Displaying items by tag: Department of Homeland Security

With tensions mounting in Ukraine, the New York Department of Financial Services and the European Central Bank are alerting governments, businesses, and financial institutions to prepare for a possible state-sponsored cyber attack from Russia.

A Republican senator from Ohio has criticised the US Government over taking more than three months to say who was accountable for not stopping the SolarWinds supply chain attack that first came to light in December 2020.

Slovakian security firm ESET says it has detected at least three additional threat groups using a zero-day in Microsoft Exchange Server in attacks, even as the US Government issued an emergency directive telling all US federal bodies to patch Exchange and report on exploitation by noon on Friday.

The US bid to put in place new wage rules for those employed on H-1B visas has been blocked by a court, with a federal judge in New Jersey granting a business group a preliminary injunction which prevents the US Department of Labour from putting the rule into practice.

Global security firm Sophos has questioned the connection drawn between ransomware attacks facilitated by the Trickbot botnet and threats to election security, with a senior researcher saying gangs did not generally target local governments specifically for political effect.

The US Department of Homeland Security issued a warning on Tuesday that Russia may try to "sow discord, distract, shape public sentiment, and undermine trust in Western democratic institutions" in the run-up to the presidential elections which are now four weeks away.

The US has announced fresh curbs on H-1B visas, with the Department of Homeland Security unveiling what it described as an interim final rule "to protect US workers, restore integrity to the H-1B program and better guarantee that H-1B petitions are approved only for qualified beneficiaries and petitioners".

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull is wrong to claim that he was the first person to raise the subject of banning Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei Technologies from bidding to be a supplier for Australia's 5G networks, the company's Australian arm claims.

The Australian Government appears to have decided to outsource its cyber security strategy to the US, calling in the former US secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, to play a role in drafting the country's 2020 strategy in what seems to be admission of a longstanding cultural cringe and also an indictment of all the Australian cyber security professionals.

The US has finally decided on the changes to be made for the granting of H-1B visas, one effect of these being that the proportion granted to foreigners with a master's degree or higher from an US institution would be increased.

T-Mobile US and Sprint have been given permission to go ahead with their proposed merger after national security reviews cleared the deal, which is now expected to be finalised in the first half of 2019.

The first change of rules around the H-1B visa, which has been used by many Indian IT outsourcing outfits to take workers to the US, will be announced by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Department of Homeland Security on Monday US time.

Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab has had its appeal against a US public sector software ban thrown out by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit Court.

American plans to strip the spouses of holders of H-1B visas of the right to work have reached the final stage, with the Department of Homeland Security inching towards approving the change.

US Government offices are struggling to remove code created by Kaspersky Lab from their networks to meet a 1 October deadline, following a ban on its use in September last year.

Australia has been caught up in the unrelenting cyber crime scourge sweeping the world, with a new global security report finding that since 2014 the country was hit by more than 114,000 instances of cyber crime, with almost 24,000 of the attacks occurring in the first half of 2017.

Kaspersky Lab has taken resort to the American legal system again, in its bid to get the ban on its products, promulgated by the Department of Homeland Security in September, rescinded.

Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab is seeking a preliminary injunction in US federal court to try and prevent an order banning the use of its software in the US public service from taking effect.

Citing "reputational and revenue impact of a Binding Operational Directive based on media reports, rumour and unsubstantiated allegations", Kaspersky Lab is fighting back and wants due process.

A senior cyber security official at the US Department of Homeland Security has told a Congressional panel that she has yet to see any proof that software made by Kaspersky Lab has been exploited to infiltrate US government systems.