Jamie Dimon, Powell, Richard Cordray, CISA, Hacks, Social Studies

financial terrorists

Jamie Dimon Has Been Juggling Too Many Criminal Balls in the Air; One Just
Landed with a Bang in Judge Jed Rakoff’s Court
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/12/jamie-dimon-has-been-juggling-too-many-criminal-balls-in-the-air-one-just-landed-with-a-bang-in-judge-jed-rakoffs-court/
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 2, 2021 ~
Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase
We can tell you with some confidence what Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is going to be doing at 11:00 a.m. this morning. He’s going to be listening to a teleconference in a federal court case titled […]

The Market from Hell Arrived Today: Dow Soars then Plunges in 1,000 Point
Intraday Range
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/12/the-market-from-hell-arrived-today-dow-soars-then-plunges-in-1000-point-intraday-range/
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 1, 2021 ~
If you’re a stock market watcher you might want to invest in a neck brace if
today’s whipsawing action is any gauge of what’s ahead.
Just this morning we warned our readers to buckle up for the unwinding of the massive stock market bubble that Fed Chair Powell […]

Wall Street Is Sweating Biden’s Nominee to Head Bank Supervision at the Fed
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/12/wall-street-is-sweating-bidens-nominee-to-head-bank-supervision-at-the-fed/
Richard Cordray, Former Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 3, 2021 ~
Progressives are waiting with bated breath to see if President Joe Biden will
show more moxie than former President Barack Obama when it comes to WallStreet regulation. So far, the record has been nothing short of […]

CISA’s advisory panel is announced, set to make recommendations on major cyber topics
https://www.cyberscoop.com/cisa-cybersecurity-advisory-committee/

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Wednesday named members to a new cyber advisory panel that will make recommendations on subjects ranging from battling misinformation to gaining aid from the hacker community on national cyber defense.

Among the 23 members selected are leaders from social media, cybersecurity companies, major technology firms and critical infrastructure sectors such as finance and energy. It includes officials from Johnson & Johnson and Walmart, as well as a longtime cybersecurity journalist and the mayor of Austin, Texas.

“We’re at a pivotal moment in our history — one that demands we think anew about ensuring the security and resilience of our digital infrastructure in the face of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats,” said CISA Director Jen Easterly, whose agency is a part of the Department of Homeland Security. “I look forward to partnering with these distinguished leaders from across industry, academia, and government to tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time.”

The panel springs from the most recently enacted annual defense policy bill, which amounted to perhaps the most significant cybersecurity legislation ever passed. Like much of what was included in that legislation, the new advisory committee represented a recommendation from the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.

New York Rep. John Katko, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, had long advocated for such a panel.

In introducing legislation on the subject in 2019, he said his bill “takes steps towards equipping the agencies within the Department of Homeland Security with the necessary tools to respond to evolving cyber threats. By creating a Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, we can facilitate a vital dialogue between public and private partners and better secure the U.S.”

Bylaws for the committee published in July said it would address subjects like critical infrastructure protection, information sharing, risk management and public-private partnerships. Wednesday’s announcement added potential subjects like the cyber workforce and disinformation. Its first meeting is Dec. 10.

The by-laws include a prohibition on lobbyists and restrictions on using their access to solicit business.

The defense bill that established the panel authorized up to 35 members. The members announced Wednesday were:

Austin Mayor Steve Adler; Marene Allison of Johnson & Johnson; Lori Beer of JPMorgan Chase; Robert Chesney of the Texas School of Law; Southern Company CEO Thomas Fanning; Vijaya Gadde from Twitter; University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Patrick Gallagher; Ronald Green of Mastercard; Niloofar Razi Howe, a board member at Tenable; Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia; Jeff Moss, president of DEF CON Communications; Nuala O’Connor of Walmart; Nicole Perlroth, a cybersecurity reporter who recently announced her departure from The New York Times; Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince; Ted Schlein of Kleiner Perkins and Caufield & Byers; Stephen Schmidt of Amazon Web Services; Suzanne Spaulding from the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Alex Stamos of Krebs Stamos Group; Kate Starbird, from the University of Washington; George Stathakopoulos from Apple; Illinois Emergency Management Agency Director Alicia Tate-Nadeau; Nicole Wong of NWong Strategies; and Chris Young of Microsoft.

EXCLUSIVE U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware By Christopher Bing and Joseph Menn
https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-us-state-department-phones-hacked-with-israeli-company-spyware-sources-2021-12-03/

WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 3 (Reuters) – Apple Inc iPhones of at least nine U.S. State Department employees were hacked by an unknown assailant using sophisticated spyware developed by the Israel-based NSO Group, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The hacks, which took place in the last several months, hit U.S. officials either based in Uganda or focused on matters concerning the East African country, two of the sources said.

The intrusions, first reported here, represent the widest known hacks of U.S. officials through NSO technology. Previously, a list of numbers with potential targets including some American officials surfaced in reporting on NSO, but it was not clear whether intrusions were always tried or succeeded.

Reuters could not determine who launched the latest cyberattacks.

NSO Group said in a statement on Thursday that it did not have any indication their tools were used but canceled the relevant accounts and would investigate based on the Reuters inquiry.

“If our investigation shall show these actions indeed happened with NSO’s tools, such customer will be terminated permanently and legal actions will take place,” said an NSO spokesperson, who added that NSO will also “cooperate with any relevant government authority and present the full information we will have.”

NSO has long said it only sells its products to government law enforcement and intelligence clients, helping them to monitor security threats, and is not directly involved in surveillance operations.

Officials at the Uganda embassy in Washington did not comment. A spokesperson for Apple declined to comment.

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on the intrusions, instead pointing to the Commerce Department’s recent decision to place the Israeli company on an entity list, making it harder for U.S. companies to do business with them.

NSO Group and another spyware firm were “added to the Entity List based on a determination that they developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used this tool to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers,” the Commerce Department said in an announcement last month.

EASILY IDENTIFIABLE

NSO software is capable of not only capturing encrypted messages, photos and other sensitive information from infected phones, but also turning them into recording devices to monitor surroundings, based on product manuals reviewed by Reuters.

Apple’s alert to affected users did not name the creator of the spyware used in this hack.

The victims notified by Apple included American citizens and were easily identifiable as U.S. government employees because they associated email addresses ending in state.gov with their Apple IDs, two of the people said.

They and other targets notified by Apple in multiple countries were infected through the same graphics processing vulnerability that Apple did not fix until September, the sources said.

Since at least February, this software flaw allowed some NSO customers to take control of iPhones simply by sending invisible yet tainted iMessage requests to the device, researchers who investigated the espionage campaign said.

The victims would not see or need to interact with a prompt for the hack to be successful. Versions of NSO surveillance software, commonly known as Pegasus, could then be installed.

Apple’s announcement that it would notify victims came on the same day it sued NSO Group last week, accusing it of helping numerous customers break into Apple’s mobile software, iOS.

In a public response, NSO has said its technology helps stop terrorism and that they’ve installed controls to curb spying against innocent targets.

For example, NSO says its intrusion system cannot work on phones with U.S. numbers beginning with the country code +1.

But in the Uganda case, the targeted State Department employees were using iPhones registered with foreign telephone numbers, said two of the sources, without the U.S. country code.

A senior Biden administration official, speaking on condition he not be identified, said the threat to U.S. personnel abroad was one of the reasons the administration was cracking down on companies such as NSO and pursuing new global discussion about spying limits.

The official added that they have seen “systemic abuse” in multiple countries involving NSO’s Pegasus spyware.

Historically, some of NSO Group’s best-known past clients included Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense must approve export licenses for NSO, which has close ties to Israel’s defense and intelligence communities, to sell its technology internationally.

In a statement, the Israeli embassy in Washington said that targeting American officials would be a serious breach of its rules.

“Cyber products like the one mentioned are supervised and licensed to be exported to governments only for purposes related to counter-terrorism and severe crimes,” an embassy spokesperson said. “The licensing provisions are very clear and if these claims are true, it is a severe violation of these provisions.”

–SOCIAL STUDIES–

Stolen Lives: The Indigenous Peoples of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools Social studies
https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools

Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers Philosophy
https://historyofwomenphilosophers.org/ecc/#hwps

Diarna: Geo-Museum of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Life Religion https://diarna.org

Charleston’s Free People of Color

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