Andy Greenberg (previously) is Wired's senior security reporter; he did amazing work covering Russian cyberwarfare in Ukraine, which he has expanded into a forthcoming book: Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers (I read it for a blurb and a review; it's excellent).

Andy Greenberg (previously) is a veteran Wired security reporter who has chronicled the frightening and chaotic world of cyberwar since its earliest days; in a forthcoming book called "Sandworm," Greenberg tells the fascinating and terrible tale of Notpetya (previously), a Russian cyberweapon (built on leaked NSA cyberweapons!) — Read the rest

• U.S. State Department blames Russia for cyberattacks that hit neighboring Georgia in October 2019

• By identifying Russia's digital assaults on neighbors, US hopes to raise awareness of ongoing GRU attacks on US

Wired has published another long excerpt from Sandworm, reporter Andy Greenberg's (previously) forthcoming book on the advanced Russian hacking team who took the US-Israeli Stuxnet program to the next level, attacking Ukrainian power infrastructure, literally blowing up key components of the country's power grid by attacking the embedded code in their microcontrollers.

ProPublica's Minhee Cho says: "Thought you might be interested in ProPublica's latest report detailing how insurance companies are actually fueling a rise in ransomware attacks by choosing to pay the ransom, even when they could recover the files on their own. — Read the rest

Security services firm FireEye says two hacker groups known to be sponsored by the Russian government of Vladimir Putin are waging cyber-attacks currently against European government systems.

2018 has been a dangerous year for those who bring us the news: according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 129 journalists were killed this year. For the first time in history, the United States has been listed as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists to ply their trade. — Read the rest

After K-pop group NCT 127 from Vancouver, Canada performed on KTTV-Fox 11's Good Day L.A., host Araksya Karapetyan gave one of the singers an odd compliment: "Very cool, your English is awesome. I love it."

Here's the clip:

"Your english is awesome , I love it"

I mean he's from Canada , what is he supposed to speak , moose?

A little over two weeks ago, Russian feminist protest group Pussy Riot was arrested for crashing the field at the World Cup final wearing police uniforms. They were protesting illegal arrests. After serving 15 days in jail for their "crime," they were released, but then, to their surprise, were immediately arrested again. — Read the rest

The global epidemic of Wannacry ransomware infections was the result of petty criminals fusing an old ransomware strain with a leaked NSA cyberweapon that was released by The Shadow Brokers, and the result was tens of millions of dollars' worth of economic harm.

CCleaner is a clean-your-computer app beloved of people who own inexplicably slow PCs. If you installed recent editions of it, you were installing malware. But the company behind it hasn't gone rogue, reports Reuters. Hackers compromised their systems.

A version of CCleaner downloaded in August included remote administration tools that tried to connect to several unregistered web pages, presumably to download additional unauthorized programs, security researchers at Cisco's (CSCO.O)

According to Kaspersky, the Petya ransomware that raced around the world this week wasn't ransomware at all, and there is no way to get back your files after it does its work (that's why it was so easy to shut down the email address the ransomware used to negotiate payments and decryption with victims whose computers had been taken over).

Yesterday's massive ransomware outbreak of a mutant, NSA-supercharged strain of the Petya malware is still spreading, but the malware's author made a mere $10K off it and will likely not see a penny more, because Posteo, the German email provider the crook used for ransom payment negotiations, shut down their account.

Petya is a well-known ransomware app that has attained a new, deadly virulence, with thousands of new infection attempts hitting Kaspersky Lab's honeypots; security firm Avira attributes this new hardiness to the incorporation of EternalBlue — the same NSA cyberweapon that the Wannacry ransomware used, which was published by The Shadow Brokers hacker group — into a new Petya strain.

Hot on the heels of the WannaCry attack, a massive, new, ransomware attack has struck Europe, shutting down systems in Ukraine, Britain, and Spain.

From The Telegraph:

The virus is believed to be ransomware – a piece of malicious software that shuts down a computer system and then demands an extortionate sum of money to fix the problem.

In just a few short years, ransomware — malware that encrypts all the files on the computer and then charges you for a key to restore them — has gone from a clever literary device for technothrillers to a cottage industry to an epidemic to a public menace.

When Putin and the Kremlin throw a charm offensive to distract people from the popular uprising in the Ukraine and the institutionalized homophobia in Russia, it's good news for dissidents and former billionaires. Russia's Stalin-loving strongman has extended amnesty to Pussy Riot, the Greenpeace 30, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky (formerly Russia's richest man, who fell into Putin's bad books and onto hard times).

Here's a video of Pussy Riot's lawyers lecturing at NYU Law.

Joly sez, "September 21 2012: Having in the morning received the John Lennon Peace prize from Yoko Ono on behalf of the band, Petya Verzilov, husband of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and the group's Russian attorneys speak at NYU School of Law." — Read the rest