Zoom Bombing, don’t be Fooled

Posted on April 1, 2020April 1, 2020 by Denise Simon

So, there are several online conference video chat platforms now being used while businesses continue to operate even while doing the stay at home thing. We are aware of course of the common Skype platform, Uber Conference and gaining huge popularity is Zoom.

Warning to the healthcare industry: Since the United States has launched full tele-health platforms, all parties involved in the session(s) should watch carefully the platform(s) for cyber weirdness. All the same warnings and watchful eyes should be applied to the military across the spectrum as forces too are working from remote locations.

How to Record Zoom Meeting on PC, iPhone

In recent days, I have seen reports of Zoom conference/meeting events getting bombed by rogue players. Every nation while struggling to overcome the pandemic, governments and companies are quite vulnerable to breaches of cyber security due to limited employee resources. What better time for bad actors (read China) to attack?

Zoom has also seen a sharp increase in usage, but the attention the teleconferencing solution is receiving continues to be decidedly mixed. TechCrunch reports that researcher Patrick Wardle has found two local security flaws in Zoom’s macOS client.

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While Zoom has certainly drawn investors’ eyes in a good way, it’s also attracted the ministrations of white hat researchers, cybercriminals, the plaintiffs’ bar, and state attorneys general. The platform’s encryption isn’t really end-to-end, the Intercept reports. Instead, it uses familiar transport encryption, which gives Zoom itself the potential to access its users’ traffic. The FBI’s Boston Field Office has issued a detailed warning about the ways in which criminals (conventional criminals out for gain, sleazy hacktivists, and skids out for the lulz) have been able to meddle with Zoom sessions. Check Point describes the ways in which criminals have registered domains that include the name “zoom;” these domains are of course up to no good at all. Zoom was also discovered to have been sharing analytic data with Facebook, a practice Zoom halted after it came to public attention, but not in time to forestall a class action suit under California’s Unfair Competition Law, Consumers Legal Remedies Act, and Consumer Privacy Act. And the New York Times reports that all of this news has prompted New York State’s Attorney General to ask Zoom for an explanation of its privacy and security policies.

So, as I was researching for this piece, I received an email from a distant buddy that read in part:

The government has sought the assistance of outside software experts to move online meetings. In one particular instance, my email buddy noted the following”

I have a Zoom warning. We had a Council meeting this afternoon and it had to end immediately. Fortunately, the Council was 99% finished with the meeting. The reason for ending the meeting is because we were Zoom Bombed (yup this is really the name for it). A participant joined the meeting late and his name was Mr. Off. His first name was Jack and he had a middle name “Me”. You can imaging the video. It was horrible. There were three hosts of the meeting that could control participants. The hosts could not see this participant so they didn’t think anything was wrong. Clearly, the hack knows how to enter a meeting without the controlling hosts knowing what is going on. I saw it and ordered the meeting end immediately. The Chair couldn’t see it and was wondering what to heck was wrong with me. It took about 5 more long seconds for me to yell at people to leave the meeting. We all jumped back on the meeting in five minutes and Mr. Off joined the meeting again.

I will add that only half the participants actually saw the act. We also caught it in time to not have it go live on cable or YouTube. Another participant actually viewed video of three other participants that no one else could see and were likely ready to Bomb the meeting.

In the future, we will use passwords for participants. This is unfortunate for the public because they wont be able to join the Zoom part of the meeting. They will still be able to watch it live on local cable and YouTube. We will set up an email and telephone for public comment if the agenda item requires public comment.

I highly recommend you use passwords for future meetings.

Seems we have a new kind of cyber terrorism going on here….espionage at a silent/covert level. Perhaps we can get some kind of press release from the NSA or something.

Google Sent Users 40,000 Warnings

Posted on March 31, 2020March 31, 2020 by Denise Simon

Primer questions: Did other tech companies do the same and if so, how many? What does Congress know and where are they with a real cyber policy?

Google’s threat analysis group, which counters targeted and government-backed hacking against the company and its users, sent account holders almost 40,000 warnings in 2019, with government officials, journalists, dissidents, and geopolitical rivals being the most targeted, team members said on Thursday.

The number of warnings declined almost 25 percent from 2018, in part because of new protections designed to curb cyberattacks on Google properties. Attackers have responded by reducing the frequency of their hack attempts and being more deliberate. The group saw an increase in phishing attacks that impersonated news outlets and journalists. In many of these cases, attackers sought to spread disinformation by attempting to seed false stories with other reporters. Other times, attackers sent several benign messages in hopes of building a rapport with a journalist or foreign policy expert. The attackers, who most frequently came from Iran and North Korea, would later follow up with an email that included a malicious attachment.

Color-coded Mercator projection of the world.

“Government-backed attackers regularly target foreign policy experts for their research, access to the organizations they work with, and connection to fellow researchers or policymakers for subsequent attacks,” Toni Gidwani, a security engineering manager in the threat analysis group, wrote in a post.

Top targets

Countries with residents that collectively received more than 1,000 warnings included the United States, India, Pakistan, Japan, and South Korea. Thursday’s post came eight months after Microsoft said it had warned 10,000 customers of nation-sponsored attacks over the 12 previous months. The software maker said it saw “extensive” activity from five specific groups sponsored by Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

Thursday’s post also tracked targeted attacks carried out by Sandworm, believed to be an attack group working on behalf of the Russian Federation. Sandworm has been responsible for some of the world’s most severe attacks, including hacks on Ukrainian power facilities that left the country without electricity in 2015 and 2016, NATO and the governments of Ukraine and Poland in 2014, and according to Wired journalist Andy Greenberg, the NotPetya malware that created worldwide outages, some that lasted weeks.

The following graph shows Sandworm’s targeting of various industries and countries from 2017 to 2019. While the targeting of most of the industries or countries was sporadic, Ukraine was on the receiving end of attacks throughout the entire three-year period:

Enlarge / Sandworm’s targeting efforts (mostly by sector) over the last three years.

Google

Tracking zero-days

In 2019, the Google group discovered zero-day vulnerabilities affecting Android, iOS, Windows, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. A single attack group was responsible for exploiting five of the unpatched security flaws. The attacks were used against Google, Google account holders, and users of other platforms.

“Finding this many zeroday exploits from the same actor in a relatively short time frame is rare,” Gidwani wrote.

The exploits came from legitimate websites that had been hacked, links to malicious websites, and attachments embedded in spear-phishing emails. Most of the targets were in North Korea or were against individuals working on North Korea-related issues.

The group’s policy is to privately inform developers of the affected software and give them seven days to release a fix or publish an advisory. If the companies don’t meet that deadline, Google releases its own advisory.

One observation that Google users should note: of all the phishing attacks the company has seen in the past few years, none has resulted in a takeover of accounts protected by the account protection program, which among other things makes multifactor authentication mandatory. Once people have two physical security keys from Yubi or another manufacturer, enrolling in the program takes less than five minutes.

IBM’s Watson Leading the Super Computer Charge on COVID-19

Posted on March 25, 2020March 25, 2020 by Denise Simon

Most missed the Trump White House announcement that on March 11th, the leaders of several tech companies met with the Trump team to discuss ways that super computers can process and speed up solutions for eradicating COVID-19 with treatment discoveries. On tap for the meeting, Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, Twitter, Apple and Microsoft. The White House Chief Technology Officer, Michael Kratsios also enlisted the help of NASA, IBM, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US Department of Energy, Argonne National Lab, Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Los Alamos National Laboratory, The National Science Foundation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and several others.

The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium will bring significant computing power, 16 systems with over 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, and 34,000 GPUs to help researchers understand COVID-19 potential treatments and cures. “These high-performance computing systems allow researchers to run very large numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling,” Dario Gil, director of IBM Research said in the announcement. “These experiments would take years to complete if worked by hand, or months if handled on slower, traditional computing platforms.”

“Since the start of COVID-19 pandemic we have been working closely with governments in the US and worldwide to find all available options to put our technology and expertise to work to help organizations be resilient and adapt to the consequences of the pandemic, and to accelerate the process of discovery and enable the scientific and medical community to develop treatments and ultimately a cure,” Gil said.

Powerful supercomputer and training program, IBM’s Summit, previously enabled researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee to screen nearly 8,000 compounds to uncover, which are most likely to bind to the main “spike” of the coronavirus, making it unable to reproduce and infect other cells.

The organizations were able to recommend 77 promising small-molecule drug compounds that could be experimentally tested. IBM will continue to work with different partners to evaluate proposals and provide access to supercomputing capacity to tackle to global pandemic.

“I am proud to be working with my IBM colleagues and the extended scientific community to help kick-start this effort. What began just two days ago with one conversation with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has solidified quickly into an unprecedented effort that can make a real difference,” Gil stressed.

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The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee (one member of the consortium) is using its supercomputers to look for compounds already on the market that might foil the virus.

Oak Ridge’s approach involves what’s called computational structure-based drug discovery. Basically, that means they use a computer to calculate how drugs might work against germs like viruses.

source

“We could get these calculations done in one day on the supercomputer, whereas a normal computer, it would take a month,” says Jeremy Smith, director of the Center for Molecular biophysics at Oak Ridge.

To run the calculations, you need to know the physical properties of the proteins a virus makes — what they’re made of and what their shape is.

One key viral protein of the coronavirus is called the spike protein. Information about what it looks like came out in mid-January, so Smith asked people in his lab if they wanted to start looking through databases of existing drugs that would block it.

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Summit, IBM’s supercomputer equipped with the “brain of AI,” ran thousands of simulations to analyze which drug compounds might effectively stop the virus from infecting host cells.

The supercomputer identified 77 of them. It’s a promising step toward creating the most effective treatment.

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory published their findings in the journal ChemRxiv.

Summit was built to solve the world’s problems

Summit was commissioned by the US Department of Energy in 2014 for the purpose it’s serving now — solving the world’s problems.

It’s got the power of 200 petaflops, which means it has the computing speed of 200 quadrillion calculations per second, aka: It’s 1 million times more powerful than the fastest laptop.

Summit, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, modeled how different drug compounds might prevent the coronavirus from spreading to other cells.

At its station in Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Summit has identified patterns in cellular systems that precede Alzheimer’s, analyzed genes that contribute to traits like opioid addiction and predicted extreme weather based on climate simulations.

How Summit fights coronavirus

Viruses infect host cells by injecting them with a “spike” of genetic material. Summit’s job is to find drug compounds that could bind to that spike and potentially stop the spread.

Here’s a list of articles explaining the coronavirus pandemic

Oak Ridge researcher Micholas Smith created a model of the coronavirus spike based on research published in January. With Summit, he simulated how the atoms and particles in the viral protein would react to different compounds.

The supercomputer ran simulations of over 8,000 compounds that could bind to the spike protein of the virus, which could limit its ability to spread to host cells. Summit identified 77 of them and ranked them based on how likely they were to bind to the spike.

What’s next

The team will run the simulations on Summit again, using a more accurate model of the coronavirus’ spike that was published this month.

More here.

Hat tip to the Trump White House

(PanCAP)SynchronizationMatrix-COVID-19 Plan

Posted on March 19, 2020March 19, 2020 by Denise Simon

The Defense Production Act. Read it here.

The president invoked the act Wednesday during a White House news briefing with members of the Coronavirus Task Force.

“It can do a lot of good things if we need it,” the president told reporters.

Image result for defense production act source

The 1950 act was periodically used during both the Korean War and throughout the Cold War, and was last invoked in June 2017 by Trump to provide technology in the space industrial base.

This is not about what the Federal government can provide, but rather the Federal government authorizing and hiring private business to produce products and service to fulfill the needs for the good of the nation. That is where innovation and capitalism works.

President Trump is pulling all the levers of government and plowing his way through regulations and bureaucracy. It is big and messy mostly because of Obamacare which installed 23000 pages of regulations. The PANCAP plan is found here in full. Additional levers are being created to stop the economic and financial damage the the nation.

Meanwhile, media has attacked President Trump for using the term ‘China virus’ and he defended that use, rightly so. The medical community uses several variations of the same phrase. It is about China and has been for decades. World leaders have challenged China for countless years over their reckless laws and lack of food, people, animal and health protections. I have seen it personally myself being in mainland China many years ago. I visited those wet markets where the food supply and lack of safety is not only disgusting but deadly. Truth be told, trafficking and breeding animals for food in China is estimated to be a $76 billion industry.

For perspective, this short video is a must watch.

Relations between the West and China has taken on a new attitude and approach and rightly so. The discussions should begin with China paying trillions in reparations to nations affected by not only the Covid-19 virus but even previous virus outbreaks as well. China holds an estimated $1.7 trillion of U.S. debt. China should forgive that debt today.

From an article written by Michael Auslin in part mentions:

Those concerned with global health issues may wonder why it is that China is wracked regularly by viral epidemics in addition to coronavirus, such as SARS, African Swine Fever, and avian flu (another outbreak is happening right now). Others may begin to look more carefully at China’s environmental devastation and the hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year from air and water pollution.

On the trade side, many foreign corporations already have been reconsidering their operations in China, due to rampant intellectual property theft and rising production costs; now, they may seriously question how safe it is to continue to do business in China. Not only is the health of their employees at risk, but they no longer can be assured that China will be a stable supplier. If coronavirus becomes a seasonal phenomenon, as some experts predict, then even with a vaccine, new strains of the pathogen will always raise the specter of another out-of-control epidemic overwhelming the party-state’s capabilities and infecting the rest of the world.

China has a plan to be the world’s dominant power, what better way to achieve that mission than to infect the globe with a pandemic causing financial collapse? To prevent the China mission, Western nations must reassert nationalism including manufacturing and install policy that never allows vulnerabilities to health and national security, this includes 5G. China and Russia cannot be allowed to win much less have any kind of advantage over other nations.

U.S. citizens are very crafty, innovative and resourceful and given these skills and spirit, this will pass quickly.

First Covid-19 Vaccine code-named mRNA-1273 Shot Given

Posted on March 17, 2020March 17, 2020 by Denise Simon

At a news conference, President Donald Trump praised how quickly the research had progressed. Fauci noted that 65 days have passed since Chinese scientists shared the virus’ genetic sequence. He said he believed that was a record for developing a vaccine to test.

Seattle: This vaccine candidate, code-named mRNA-1273, was developed by the NIH and Massachusetts-based biotechnology company Moderna Inc. There’s no chance participants could get infected because the shots do not contain the coronavirus itself.

It’s not the only potential vaccine in the pipeline. Dozens of research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine against COVID-19. Another candidate, made by Inovio Pharmaceuticals, is expected to begin its own safety study next month in the U.S., China and South Korea.

The Seattle experiment got underway days after the World Health Organization declared the new virus outbreak a pandemic because of its rapid global spread, which has infected more than 169,000 people and killed more than 6,500. AP reporter(s) witnessed the first human trial on Monday.

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Other medical procedures are underway in hundreds of forms to combat the Covid-19 outbreak.

A very old drug developed by a scientist in 1934 for Bayer discovered chloroquine for malaria. It was widely used during World War ll and has been extensively used for SARS with excellent results. Its history goes back to Peru (South America), where the indigenous people extracted the bark of the Cinchona trees and used the extract (Chinchona officinalis) to fight chills and fever in the seventeenth century. In 1633 this herbal medicine was introduced in Europe, where it was given the same use and also began to be used against malaria.

We report on chloroquine, a 4-amino-quinoline, as an effective inhibitor of the replication of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in vitro. Chloroquine is a clinically approved drug effective against malaria.

It was reported a few weeks ago that officials in China were not cooperating with other nations at the outset of Covid-19. That is only partially true. The U.S. has collaborated with scientists and medical experts in China since SARS and continues to do so with very positive results.

Data from the drug’s studies showed ‘certain curative effect’ with ‘fairly good efficacy’.

According to Sun, patients treated with chloroquine demonstrated a better drop in fever, improvement of lung CT images, and required a shorter time to recover compared to parallel groups.

The percentage of patients with negative viral nucleic acid tests was also higher with the anti-malarial drug.

Chloroquine has so far showed no obvious serious adverse reactions in the more than 100 participants in the trials.

The China National Center for Biotechnology Development head Zhang Xinmin said that chloroquine is one of the three drugs that have a promising profile against the new coronavirus, reported China Daily.

The remaining two drugs are anti-flu medicine favipiravir and Gilead’s investigational anti-viral candidate remdesivir.

Favipiravir is currently in a 70-patient trial in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, while remdesivir is under evaluation at more than ten medical institutions in Wuhan.

In trials conducted in China, chloroquine appears to be useful for coronavirus disease 2019. Another form is Hydroxychloroquine.

Hydroxychloroquine Sulfate (Watson Laboratories, Inc ...

Hydroxychloroquine is also presecribed for HIV, arthritis as well as advanced malaria and strains of coronavirus. It is a disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD).It regulates the activity of the immune system, which may be overactive in some conditions.

A small 40 cents, that is $.40 a dose to make and is generally sold for $5.00 per dose.