon Charles said 18 Colombians have been arrested in connection with the assassination.

Colombia’s president told a local radio station Thursday that most of the detained Colombians had been duped into thinking they were to provide bodyguard services for the Haitian leader.

“Once they were over there,” Ivan Duque said, “the information they were given changed,” and the men ended up as suspects in an assassination plot.

New investigation details

Police Chief Charles said five Haitian police officers are currently in isolation because of their alleged involvement in the assassination plot. Investigators are questioning all police officers who were on duty when the attack occurred, he said.

“We have 18 assailants under detention. Three were killed during the attack, and there are five Haitian Americans who we are taking a close look at,” the chief told reporters during a Friday press conference.

“We are working both internally and externally with the assistance of our international partners to move the investigation forward. There are Interpol and FBI agents here on the ground to help us analyze evidence that will help us trace and identify the masterminds,” Charles said.

The chief thanked civilians who had been helping law enforcement find those involved in the assassination. Police have received a lot of helpful tips every day so far, he said.

Matiado Vilme in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, contributed to this story.
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The Hubble Space Telescope should be back in action soon, following a tricky, remote repair job by NASA.  The orbiting observatory went dark in mid-June, with all astronomical viewing halted.  NASA initially suspected a 1980s-era computer as the source of the problem. But after the backup payload computer also failed, flight controllers at Maryland’s Goddard Space Flight Center focused on the science instruments’ bigger and more encompassing command and data unit, installed by spacewalking astronauts in 2009.  This image of the Eagle Nebula, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, shows towers of gas and dust, known as the Pillars of Creation because within them, hundreds of new stars are being created.Engineers successfully switched to the backup equipment Thursday, and the crucial payload computer kicked in. NASA said Friday that science observations should resume quickly, if everything goes well.  A similar switch took place in 2008 after part of the older system failed.”Congrats to the team!” NASA’s science mission chief Thomas Zurbuchen tweeted.Launched in 1990, Hubble has made more than 1.5 million observations of the universe. NASA launched five repair missions to the telescope during the space shuttle program. The final tuneup was in 2009.NASA plans to launch Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, by year’s end.
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The World Meteorological Organization is calling for action to halt climate change as extreme weather becomes the norm rather than the exception. Heavy rainfall this week has triggered devastating floods across western Europe, killing and injuring scores of people, destroying homes and livelihoods.  At the same time, parts of Scandinavia — northern Europe’s coldest region — are enduring scorching temperatures.The Finnish Meteorological Institute says Finland had its warmest June on record, which has extended into July.   Southern Finland it notes has had 27 consecutive days with temperatures above 25 degrees Celsius.  By Finland’s normally frigid temperatures, that qualifies as a heatwave.US Facing Triple Weather ThreatsUS experiencing varying, but intense weather conditionsThe western U.S. and Canada also have been gripped by heat, with many records broken in states of Nevada and Utah. Last August, Death Valley, California reached a temperature of 54.4 degrees Celsius, the world’s highest temperature record.  But meteorologists believe Death Valley may have equaled that record a week ago on July 9.The spokeswoman for the World Meteorological Organization, Clare Nullis, says the heatwave in the western U.S. has led to megadrought conditions and numerous wildfires.”The heatwave that we saw in parts of the U.S. and Canada at the end of June…This heatwave would have been virtually impossible without the influence of human-caused climate change,” said Nullis. “Climate change, caused by greenhouse gas emissions, made the heatwave at least 150 times more likely.”   Nullis says climate change already is increasing the frequency of extreme weather events.  She adds many single events have been shown to have been made worse by global warming.”We need to step up climate action,” said Nullis. “We need to step up the level of ambition.  We are not doing really enough to stay within the targets of the Paris agreement and keep temperatures below two degrees Celsius, even 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.”   The spokeswoman’s call echoes that of U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who is urging all countries to do more to avoid a climate catastrophe linked to rising carbon dioxide emissions and temperatures.
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The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has warned in a statement that the global COVID vaccination rate “must increase rapidly and protection measures upheld, if we are to win the race against more transmissible, and potentially more deadly, variants.” “At least three quarters of people in most countries want to be vaccinated worldwide, in the face of emerging new variants, according to new survey data,” IFRC said. “However, despite lofty rhetoric about global solidarity, there is a deadly gap in the global plan to equitably distribute COVID-19 vaccines. Only around a quarter of the world’s population have received at least one dose of the vaccine. This number drops dramatically in low-income countries, where only 1% of people have received one dose.  And some countries are yet to start mass vaccination campaigns.”  Haiti Gets First Half Million Doses of COVID-19 Vaccine National Security Council official tells VOA decision to speed up vaccine delivery was made after US delegation trip to Port-au-Prince on Sunday A group of human rights advocates is calling for humanitarian aid for Myanmar’s “crippling COVID-19 crisis.”Myanmar
The Special Advisory Council for Myanmar said in a statement that the country is experiencing “a massive third wave of COVID-19″ and is “in urgent need of help.”  It called on the United Nations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and “other actors” to deliver assistance “directly to the people now.”Yanghee Lee, of the advisory council, in a statement, accused the country’s junta of “weaponising COVID-19 for its own political gain by suffocating the democracy movement and seeking to gain the legitimacy and control it craves – and has so far been denied – by deliberately fueling a humanitarian disaster and then co-opting the international response.”  Millions of children did not receive their basic vaccinations last year as the world sought to bring the COVID-19 outbreak under control, leaving the youngsters vulnerable to preventable diseases like polio and measles.The World Health Organization said in a recent statement that “23 million children missed out on basic vaccines through routine immunization services in 2020 – 3.7 million more than in 2019.”While Southeast Asia Battles COVID-19 Outbreak, Doubts Linger Over Sinovac VaccineMost of the vaccines offered in Indonesia — nearly 90% — have been made by Beijing-based Sinovac BiotechUp to 17 million children, the WHO said, “likely did not receive a single vaccine during the year, widening already immense inequities in vaccine access.”WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “Multiple disease outbreaks would be catastrophic for communities and health systems already battling COVID-19, making it more urgent than ever to invest in childhood vaccination and ensure every child is reached.”“This is a wake-up call,” said Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.  “We cannot allow a legacy of COVID-19 to be the resurgence of measles, polio and other killers.” The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Friday that there are more than 189 million global COVID cases. Worldwide more than 4 million people have died from COVID-19.  More than 3.5 billion vaccines have been administered, according to Johns Hopkins.
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In a medical first, researchers harnessed the brain waves of a paralyzed man unable to speak — and turned what he intended to say into sentences on a computer screen.

It will take years of additional research but the study, reported Wednesday, marks an important step toward one day restoring more natural communication for people who can’t talk because of injury or illness.

“Most of us take for granted how easily we communicate through speech,” said Dr. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the work. “It’s exciting to think we’re at the very beginning of a new chapter, a new field” to ease the devastation of patients who lost that ability.

Today, people who can’t speak or write because of paralysis have very limited ways of communicating. For example, the man in the experiment, who was not identified to protect his privacy, uses a pointer attached to a baseball cap that lets him move his head to touch words or letters on a screen. Other devices can pick up patients’ eye movements. But it’s a frustratingly slow and limited substitution for speech.

Tapping brain signals to work around a disability is a hot field. In recent years, experiments with mind-controlled prosthetics have allowed paralyzed people to shake hands or take a drink using a robotic arm — they imagine moving and those brain signals are relayed through a computer to the artificial limb.

Chang’s team built on that work to develop a “speech neuroprosthetic” — decoding brain waves that normally control the vocal tract, the tiny muscle movements of the lips, jaw, tongue and larynx that form each consonant and vowel.

Volunteering to test the device was a man in his late 30s who 15 years ago suffered a brain-stem stroke that caused widespread paralysis and robbed him of speech. The researchers implanted electrodes on the surface of the man’s brain, over the area that controls speech.

A computer analyzed the patterns when he attempted to say common words such as “water” or “good,” eventually becoming able to differentiate between 50 words that could generate more than 1,000 sentences.

Prompted with such questions as “How are you today?” or “Are you thirsty” the device eventually enabled the man to answer “I am very good” or “No I am not thirsty” — not voicing the words but translating them into text, the team reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

It takes about three to four seconds for the word to appear on the screen after the man tries to say it, said lead author David Moses, an engineer in Chang’s lab. That’s not nearly as fast as speaking but quicker than tapping out a response.

‘Pioneering demonstration’

In an accompanying editorial, Harvard neurologists Leigh Hochberg and Sydney Cash called the work a “pioneering demonstration.”

They suggested improvements but said if the technology pans out it eventually could help people with injuries, strokes or illnesses like Lou Gehrig’s disease whose “brains prepare messages for delivery but those messages are trapped.”

Chang’s lab has spent years mapping the brain activity that leads to speech. First, researchers temporarily placed electrodes in the brains of volunteers undergoing surgery for epilepsy, so they could match brain activity to spoken words.

Only then was it time to try the experiment with someone unable to speak. How did they know the device interpreted his words correctly? They started by having him try to say specific sentences such as, “Please bring my glasses,” rather than answering open-ended questions until the machine translated accurately most of the time.

Next steps include ways to improve the device’s speed, accuracy and vocabulary size — and maybe one day allow a computer-generated voice rather than text on a screen — while testing a small number of additional volunteers. 
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Australian cybersecurity experts are calling for more aggressive government action to protect businesses from ransomware attacks. Experts have warned a “tsunami of cybercrime” has cost the global economy about $743 billion.

Big companies can be attractive targets for cybercriminals who can extort millions of dollars after stealing sensitive commercial information.

The Cybersecurity Cooperative Research Centre is a collaboration between industry representatives, the Australian government and academics.

Its chief executive, Rachael Falk, believes Australia is an easy target for hackers because cyber defenses can be weak.

“More often than not, it is by sending an email where an employee clicks on a link,” she said. “They get into that organization, they have a good look around and they work out what is valuable data here that we can encrypt, which means we lock it up and we will take a copy of it. And then we will encrypt all the valuable data in that organization and then we will hold them to ransom for money. So, it is a business model for criminals that earns them money.”

The consequences for businesses can be extreme. They can lose valuable data, or have it leaked or sold by cyberthieves. In some cases, hackers can disable an organization’s entire operation. In March, a cyberattack disrupted broadcasts by Channel Nine, one of Australia’s most popular commercial television news networks. It sought help from the Australian Signals Directorate, a government intelligence agency.

Researchers want the government to require Australian companies to tell authorities when they are being targeted.

They also want clarity on whether paying ransoms is legal. Experts have said Australian law does not make it clear whether giving money to hackers is a criminal offense.

There is also a call for the government to use tax incentives to encourage Australian businesses to invest in cybersecurity.

Last year, federal government agencies said China had been responsible for a series of cyberattacks on Australian institutions, including hospitals and state-owned companies. 
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U.S. President Joe Biden, his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and Russian President Vladimir Putin are among Pacific Rim leaders gathering virtually to discuss strategies to help economies rebound from a resurgent COVID-19 pandemic.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will chair the special leaders’ meeting Friday of the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

But the pandemic and vaccine diplomacy have proved to be divisive issues among members of a forum that says its primary goal is to support sustainable economic growth and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region.

Biden spoke by phone with Ardern on Friday ahead of the leaders’ retreat and discussed U.S. interest in maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific region, a White House statement said.

“They also discussed our cooperation on and engagement with Pacific Island nations,” the statement said.

The Biden administration has put a premium on tending to relations with allies in the Pacific early in his administration.

One of his first high-profile acts of diplomacy as president was hosting a virtual summit with fellow leaders of the Quad – Australia, India and Japan – a group central to his efforts to counter China’s growing military and economic power. And he hosted Suga and South Korea President Moon Jae-in for the first in-person foreign leader meetings of his presidency. South Korea is an APEC member and India is the only country in the Quad that is not.

Biden plans to use the virtual APEC retreat to talk to leaders about his administration’s efforts to serve “as an arsenal of vaccines to the world” in the battle against COVID-19 pandemic and how members of the alliance can collaborate to bolster the global economy, according to a senior Biden administration who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The U.S. has donated 4.5 million vaccine doses to Indonesia, 2 million to Vietnam, 1 million to Malaysia, and 3.2 million doses will soon be delivered to the Philippines. The White House says donations to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Papua New Guinea, will also soon be delivered. Laos and Cambodia are the only countries among those eight vaccine recipients that are not APEC members.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said the “important meeting” came at a critical time as the world was facing a resurgence in COVID-19 infection numbers and international cooperation against the pandemic had entered a new stage.

“We hope all parties can uphold the vision of an Asia-Pacific community with a shared future, carry forward the Asia-Pacific partnership, send a positive message of fighting the coronavirus with solidarity and deepen economic recovery and cooperation,” Zhao said.

Suga will speak about his determination to hold a safe and secure Olympics when the games start in Tokyo on July 23, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said.

Suga will also emphasis Japan’s determination to secure fair access to vaccines for all countries and regions to support the global effort toward ending the COVID-19 pandemic, and Tokyo’s vision to expand a free and fair economic bloc, Kato said.

Ardern said APEC’s first leaders’ meeting outside the usual annual summits “reflects our desire to navigate together out of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis.”

“APEC economies have suffered their biggest contraction since the Second World War over the past year, with 81 million jobs lost. Responding collectively is vital to accelerate the economic recovery for the region,” said Ardern, whose South Pacific island nation has been among the most successful in the world in containing the virus.

The pace of a global vaccine rollout and conditions attached to international vaccine deals are vexed issues among APEC members.

The United States has been accused by some of hoarding vaccines. Biden came up well short on his goal of delivering 80 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine to the rest of the world by the end of June as a host of logistical and regulatory hurdles slowed the pace of U.S. vaccine diplomacy.

Although the Biden administration has announced that about 50 countries and entities will receive a share of the excess COVID-19 vaccine doses, the U.S. had shipped fewer than 24 million doses to 10 recipient countries by July 1, according to an Associated Press tally.

Taiwan, an APEC member that China claims as a renegade territory, has accused Beijing of tying the delivery of coronavirus vaccines to political demands. The government of the self-ruled island says China has intervened to block vaccine deliveries to Taiwan from fellow APEC members Japan and the United States.

China has accused Australia of interfering in the rollout of Chinese vaccines in former Australian colony Papua New Guinea. Both Australia and Papua New Guinea are also APEC members.

Sino-Australian relations plummeted last year when Australia called for an independent investigation into the origins of and responses to the pandemic.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who will also join the meeting, said in a statement now was a “critical time for Australia to engage with regional partners to promote free trade facilitation, in particular for vaccines and essential goods; build momentum for strengthening the multilateral trading system; and secure a sustainable and inclusive recovery.”

China said that by May it was providing COVID-19 vaccines to nearly 40 African countries, describing its actions as purely altruistic.

The vaccines were donated or sold at “favorable prices,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry official said.

The online leaders’ meeting that is chaired from the New Zealand capital Wellington and straddles 11 time zones comes before the scheduled annual summit in November.

New Zealand’s pandemic response has been among the most effective in the world and the isolated nation of 5 million people has recorded just 26 COVID-19 deaths. But its vaccination campaign has been far slower than in most developed countries.

Ardern said leading a regional response to the pandemic was one of New Zealand’s highest priorities when it took over as APEC’s chair from Malaysia in an annual rotation among the 21 members.

“I will be inviting discussion on immediate measures to achieve more coordinated regional action to assist recovery, as well as steps that will support inclusive and sustainable growth over the long term,” she said. “APEC leaders will work together to get through the pandemic and promote a sustainable and inclusive recovery, because nobody is safe until everyone is safe.” 
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A Chinese gene company is collecting genetic data through prenatal tests from women in more than 50 countries for research on the traits of populations, raising concern that such a large DNA database could give China a technological advantage and the strategic edge to dominate global pharmaceuticals, according to a recent news report.

Analysts expressed unease with the developments exclusively reported by Reuters at BGI Group, the Chinese gene company, which is collecting genetic data via its NiPT prenatal test with the brand name NIFTY (Non-Invasive Fetal TrisomY).

The tests, sold in more than 50 countries, can detect abnormalities such as Down syndrome in the fetus by capturing DNA from the placenta in the bloodstream about 10 weeks into a pregnancy.

The tests are sold in 52 countries, including Germany, Spain and Denmark, as well as in Britain, Canada, Australia, Thailand, India and Pakistan, according to Reuters. They are not sold in the United States, where “government advisers warned in March that the genomic data BGI is amassing and analyzing with artificial intelligence could give China a path to economic and military advantage,” Reuters reported. 

Collecting the biggest and most diverse set of human genomes could propel China to dominate global pharmaceuticals, and also potentially lead to genetically enhanced soldiers, or engineered pathogens to target the U.S. population or food supply, the U.S. advisers said, according to Reuters.

Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of the rights group Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, said that due to China’s strategy of fusing military and civilian interests, “any Chinese company can be forced by the government to supply its information to the military.”

China sells the prenatal tests “a good product at a lower cost because they’re able to do that,” Littlejohn said. “But what people don’t realize is that when they get these lower cost genetic tests,” the collected information goes to the Chinese military,” she told VOA via a video interview using Microsoft Teams.

The Reuters report said the company has “worked with the Chinese military to improve ‘population quality’ and on genetic research to combat hearing loss and altitude sickness in soldiers.”

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed the report, telling Reuters it was “a groundless accusation and smear campaign.”

Dan Harris, an international lawyer and author at the China Law Blog, told VOA Mandarin that he believes democratic entities, such as the United States, Japan, Korea, Australia and the European Union, are going to realize they “need to enact special laws to deal with China and China’s hoovering of data.”

Crystal Grant, a data scientist and molecular biologist with a Ph.D. in genetics who is a technology fellow in the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, told VOA Mandarin via Teams video interview that this accumulation of DNA will challenge genomic policy worldwide.

By using what she described as “this massive amount of information” and supercomputers “to crack those codes is going to be a threat to genomic policy everywhere,” she told VOA in a video interview.

Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the Council of Foreign Relations, told VOA Mandarin in a TV interview in February that rapid advances in genetics and biotechnology have highlighted the need for the international community to step up regulations to prevent data abuse.

“It is not just China. The progress in the legal framework in this area is lagging behind,” Huang said. “It’s vital for the international community to sit down and work out a framework.”

Genetic engineering

Yet researchers worldwide in the academic, private and government sectors, are refining genetic engineering techniques and knowledge.

China’s interest in the field is not new. In 2018, researcher He Jiankui announced that he had produced twins genetically altered to resist HIV using a relatively new, accurate and very fast American-developed genetic editing technique known by its acronym, CRISPR.

In 2019, a Chinese court found He guilty of using “illegal medical practices” and sentenced He to three years in prison.

Prenatal privacy

Reuters found no evidence BGI violated patient privacy agreements or regulations. “However, the privacy policy on the NIFTY test’s website says data collected can be shared when it is ‘directly relevant to national security or national defense security’ in China,” the report stated.

BGI dismissed the Reuters report, saying that the company’s research has met national and international requirements.

“All NIPT data collected overseas are stored in BGI’s laboratory in Hong Kong and are destroyed after five years, as stipulated by General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),” the company said in a statement released on July 9.

BGI emphasized that it developed the NIPT test alone, not in a partnership with China’s military.

Reuters interviewed four women who have used the BGI’s prenatal tests in Poland, Spain and Thailand. They all signed consent forms stating that their genetic data would be stored and used for research, yet they are not aware that their genetic information could end up in China.

Harris, the lawyer, told VOA that most of the time, people didn’t know what they were signing.

“Maybe the sign off says that it will be limited to BGI and BGI access, though XYZ, a Chinese military company, might be one of BGI’s subsidiaries,” which would mean that the consent form allowed BGI to transfer a woman’s genetic information to the Chinese military, he told VOA via Microsoft Teams.

One of the women, a 32-year-old office administrator from Poland, told Reuters that she would have chosen a different test had she known that her data might end up in China being used for research involving military applications.

U.S. federal authorities have been watching BGI’s record on data collection. Bill Evanina, former director of the United States National Counterintelligence and Security Center, told the CBS-TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes in January that he was extremely concerned when BGI offered to provide COVID-19 testing kits to several U.S. states last year.

“Knowing that BGI is a Chinese company, do we understand where that data’s going?” Evanina asked. They are the ultimate company that shows connectivity to both the communist state as well as the military apparatus.”

Edward You, supervisory special agent with the FBI and a former biochemist, told 60 Minutes in the same January episode that Beijing authorities are betting that accumulating large amounts of human DNA will prove to be a successful strategy.

“They are building out a huge domestic database,” You said. “And if they are now able to supplement that with data from all around the world, it’s all about who gets the largest, most diverse data set. And so, the ticking time bomb is that once they’re able to achieve true artificial intelligence, then they’re off to the races in what they can do with that data.”  
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Iran appears to be intensifying its effort to exploit U.S. and Western targets in cyberspace, running a campaign aimed at manipulating American military personnel and defense companies on social media.

Tehran’s latest campaign, orchestrated on Facebook by a group known as Tortoiseshell, used a series of sophisticated, fake online personas to make contact with U.S. servicemembers and employees of major defense companies in order to infect their computers with malware and extract information.

“This activity had the hallmarks of a well-resourced and persistent operation, while relying on relatively strong operational security measures to hide who’s behind it,” Facebook said Thursday in a blog post, calling it part of a “much broader cross-platform cyber espionage operation.”

Personas used

Employees of defense companies in the U.K. and other European countries were also targeted.

“These accounts often posed as recruiters and employees of defense and aerospace companies from the countries their targets were in,” Facebook said. “Other personas claimed to work in hospitality, medicine, journalism, NGOs and airlines.”

And the hackers were in no hurry.

“Our investigation found that this group invested significant time into their social engineering efforts across the internet, in some cases engaging with their targets for months,” Facebook said. “They leveraged various collaboration and messaging platforms to move conversations off-platform and send malware to their targets.”

Facebook said it has notified users who appeared to have been targeted, took down the fake accounts and blocked the malicious domains from being shared.

The social media company said it was able to trace the activity to Iran, in part because of the distinctive malware, known to have been developed by Mahak Rayan Afraz, a Tehran-based company with links to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Mandiant Threat Intelligence, a private cybersecurity company, said Thursday that it agreed with Facebook’s assessment that Iran, and the IRGC in particular, was behind the campaign.

Tortoiseshell “has historically targeted people and organizations affiliated with the U.S. military and information technology providers in the Middle East since at least 2018,” Mandiant Senior Principal Analyst Sarah Jones said in an email.

Jones also said it was noteworthy that some of the fake domains associated with the Iranian campaign used the name of former U.S. President Donald Trump, including, “trumphotel[.]net”, “trumporganization[.]world”, and “trumporganizations[.]com”.

“Domains such as these could suggest social engineering associated with U.S. political topics,” Jones said. “We have no evidence that these domains were operationalized or used to target anyone affiliated with the Trump family or properties.”

Facebook, which discovered the hacking campaign, did not comment on whether Iran managed to steal any critical or sensitive data.

U.S. military officials also declined to speak about what, if anything, the Iranian hackers were able to steal.

“For operational security purposes, U.S. Cyber Command does not discuss operations, intelligence and cyber planning,” a spokesperson told VOA.

“The threats posed by social media interactions are not unique to any particular social media platform and Department of Defense personnel must be cautious when engaging online,” the spokesperson added.

‘Significant threat’

U.S. intelligence officials have been increasingly concerned about Iran’s growing capabilities and aggressiveness in cyberspace.

In its annual Worldwide Threat Assessment, published in April, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence called Tehran “a significant threat to the security of U.S. and allied networks and data.”

“We expect Tehran to focus on online covert influence, such as spreading disinformation about fake threats or compromised election infrastructure and recirculating anti-U.S. content,” the report said.

The U.S. intelligence community, earlier this year, also accused Iran of meddling in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, carrying out a “multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former President Trump’s reelection prospects.”

U.S. officials said part of that effort involved hacking voter registration systems in at least one U.S. state and using the information to send prospective voters threatening emails.

More recently, the cybersecurity firm Proofpoint said a separate Iranian hacker collective with ties to the IRGC, known as TA453 and Charming Kitten, posed as British university professors to steal information and research from think tanks and academics.
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The U.S. government said Thursday it will begin offering up to $10 million for information to identify or locate malicious cyber actors working on behalf of a foreign government that are trying to cripple the internet operations of American businesses and infrastructure.The new reward was announced as the U.S. faces a growing threat from ransomware attacks – the demand from foreign entities that U.S. corporations and institutions pay millions of dollars to unlock critical technology systems that hackers have seized. The attacks have usually originated overseas, frequently from Russia, according to U.S. officials.Already this year, one of the largest pipeline operators in the U.S., a major meat processing company and, most recently, hundreds of small businesses have been hit by ransomware, forcing companies to pay millions of dollars to restore their operations or risk losing vital data.The U.S. says that about $350 million in ransom was paid to malicious cyber actors in 2020, a more than 300% increase from the year before.The U.S. State Department said it has created a new Tor-based channel to let potential sources anonymously report tips on malicious activity.At the same time, the departments of Justice and Homeland Security created a new website, stopransomware.gov, with information for organizations to learn how to protect themselves and respond to attacks.Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN it is a “one-stop shop” for information on “how one can prevent oneself from becoming a victim of ransomware, and should one become a victim, how one can work with the federal government in partnership to address the situation.”“Of course, we advise they not pay that ransom,” he said.  In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the government alone cannot prevent the ransomware attacks.“It is critical for business leaders across industries to recognize the threat, prioritize efforts to harden their systems and work with law enforcement by reporting these attacks promptly,” Garland said.
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The space-tourism industry got a major boost aboard a billionaire’s rocket ship.  Plus, the EU lends Mother Earth a climate-conscious hand, and LeBron James suits-up for the big screen.  VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us the Week in Space. Produced by: Arash Arabasadi
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A NASA-University of Hawaii study warns that upcoming changes in the moon’s orbit coupled with higher ocean levels could lead to record coastal flooding on U.S. coasts in the next decade.The study, conducted by the NASA Sea Level Change Team at the University of Hawaii, and published last month in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, says a regularly occurring change in the moon’s orbit around the earth will raise ocean water levels along U.S. shorelines.The NASA researchers say the so-called “wobble” in the moon’s orbit is part of an 18.6-year cycle, recorded as far back as 1728. During half of the cycle, the moon creates lower high tides and higher low tides; the other half creates higher high tides and even lower low tides.The phenomenon is expected to peak the mid-2030s and is occurring just as coastal flooding is on the rise due to higher ocean levels linked to the effects of climate change. A report released Wednesday by the U.S. National Oceanic at Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says the U.S. saw record levels of coastal flooding in the past year.NOAA say flooding at high tide, often called “nuisance” or “sunny day” flooding, has regularly occurred within many coastal communities as water routinely sloshes into streets, yards and businesses.But the agency reports from May 2020 through April 2021, U.S. coastal communities saw twice as many high tide flooding days than they did 20 years ago. They expect the near-record high tides trend to continue through April 2022, as well as in decades to come.NOAA oceanographer and author on the NASA study William Sweet told The Washington Post the combination of the moon’s orbit wobble and rising sea levels is  “sort of a double-whammy” that means coastal communities are likely to expect even greater flooding than they might otherwise in coming years, unless they adapt and fortify their shorelines.NASA’s Sea Level Change team leader Ben Hamlington said communities and urban planners need to plan for more extreme flooding in the future.
 
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The State Department will offer rewards up to $10 million for information leading to the identification of anyone engaged in foreign state-sanctioned malicious cyber activity against critical U.S. infrastructure — including ransomware attacks — and the White House has launched a task force to coordinate efforts to stem the ransomware scourge.The Biden administration is also launching the website stopransomware.gov to offer the public resources for countering the threat and building more resilience into networks, a senior administration official told reporters.Another measure being announced Thursday to combat the ransomware onslaught is from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network at the Treasury Department. It will engage banks, technology firms and others on better anti-money-laundering efforts for cryptocurrency and more rapid tracing of ransomware proceeds, which are paid in virtual currency.  Officials are hoping to seize more extortion payments in ransomware cases, as the FBI did in recouping most of the $4.4 million ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline in May.The rewards are being offered under the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program. It will offer a tips-reporting mechanism on the dark web to protect sources who might identify cyber attackers and/or their locations, and reward payments may include cryptocurrency, the agency said in a statement.  The administration official would not comment on whether the U.S. government had a hand in Tuesday’s online disappearance of REvil, the Russian-linked gang responsible for a July 2 supply chain ransomware attack that crippled well over 1,000 organizations globally by targeting Florida-based software provider Kaseya. Ransomware scrambles entire networks of data, which criminals unlock when they get paid.Cybersecurity experts say REvil may have decided to drop out of sight and rebrand under a new name, as it and several other ransomware gangs have done in the past to try to throw off law enforcement.Another possibility is that Russian President Vladimir Putin actually heeded President Joe Biden’s warning of repercussions if he didn’t rein in ransomware criminals, who enjoy safe harbor in Russia and allied states.That seemed improbable, however, given Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s statement to reporters Wednesday that he was unaware of REvil sites disappearing.”I don’t know which group disappeared where,” he said. He said the Kremlin deems cybercrimes “unacceptable” and meriting of punishment, but analysts say they have seen no evidence of a crackdown by Putin.
 
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