Hackers breach thousands of Microsoft users
An attack on Microsoft’s widely used business email software is morphing into a global cybersecurity crisis, as hackers race to infect as many victims as possible before companies can secure their computer systems.t he attack, which Microsoft has said started with a Chinese government-backed hacking group, has so far claimed at least 60,000 known victims globally, according to a former senior US official. Many of them appear to be small or medium-sized businesses caught in a wide net the attackers cast as Microsoft worked to shut down the hack.
Victims identified so far include banks and electricity providers, as well as senior citizen homes and an ice cream company, according to Huntress, a Maryland-based firm that monitors the security of customers, in a blog post Friday. One U.S. cybersecurity company which asked not to be named said its experts alone were working with at least 50 victims, trying to quickly determine what data the hackers may have taken while also trying to eject them.the rapidly escalating attack drew the concern of U.S. national security officials, in part because the hackers were able to hit so many victims so quickly. Researchers say in the final phases of the attack, the hackers appeared to have automated the process, scooping up tens of thousands of new victims around the world in a matter of days.“we are undertaking a whole of government response to assess and address the impact,” a White House official wrote in an email on Saturday. “This is an active threat still developing and we urge network operators to take it very seriously.”
Microsoft Server Flaws Raise Alarms at White House, DHS The Chinese hacking group, which Microsoft calls Hafnium, appears to have been breaking into private and government computer networks through the company’s popular Exchange email software for a number of months, initially targeting only a small number of victims, according to Steven Adair, head of the northern Virginia-based Volexity. The cybersecurity company helped Microsoft identify the flaws being used by the hackers for which the software giant issued a fix .
The result is a second cybersecurity crisis coming just months after suspected Russian hackers breached nine federal agencies and at least 100 companies through tampered updates from IT management software maker Solarwinds LLC. Cybersecurity experts that defend the world’s computer systems expressed a growing sense of frustration and exhaustion.
Afew years ago Youtube recommended I watch a video with the word “carpocalypse” in its title. I clicked the link — of course I did — and stared in awe at what resembled a mash-up of a video game, nature documentary and war movie. I saw a river full of fish leaping from the water like chaotic piscine fireworks and men in speedboats yelling and holding out nets to catch them as if they were wet and weighty butterflies. Fish hitting people in the face, fish landing in boats, fish flapping between people’s feet in a mess of slime and blood. This, the video informed me, was the annual Redneck
Fishing Tournament in Bath, Illinois, the object of which was to kill as many Asian carp as possible. An invasive species that has spread throughout the Mississippi basin since its introduction as a “safe” agent of biological control in the 1960s, Asian carp jump when they feel in danger, and the sound of boat engines is sufficiently alarming to push them en masse into the air.
The video was a startling coincidence of science, culture and environmental disaster, and I thought of it often as I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent new book. I did so partly because her opening chapter deals with the continuing struggle to prevent Asian carp from entering the Great Lakes system, with solutions ranging from electrified water barriers to thrillingly impractical suggestions from members of the public to stop them with flying knives. But as I read on, I was reminded of the carp for a different reason. In my mind they became proxies for us — creatures in mass panic, leaping out of their comfort zone, desperate to avoid catastrophe.
Under a White Sky is a fascinating survey of novel attempts to manage natural systems of all sizes, from preserving tiny populations of desert fish to altering the entire atmosphere (the title refers to the colour the sky would turn were solar engineers to implement plans to spread mineral particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and cut global warming).
One of the great science journalists, Ms Kolbert has for many years been an essential voice, a reporter from the front lines of the environmental crisis. Her new book crackles with the realities of living in an era that has sounded the death knell for our commonly held belief that one can meaningfully distinguish between nature and humanity. Our world is too much changed for nature to be preserved simply by leaving it alone. “Humans,” she explains, are producing “no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future.” The systems that support us are now hybrid humannatural ones, and maintaining them increasingly requires us to adopt inventive strategies to correct for our previous attempts at control, efforts that have frequently led to highly unfortunate outcomes.
Ms Kolbert has a phenomenal ability to communicate complex scientific information. She explains CRISPR gene-editing and atmospheric physics in prose that is a model of clarity and generosity; she traces environmental histories deftly. She moves us gracefully across numerous scales, from aerial views of
UNDER A WHITE SKY:
Random House Price: $28 Pages: 234 clouds reflected in Louisiana lakes right down to an individual scientist picking aquatic beetles from a mesh screen, a fish egg with a visibly beating heart, a single gene. She has a marvellous eye for the quirky, from the plywood palm tree outside an Arctic research station to the local term for used condoms floating in water.
All the while, we are introduced to a wonderful cast of people. She interviews scientists and engineers, coastal geologists, solar geoengineers, tattooed fishermen in gore-smeared overalls, a director of an Arctic institute with an icicle-hung beard and a Biloxichitimacha-Choctaw chief living on doomed land. One frustration I had was the omission of Black voices in the chapter about land loss and environmental disaster in Louisiana. A significant aspect of managing natural systems has to do with the paternalism of such projects — the question of whether the people most affected by these endeavours have a say in how they are carried out.
Ms Kolbert repeatedly turns to attempts by humans to recreate the natural world. She visits large-scale dynamic hydrological models; marine tanks in which corals are subjected to stress to assist their artificial evolution into hardier organisms capable of coping with our changing seas; the construction of a desert pool in a building that looks like an industrial warehouse. These spaces, strangely irrigated with both hope and despair, remind us that Earth itself is a discrete system under stress, the site of an experiment in survival we have busily been conducting on ourselves.
Under a White Sky is important, necessary, urgent and phenomenally interesting. It has, however, made me muse on the ways we choose to write about the environmental emergency. Beautifully and insistently, Ms Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment; time to work with what we have, using the knowledge we have, with our eyes fully open to the realities of where we are. Rigorous analysis and science journalism, the form in which Ms Kolbert truly excels, is needed now more than ever.