Financial safety

FBI warns hackers are targeting mobile banking apps

The FBI on Wednesday warned that malicious cyber actors were targeting mobile banking apps in an attempt to steal money as more Americans have moved to online banking during the coronavirus pandemic.

In a public service announcement, the FBI noted it expects to see hackers “exploit” mobile banking platforms, which have seen a 50 percent surge in use since the beginning of the pandemic.

“With city, state, and local governments urging or mandating social distancing, Americans have become more willing to use mobile banking as an alternative to physically visiting branch locations,” the agency wrote. “The FBI expects cyber actors to attempt to exploit new mobile banking customers using a variety of techniques, including app-based banking trojans and fake banking apps.”

The FBI specifically pointed to threat of banking trojans, which involve a malicious virus hiding on a user’s mobile device until a legitimate banking app is downloaded. Once the real app is on the device, the banking trojan then overlays the app, tricking the user into clicking on it and inputting their banking login credentials.

Outer space

DARPA awards Blackjack contracts to Blue Canyon, SA Photonics

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced on June 10 it awarded Blue Canyon Technologies a $14.1 million contract for satellite buses for the Blackjack program. DARPA on June 9 also announced a $16.3 million contract award to SA Photonics for Blackjack payloads.

The Blackjack program is an experiment to show the military utility of low Earth orbit constellations and mesh networks of low-cost satellites.

Both companies already had been selected as part of a pool of Blackjack satellite bus and payload suppliers and had received study contracts. These latest contracts are to produce hardware for the demonstration.

DARPA wants to make plug-and-play satellites where new payloads can be added without having to redesign the bus. That approach would allow the military to speed up the production and lower the cost of satellites compared to traditional acquisitions of custom-built spacecraft.

Scam

Ex-DEA public affairs chief pleads guilty to brazen scam

A former head of public affairs for the Drug Enforcement Administration who later worked as a producer for TMZ has admitted to a fraud scheme that involved posing as an undercover CIA operative in order to swindle government contractors out of over $4 million.

Details of the complex scam carried out by Garrison Courtney, 44, became public Thursday morning as he pleaded guilty to a felony wire fraud charge in Alexandria, Va., before U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady.

In the scheme, Courtney informed various businesses that the CIA or other agencies needed to place individuals on the companies’ payroll as part of an undercover operation — an arrangement sometimes referred to as commercial cover — O’Grady explained as he read from an agreed statement of facts in the case.

Espionage

Former Austrian army colonel convicted of spying for Russia

A retired Austrian army colonel was convicted of spying for Russia for nearly three decades.

The 71-year-old man, whose name has not been released, was accused of giving Russia secret information about Austria's armed forces and their weapons systems from 1992 to 2018 in exchange for more than $300,000.

He was sentenced to three years in prison by a regional court in Salzburg on Tuesday. His trial took place behind closed doors over national security concerns.

The man denied he was a spy, saying he passed on publicly available information, but he did admit to being paid.

Austrian investigators suspected the colonel was recruited by Igor Zaitsev, a high-ranking Russian military intelligence officer for whom Vienna has issued an international arrest warrant.

Then-Austrian Defense Minister Mario Kunasek previously said the spying was exposed with the help of another European intelligence agency.

Treasure hunt

X marks the spot: treasure hunters in shock after reported $2m find in Rocky Mountains

Treasure hunters have reacted with shock, delight and disbelief to the news that a chest containing gems, gold and antiques worth up to $2m has reportedly been found in the Rocky Mountains.

“I’ve had every emotion under the sun,” said Sacha Dent of Kansas, who dedicated years to a quest that resulted in the deaths of up to five people.

“First it was shock and sadness, then on Monday a mix of happiness, relief and excitement,” said Dent. “I’ve invested six years into this. Now it’s finally over. I am very happy for the person who found it.”

An eccentric New Mexico millionaire named Forrest Fenn said he hid the bronze chest in the Rockies in 2010. The only clues to the prize’s whereabouts were located in a cryptic 24-line poem written by Fenn and added to the last pages of his autobiography, The Thrill of the Chase.

“Begin it where warm waters halt / And take it in the canyon down, / Not far, but too far to walk. / Put in below the home of Brown,” reads the second stanza of Fenn’s poem that would send treasure hunters to scour five western states. 

Intel assessment

Declassified: Intelligence community assessment annex shows 'limited corroboration' of Steele dossier

The annex to the 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference containing allegations from British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier was declassified Thursday, revealing the U.S. government claimed to have “only limited corroboration” of the former MI6 agent’s claims.

The two-page annex, appended to the January 2017 conclusion by the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 election to help then-candidate Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton, was declassified by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and obtained by the Washington Examiner. Both fired FBI Director James Comey and fired Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had unsuccessfully pushed to include Steele's unverified research in the official public assessment, according to a Justice Department watchdog report.

“An FBI source using both identified and unidentified sub sources volunteered highly politically sensitive information from the summer to the full of 2016 on Russian influence efforts aimed at the U.S. presidential election,” the annex stated. “We have only limited corroboration of the source’s reporting in this case and did not use it to reach the analytic conclusions of the CIA/FBI/NSA assessment.”

Biosecurity

Satellite images of packed Wuhan hospitals suggest coronavirus outbreak began earlier than thought

Coronavirus may have broken out in the Chinese city of Wuhan much earlier than previously thought, according to a new US study looking at satellite imagery and internet searches.

The Harvard Medical School research found that the number of cars parked at major Wuhan hospitals at points last autumn was much higher than the preceding year.  

It also found that searches from the Wuhan region for information on “cough” and “diarrhea”, known Covid-19 symptoms, on the Chinese search engine Baidu spiked around the same time.

It has led researchers to suggest that the outbreak began much earlier than December 31, the date the Chinese government notified the World Health Organisation of the outbreak. 

The findings add weight to US calls for Beijing to cooperate with investigators attempting to understand the origins of a virus which has now claimed more than 400,000 lives worldwide. 

Spy work

Who was ‘Miss KGB’ who won a secret beauty contest in 1990?

One October morning in 1990, a photo of a woman appeared on the front page of the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. The woman on the cover — Katya Mayorova, as she was presented in the article — looked young, attractive, but also dangerous… posing with a gun.

“Miss KGB” — the headline read. But who was Katya Mayorova, the world’s only holder of an unusual title of a “security services beauty?”

The new face of the KGB

Despite the newly adopted policy of glasnost — Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to make the Soviet government more transparent — the KGB remained one of the most secretive state institutions of the USSR. The all-powerful agency had an image of a serious, widely feared security apparatus that was alien to any sort of frivolity.

Biosecurity

Coronavirus may force the U.S. intelligence community to rethink how it does its job

Coronavirus is shaping up to be a watershed for the American intelligence community.

In the two decades after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the CIA and other spy agencies made terrorism their top priority, with the goal of preventing another 9/11. For the most part, they succeeded.

Now a pandemic has killed more Americans in four months than died in all the wars in the last half-century — 35 9/11's and counting — while inflicting trillions of dollars in economic damage.

It's a disaster that is already changing how the intelligence community views health threats — and how it defines national security.

"COVID-19 is a wake-up call," said Denis Kaufman, a former senior official at the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Corruption

Vatican arrest man over luxury property deal

An Italian businessman who helped the Vatican to buy luxury property in London in a controversial deal has been arrested by Vatican police.

Gianluigi Torzi is accused of extortion, embezzlement, aggravated fraud and money laundering in relation to the $200m (£160m) deal.

He is being held in Vatican police barracks, and faces up to 12 years in prison if found guilty.

The 2018 purchase of the building is subject to an ongoing investigation.

The apartment block on Sloane Avenue, in London's exclusive Chelsea, had been bought with church money by the Secretariat of State, the body charged with the Vatican's diplomatic and political functions.

But it is alleged the price was greatly inflated.

In October, police raided the Secretariat's office and seized documents and computers, and the Vatican suspended five officials, barring them from the city state.

Cybersecurity
State Dept. using email software the NSA says is being exploited by Russian hackers, report says

The State Department, local governments and at least 50 candidates running for election in 2020 are using email software that the National Security Agency says is being exploited by Russian government hackers, according to a new report by a cybersecurity firm.

Area1, a Silicon Valley security firm, says in its report that candidates and government agencies using the software are leaving themselves vulnerable to the same Russian operatives who hacked the Democrats to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign.

If the hackers take advantage of the software flaw, "they can exploit the email server and become an administrator on it, which means they can create new email accounts and they can start sending email from [your address]," said Oren Falkowitz, Area1 co-founder and a former NSA cyber warrior. "They can use it to get further into your network."

Aerospace

The X-36 Was a Crazy Maneuverable Stealth Fighter. Why Wasn’t it Built?

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, several experimental aircraft were built that were semi-tailless. Post-World War II jet engine designs had improved, allowing for greater and greater speeds past the speed of sound, or Mach 1. Airframes of the time were struggling to get through the transonic range, from around Mach 0.8 to Mach 1. It was thought that a total or semi-tailless design would allow for greater stability when passing through the transonic range, but airplane technology and airframe designs during the 1950s were not yet sophisticated enough to safely control a tailless design.

In the 1970s and 1980s tailless designs were reexamined, as computer-controlled fly-by-wire systems could adjust a plane’s flight controls quickly enough to keep tailless airframes airborne. Tailless designs also had the added advantage of being stealthierthan their tailed cousins—sans tail, less radar is reflected back to a radar antenna. A tailless design also benefits from better range due to lower drag, and can under some circumstances be more maneuverable than traditionally-tailed planes.

Military

Donald Trump orders 9,500 US troops to leave Germany

Donald Trump has ordered the US military to remove nearly 9,500 troops from Germany in a move likely to raise concerns in Europe about the US commitment to the region.

The move would reduce US troop numbers in Germany to 25,000, compared with the 34,500 currently there, a senior US official said.

'Regrettable': Germany reacts to Trump plan to withdraw US troops

 

Read more

The official said the move was the result of months of work by America’s top military officer, General Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and had nothing to do with tensions between Trump and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who thwarted Trump’s plan to host a G7 meeting this month.

A second senior administration official said the 9,500 troops would be sent elsewhere: some to Poland, some to other allied countries, and the rest would return home. The official said there was less need for the large contingent in Germany because of overall increased defence spending by the US-led Nato military alliance.

Drug trafficking

COVID-19 is costing drug cartels millions of dollars

The coronavirus pandemic has crippled cities and crushed businesses from coast to coast.

It’s also costing drug traffickers millions, multiple law enforcement officials told NBC News, because their methods of moving money have been compromised.

Since the start of the crisis, federal drug agents in major U.S. hubs have seized substantially more illicit cash than usual amid statewide lockdowns that have disrupted the way cartels do business, the officials said.

“Their activities are a lot more apparent than they were three months ago,” said Bill Bodner, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Los Angeles field office.

Bodner said California’s stay-at-home order has made it more difficult for traffickers to launder money and move around the city unseen.

Biosecurity

China tells U.S. to stop wasting time in coronavirus battle

The United States should stop wasting time in its fight against the coronavirus and work with China to combat it, rather than spreading lies and attacking the country, the Chinese government’s top diplomat Wang Yi said on Sunday.

Sino-U.S. ties have nosedived since the outbreak of the new coronavirus, with the administrations of President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping repeatedly trading barbs over issues related to the pandemic, especially U.S. accusations of cover-ups and lack of transparency.

The two top economies have also clashed over Hong Kong, human rights, trade and U.S. support for Chinese-claimed Taiwan.

State Councillor Wang, speaking at his annual news conference on the sidelines of China’s parliament, expressed his deep sympathies to the United States for the pandemic, where the death toll is expected to surpass 100,000 in the coming days, the highest number of any country.

Electronic surveillance


Inside the NSA’s Secret Tool for Mapping Your Social Network

IN THE SUMMER of 2013, I spent my days sifting through the most extensive archive of top-secret files that had ever reached the hands of an American journalist. In a spectacular act of transgression against the National Security Agency, where he worked as a contractor, Edward Snowden had transmitted tens of thousands of classified documents to me, the columnist Glenn Greenwald, and the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.

One of those documents, the first to be made public in June 2013, revealed that the NSA was tracking billions of telephone calls made by Americans inside the US. The program became notorious, but its full story has not been told.

The first accounts revealed only bare bones. If you placed a call, whether local or international, the NSA stored the number you dialed, as well as the date, time and duration of the call. It was domestic surveillance, plain and simple. When the story broke, the NSA discounted the intrusion on privacy. The agency collected “only metadata,” it said, not the content of telephone calls. Only on rare occasions, it said, did it search the records for links among terrorists.

Foreign trade security

US dependence on Chinese imports posing potential threat on national security, think tank says

A new report by a British think tank shows that the U.S. is strategically dependent on China for 414 categories of imports, of which 114 service its critical national infrastructure -- and in some cases, these could pose a national security risk.

China has steadily increased its share of many markets over the years under the increasingly authoritarian leadership of President Xi Jinping, who has made clear his ambitions for global dominance

Today, the U.S. is strategically dependent on China for antibiotics, including penicillin and chloramphenicol; essential batteries including lithium; rare earth metals and critical elements like tungsten; vitamin supplements and even shipping containers, as well as safety glass, laptops, cell phones, life jackets and anchors.

Strategic Dependency is defined here as when "[a] country is a net importer of a particular good; it imports more than 50 percent of its supplies from China, and China controls more than 30 percent of the global market of that particular good," according to the report.

As China continues to bully economies, Matthew Henderson -- director of the Asia Studies Center at the Henry Jackson Society, and one of the authors of the report -- said that to turn this around requires a "decoupling" of the U.S. and Chinese economy and the forming of new partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region.

Health security

High blood pressure: Two helpings of this food a day could lower risk of the condition

High blood pressure, diabetes and obesity all fall under the medical term metallic syndrome (MetS) and are associated with greater risk of heart disease. But research carried out by scientists at McMaster University in Canada has suggested how these could be avoided - by eating full fat milk and cheese.

Previous advice from experts has urged adults to avoid full fat dairy products in order to stay healthy.

But the new study now suggests theses foods could be good for you.

The study involved 140,000 people from 21 countries and was conducted over nine years.

Questionnaires were used to assess participants’ diets over the duration of a year.

A serving of milk or cup of yoghurt was considered 244g, a slice of cheese 15g and butter 5g.

The researchers wrote in a BMJ journal: “Higher intake of whole fat (but not low fat) dairy was associated with a lower prevalence of MetS.”

They also hope their findings will help inform worldwide health initiatives to combat serious health problems.

Study author Balaji Bhavadharini said: “We report that intake of dairy products, especially whole fat products, is associated with lower prevalence of metabolic syndrome and its individual components at baseline, and a lower risk of hypertension and diabetes during follow-up.

Conspiracy theory

Over 40% of Republicans think Bill Gates will use COVID-19 vaccine to implant microchips, survey says

Fighting misinformation and conspiracy theories about the novel coronavirus has almost been as hard as battling the pandemic itself. And a new survey has found that one conspiracy theory about Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is taking hold.

A conspiracy theory that Gates is planning to use a future COVID-19 vaccine to implant microchips in billions of people in order to monitor their movements has gained supporters particularly among Fox News viewers and Republicans, the survey found.

The representative survey of 1,640 US adults by YouGov for Yahoo News found that half of respondent Americans who say Fox News is their primary television news source believe the conspiracy theory. It's the largest group responding this way, followed by self-described Republicans and "Voted for Donald Trump in 2016" -- 44% of both those groups said they believed the conspiracy theory was true. Twenty-six percent of respondent Republicans said it was false, and 31% said they weren't sure.

Representatives for Fox News, the Republican Party, the White House and the Trump 2020 campaign didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which the namesake founders use to fund medical research and vaccine programs around the world, also didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Communication security

US Government Moving Forward in Defense of 5G Towers

The US Department of Homeland Security is getting ready to advise the telecom industry about actions that can be taken to prevent 5G cell towers from getting attacked following a rash of incidents in Western Europe and in the US, fueled by the false claim that the technology spreads the pathogen causing covid-19. Dozens of arson attacks on 5G towers in Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium last month over this backdrop.

5G is a technology that has very fast connections that can power items like self-driving cars and smart cities. Large telecom providers such as Verizon and AT&T are rapidly expanding the number of 5G cell tower sites across the US, often using existing 4G towers.

An industry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, referred to attacks in the US, saying: “It’s pretty clear,” said the official, who added that some of the attacks may be by “eco-terrorists,” according to washingtonpost.com.

DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will issue the alert with advice on ways to reduce the risk of attack, including installing appropriate sensing and barriers, cyberintrusion detection systems, closed-circuit television and monitoring drone activity near towers.