Insider espionage
There is a growing body of complaints about Chinese Communist Party efforts to “influence” Canadian business, academic and political circles. “The threat from espionage and foreign interference is significant and continues to grow,” says the latest annual report by the Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), chaired by Ottawa Liberal MP David McGuinty. “Intelligence shows that China and Russia remain the primary culprits.” [node:read-more:link]
Having been officially designed a terrorist entity, right-wing Proud Boys Canada has dissolved while continuing to reject the government’s characterization. The decision was announced by its U.S. parent organization. [node:read-more:link]
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service had recommended revocation of two researchers’ security clearances long before they were fired from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. The agency’s concerned related to communications that Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, had with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, including the transfer of intellectual property. [node:read-more:link]
An unidentified Israeli has been indicted on charges of spying for Iran and conspiring with that country’s intelligence apparatus to recruit Israeli Arabs for terrorist attacks. Shin Bet says that when he was arrested in March, the man was in possession of an encryption device and that he had been in contact with a Lebanese member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. [node:read-more:link]
U.S. federal agencies that heeded President Donald Trump’s push to move operations to the cloud are being reminded that security is paramount. “We want to ensure that in these quick migrations that we’ve done, that we fully understand both the positives as well as some of the assumptions we’ve made,” says Matthew Scholl, chief of the Computer Security Division in the Information Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He and other officials warn that security could be compromised if vendors aren’t appropriately managed. [node:read-more:link]
Nine more individuals, including two from Turkey’s main procurement agency, have been charged in an ongoing industrial espionage case. Others include active and retired military personnel and three persons in the private sector. The government detained 33 other individuals in January and March. [node:read-more:link]
The U.S. Department of Defense is broadening its Comply-to-Connect (C2C) program to encompass the entire U.S. military in a bid to ensure that any device touching its network complies with DoD cybersecurity standards. Set up by the National Security Agency, the Marine Corps and the Air Force in 2013, C2C continuously analyzes all connected devices such as smartphones and computers to ensure compliance. [node:read-more:link]
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security plans to track all federal employees and contractors in its hunt for “insider threats” regardless of whether they require security clearance. It had focused initially on government agency employees with clearance who might pose a threat even inadvertently. [node:read-more:link]
Washington-based Human Rights Watch is accusing Canada of flouting its international obligations by failing to repatriate and provide adequate consular assistance to 47 citizens, including 26 children, detained in northeast Syria. The adults, linked to the Islamic State terrorist organization, are being held by Kurdish forces. The Canadian government said it will not put its personnel at risk to gather evidence and repatriate the combatants. [node:read-more:link]
Former military journalist Ivan Safronov, who joined the Russian space agency less than two months ago as an advisor to its director general, has been arrested for treason. Roskosmos says the arrest was not related to his job with the agency. Russian state security has accused Safronov of passing on information to an unspecified NATO member. [node:read-more:link]
Espionage and theft of intellectual property by China present the “greatest long-term threat" to the future of the U.S., according to FBI Director Christopher Wray. “The stakes could not be higher,” he says. “China is engaged in a whole-of-state effort to become the world's only superpower by any means necessary.” [node:read-more:link]
Espionage and theft of intellectual property by China present the “greatest long-term threat" to the future of the U.S., according to FBI Director Christopher Wray. “The stakes could not be higher,” he says. “China is engaged in a whole-of-state effort to become the world's only superpower by any means necessary.” [node:read-more:link]
A San Francisco consultancy under contract to the Department of Defense says U.S. industry's reliance on goods and services from countries such as China shows reshoring the industry’s may be easier said than done. Researchers at Govini analyzed data from more than 1,000 vendors to show how products from foreign countries has increased by 420 per cent since 2010, particularly in the packaged software and IT services. [node:read-more:link]
A suggestion by President Donald Trump that former CIA analyst Edward Snowden could be pardoned for leaking National Security Agency documents to news media has been blasted by the senior Republicans and Democrats on the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee who say it would “mock our national security workforce.” Snowden fled the U.S. in 2013 and sought asylum in Russia. [node:read-more:link]
As it has in other countries, the COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in more government employees working from home on unclassified information but U.S. agencies are considering a move onto classified telework. “We’ve put a tremendous more amount of capability out there with respect to how to deal with classified missions, both on premise and off,” says Stephen Wallace, a systems innovation scientist at the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Emerging Technology Directorate. [node:read-more:link]
