Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials warned about cyberattacks originating in Russia against critical American infrastructure. Now, U.S. security agencies are increasingly cracking down on the networks used by cybercriminals, including for ransomware attacks. Dino Jahic has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. 
…

Twitter’s board of directors on Friday voted unanimously to use a tactic called a “poison pill” to fend off Elon Musk’s attempt to take over the company.

In such a defensive tactic, all Twitter shareholders except Musk could buy more shares at a discount. This would dilute the world’s richest person’s stake in the company and prevent him from recruiting a majority of shareholders supporting his move.

If Musk’s ownership in Twitter grows to 15% or more, the poison pill would go into effect.

Musk, who earlier this week was revealed as the company’s largest individual shareholder, with 9.2% of the shares, later offered more than $43 billion, or $54.20 a share, to purchase the entire company.

Musk’s offer would provide a substantial premium over Twitter’s current stock price of just more than $45 a share.

Free-speech concern expressed

When Musk made his offer, he lamented the company’s stance on free speech.

“I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk said in the filing. “I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.”

But instead of putting Musk’s offer up for a vote with Twitter shareholders, the company’s board said Friday that it would instead offer its shareholders a chance to buy even more shares at a steep discount, effectively diluting the price of the stock.

The plan “will reduce the likelihood that any entity … gains control of Twitter through open market accumulation without paying all shareholders an appropriate control premium,” the company said.

The Twitter board’s plan will be effective for one year.

As rumors of a poison pill action circulated Thursday, Musk speculated via Twitter on what might happen.

“If the current Twitter board takes actions contrary to shareholder interests, they would be breaching their fiduciary duty,” he wrote. “The liability they would thereby assume would be titanic in scale.”

One analyst, Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, told the New York Post that the board’s move was a “defensive measure,” adding that shareholders would not likely view it positively.

“We believe Musk and his team expected this poker move, which will be perceived as a sign of weakness, not strength, by the Street,” Ives told the Post.

Josh White, a former financial economist for the Securities and Exchange Commission, told BBC that Musk’s negotiation tactics might not be the “right approach” if Musk wants to acquire the company.

“I actually think if he was truly serious about the takeover attempt, he would have started at a price and left the window open for negotiation,” White said.

Twitter ‘storm’?

Edward Rock, who teaches corporate law and governance at New York University’s law school, also had doubts about whether Musk was serious about buying Twitter.

As Rock told NPR, Musk can show he is serious by revealing how he plans to finance the takeover, which he did not show in his SEC filing, or launch a proxy contest to replace Twitter board members in response to its poison pill.

If Musk fails to do so, Rock said, “he’s not going to acquire the company, and people can just write it off like some of his other Twitter storms.”

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
…

Hours after announcing his $43 billion hostile takeover bid for Twitter, business magnate Elon Musk laid out some of his goals for the social media giant, including an edit button that would let users amend ill-considered tweets.

Musk made the comments on the concluding day of the annual TED Conference in Vancouver. In a question-and-answer session, he said Twitter is the global town square and an important and inclusive area for free speech.

He said he has enough assets to cover the $43 billion purchase himself but did not divulge details of how he expects to finance the attempted takeover. If necessary, he said, he has a “Plan B” for acquiring the company.

Musk said if successful, he will make Twitter’s algorithms open source, introduce an edit button for people to change their tweets and will work to “ban the bot armies,” or automated computer programs, from the platform. The edit option will be available for only a limited time after a tweet is sent, he said.

In answering questions from TED head curator and organizer Chris Anderson, Musk also said that when tweets are changed, all retweets and likes to the original message will be deleted.

Musk also indicated that under his control, Twitter would be more reluctant to delete tweets that are of questionable taste or veracity and that when in doubt, he would allow a tweet to exist. But the platform would follow the laws of the different countries where it exists, he said.

Musk also was harshly critical of the San Francisco office of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, describing its staff as “those bastards.” The comment came in reference to fraud charges brought by the SEC regarding some 2,018 tweets that Musk sent claiming he had the funding to take his Tesla electric car company private.

In the settlement, Musk was forced to resign as chairman of Tesla, issue a $40 million payout to shareholders and have a lawyer approve his future tweets about the company. Musk said financial institutions forced him into the agreement, as if the SEC had been “holding a gun to your child’s head.” He agreed only to save the company, he said.

The 50-year-old entrepreneur, who also runs SpaceX and the Boring Company, announced the $43 billion takeover bid for Twitter just hours before arriving in Vancouver.

Last week, he purchased 9.2% of the company’s stock but subsequently turned down a seat on the company’s board of directors, which would have limited the amount he could own to 14.9%.

Musk said 2016 to 2018 were the worst years of his life, as Tesla encountered problems with the production of the Model 3. He said he now knows more about manufacturing than anybody on Earth after sleeping on the floors of assembly plants to work out the problems.

He also talked about building sustainable energy from wind, solar, hydro and geothermal, and repeated his support of nuclear power. He briefly talked about further developing robotic intelligence, saying the first robots to help people in everyday life are not far off. Musk said the robots will be affordable, but it should not be possible to update them remotely like computers or his Tesla vehicles.

Besides making these announcements in Vancouver, Musk has a personal tie to the city. The musician Grimes, whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher, is the mother of his two youngest children and grew up in the city, where she has family.
…

Russian users of Netflix NFLX.O have launched a class action lawsuit against the streaming giant for leaving the Russian market, demanding 60 million roubles ($726,000) in compensation, the RIA news agency reported on Wednesday. 

Netflix Inc said in March that it suspended its service in Russia and had temporarily stopped all future projects and acquisitions in the country as it assessed the impact of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Today, a law firm representing the interests of Netflix users filed a class action lawsuit against the American Netflix service with the Khamovnichesky District Court of Moscow,” RIA cited law firm Chernyshov, Lukoyanov & Partners as saying. 

“The reason for the lawsuit was a violation of Russian users’ rights due to Netflix’s unilateral refusal to provide services in Russia.” 

Netflix did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Scores of foreign companies have announced temporary shutdowns of stores and factories in Russia or said they were leaving for good since Moscow began what it calls “a special military operation” in Ukraine on February 24. Ukraine and the West say Russia launched an unprovoked war of aggression against its neighbor. 

($1 = 82.62 roubles) 
…

A former energy executive in California who took part in $1 billion solar power fraud that bilked Warren Buffett’s company and many others was sentenced Tuesday to six years in federal prison and ordered to pay $624 million in restitution.

Robert A. Karmann, 55, of Clayton was the chief financial officer for DC Solar, a company based in Benicia in the San Francisco Bay Area that sold mobile solar generator units mounted on trailers.

The company marketed the generators between 2011 and 2018 as being able to provide emergency power for cellphone companies or to provide lighting at sporting and other events.

But the company executives started telling investors they could benefit from federal tax credits by buying the generators and leasing them back to DC Solar, which would then provide them to other companies for their use, prosecutors said.

The generators never provided much income, and prosecutors say the company ran a Ponzi scheme, in which early investors were paid with funds from later investors.

The company eventually stopped building the mobile generators altogether, and prosecutors say a least half the company’s claimed 17,000 generators didn’t really exist.

Among those suckered by the business were Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

DC Solar founder Jeff Carpoff was sentenced last November to 30 years in prison and ordered to pay $790.6 million in restitution for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering.

His wife, Paulette Carpoff, 47, has pleaded guilty to federal charges and will be sentenced in May.

Prosecutors said the Carpoffs used the money to buy and invest in 32 properties, more than 150 luxury cars, a subscription to a private jet service, a semipro baseball team, a NASCAR race car sponsorship and a suite at the new Las Vegas Raiders stadium.

One other man was sentenced to three years in prison last year and three others pleaded guilty to criminal charges and await sentencing.
…

Elon Musk’s huge Twitter investment took a new twist Tuesday with the filing of a lawsuit alleging that the colorful billionaire illegally delayed disclosing his stake in the social media company so he could buy more shares at lower prices.

The complaint in New York federal court accuses Musk of violating a regulatory deadline to reveal he had accumulated a stake of at least 5%. Instead, according to the complaint, Musk didn’t disclose his position in Twitter until he’d almost doubled his stake to more than 9%. The lawsuit alleges that the strategy hurt less-wealthy investors who sold shares in the San Francisco company in the nearly two weeks before Musk acknowledged holding a major stake.

Musk’s regulatory filings show that he bought a little more than 620,000 shares at $36.83 apiece on Jan. 31 and then continued to accumulate more shares on nearly every single trading day through April 1. Musk, best known as CEO of the electric car maker Tesla, held 73.1 million Twitter shares as of the most recent count Monday. That represents a 9.1% stake in Twitter.

The lawsuit alleges that by March 14, Musk’s stake in Twitter had reached a 5% threshold that required him to publicly disclose his holdings under U.S. securities law by March 24. Musk didn’t make the required disclosure until April 4.

That revelation caused Twitter’s stock to soar 27% from its April 1 close to nearly $50 by the end of April 4’s trading, depriving investors who sold shares before Musk’s improperly delayed disclosure the chance to realize significant gains, according to the lawsuit filed on behalf of an investor named Marc Bain Rasella. Musk, meanwhile, was able to continue to buy shares that traded in prices ranging from $37.69 to $40.96.

The lawsuit is seeking to be certified as a class action representing Twitter shareholders who sold shares between March 24 and April 4, a process that could take a year or more.

Musk spent about $2.6 billion on Twitter stock — a fraction of his estimated wealth of $265 billion, the largest individual fortune in the world. In a regulatory filing Monday, Musk disclosed he may increase his stake after backing out of an agreement reached last week to join Twitter’s board of directors.

Jacob Walker, one of the lawyers that filed the lawsuit against Musk, told The Associated Press that he hadn’t reached out to the Securities and Exchange Commission about Musk’s alleged violations about the disclosure of his Twitter stake. “I assume the SEC is well aware of what he did,” Walker said.

An SEC spokesperson declined to comment.

The SEC and Musk have been wrangling in court since 2018 when Musk and Tesla agreed to pay a $40 million fine t o settle allegations that he used his Twitter account to mislead investors about a potential buyout of the electric car company that never materialized. As part of that deal, Musk was supposed to obtain legal approval for his tweets about information that could affect Tesla’s stock price — a provision that regulators contend he has occasionally violated and that he now argues unfairly muzzles him.

Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment posted on Twitter, where he often shares his opinion and thoughts. Alex Spiro, a New York lawyer representing Musk in his ongoing dispute with the SEC, also didn’t immediately respond to a query from The Associated Press. 
…

The world of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs is getting a boost from companies and celebrities, who are making the digital products. But the nascent technology comes with risks. Tina Trinh reports.
…

Twitter Inc’s biggest shareholder, Elon Musk, has decided not to join its board, Chief Executive Parag Agrawal said late on Sunday. 

Musk, who calls himself a free-speech absolutist and has been critical of Twitter, disclosed a 9.1% stake on April 4 and said he plans to bring about significant improvements at the social media platform. 

His appointment to the board was to become effective on Saturday and would have prevented him from being a beneficial owner of more than 14.9% of common stock. 

But “Elon shared that same morning that he will no longer be joining the board,” Agrawal said in a note on Twitter. “I believe this is for the best. We have and will always value input from our shareholders whether they are on our Board or not. Elon is our biggest shareholder and we will remain open to his input,” Agrawal said. 

Musk limited his response to a face with hand over mouth emoticon on Twitter. Tesla did not immediately respond to an email sent to the company seeking a comment from Musk. 

News of Musk taking a board seat had some Twitter employees panicking over the future of the social media firm’s ability to moderate content, company insiders told Reuters. 

Before taking a stake, Musk ran a Twitter poll asking users if they believed Twitter adheres to the principle of free speech. 

A day after becoming the largest shareholder, he launched another poll asking users if they want an edit button, a long-awaited feature on which the social media platform has been working. 

The Tesla boss also asked users in a poll if Twitter’s headquarters should be converted into a homeless shelter, a plan backed by Amazon.com Inc’s founder Jeff Bezos. 

On Saturday, he suggested changes to Twitter Blue premium subscription service, including slashing its price, banning advertising and giving an option to pay in the cryptocurrency dogecoin. 

Twitter shares, which soared 27% on April 4 after Musk disclosed his stake, has lost 7.5% since then to Friday’s close. 

“There will be distractions ahead, but our goals and priorities remain unchanged,” Agrawal said in his Sunday note. 

“Let’s tune out the noise, and stay focused on the work and what we’re building.” 
…

Chinese e-commerce company JD.com said Thursday that its founder Richard Liu has left his position as CEO, the latest Chinese billionaire founder to step aside amid increased government scrutiny of the country’s technology industry.

Liu will hand over the reins to JD.com’s president Xu Lei, according to a company statement. Liu will remain as the chairman of the board and continue to focus on JD.com’s “long-term strategies, mentoring younger management, and contributing to the revitalization of rural areas,” the statement said.

“I’ll devote more of my time to JD’s long-term strategies and future drivers as we continue to work on the most challenging yet valuable things,” Liu said.

Liu is the latest in a string of Chinese technology company founders who have stepped down from leadership positions in recent years. Last year, e-commerce firm Pinduoduo’s founder Colin Huang resigned as chairman and Bytedance founder Zhang Yiming also left his position as chairman of the firm.

The departures came as Beijing cracked down on the country’s once-freewheeling technology industry over antitrust concerns and fears that China’s technology giants were wielding too much influence over society. JD.com’s stock price has plunged 27% over the past year. Its New York-listed stock closed down 3% to $59.07 on the Nasdaq ahead of the announcement Thursday.

Like many Chinese technology companies, JD.com’s finances have suffered over the past year. The company reported a net loss of 5.2 billion yuan ($817 million) for the fourth quarter of 2021, compared to a net income of 24.3 billion yuan ($3.8 billion) in the previous year, even as revenue grew 23%.

E-commerce firms like JD.com and rival Alibaba have been suffering from economic headwinds and a slowdown in consumption, as well as increased competition from other players such as short-video companies like Kuaishou that have begun incorporating e-commerce functions into their platforms.

In 2018, Liu was arrested in Minnesota in the U.S. after a Chinese university student accused him of raping her in her apartment after they both attended a dinner party. Liu was exonerated after prosecutors found there was not enough evidence to press charges. The student later sued Liu in a civil lawsuit, seeking more than $50,000 in damages.
…

Twitter said on Tuesday it will begin testing a new edit feature in the coming months, surprising its users on the same day it said Tesla boss Elon Musk would join the social media company’s board. 

Jay Sullivan, Twitter’s head of consumer products, said in a tweet the company had been working since last year on building an edit option, “the most requested Twitter feature for many years.” 

The news, first teased by Twitter on April Fools’ Day, comes as the company faces a broader change in direction with Musk becoming its largest shareholder and joining the board after questioning the social media platform’s commitment to free speech.  

Musk began polling Twitter users about an edit button after disclosing his 9.2% stake in the company on Monday. As of 6:30 p.m. EST, the poll had more than 4.2 million votes, with 73.5% supporting the feature. 

Twitter Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal asked users to “vote carefully” on Monday, though the company on Tuesday tweeted that it did not get the idea for the edit button from the poll. 

Sullivan tweeted the feature will take time to fine tune as “without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation.” 

The company will actively seek “input and adversarial thinking in advance of launching Edit,” he added. 

Twitter will start testing the feature within its Twitter Blue Labs premium subscription service in the coming months to “learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible,” it said. 

Twitter Blue members get exclusive access to premium features and app customizations for a monthly subscription. 

 
…

A day after it was revealed he owned the largest stake in Twitter, slightly more than 9% of shares, Elon Musk has joined the company’s board of directors.

The Tesla and SpaceX founder will be on the board until at least 2024, according to a regulatory filing.

As a stipulation of his board membership, Musk won’t be allowed to own more than 14.9% of Twitter shares while on the board and for three months following a departure from the board.

After the announcement, Musk tweeted, “Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!”

“I’m excited to share that we’re appointing @elonmusk to our board!” tweeted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. “Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board.”

“He’s both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service, which is exactly what we need on @Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term. Welcome Elon!”

In recent weeks, Musk, who is an active Twitter user with upwards of 80 million followers, has questioned the platform’s commitment to free speech and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  

He recently ran a poll on Twitter asking users if they felt the same. More than 2 million responded, with over 70% saying Twitter does not adhere to free speech.  

Twitter stock has surged since Musk’s acquisition of about $3 billion worth of the company’s stock. 

Some information in this report comes from The Associated Press. 
…

In the U.S., some restaurants and medical supply stores are turning to drones to deliver food, medicine, and other essential goods to people’s homes. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
…

The Kremlin’s clampdown on news of the war in Ukraine has hackers and volunteers from around the world are sending messages directly to Russian citizens’ phones to keep them informed. Matt Dibble has the story.
…

China has connected a high-speed, multimillion-dollar, 15,000-kilometer undersea cable to Kenya, as Beijing advances what’s been dubbed its “digital silk road,” and Africa seeks the infrastructure it badly needs for better internet connectivity.  

Chinese giant Huawei is a shareholder in the $425-million PEACE cable, which stands for “Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe.” It stretches from Asia to Africa and then into France, where it terminates. 

It reached the coastal city of Mombasa on Tuesday, with the CEO of local partner company Telekom Kenya, Mugo Kibati, saying the cable would help meet the sharp rise in demand for internet services on a continent where internet adoption has trailed the rest of the world, but which is home to a growing, young and increasingly digital population.   

“This ultra-high-capacity cable will assist Kenya and the region in meeting its current and future broadband capacity requirements, bolster redundancy, minimize transit time of our country’s connectivity to Asia and Europe, as well as assist carriers in providing affordable services to Kenyans,” said Kibati.  

Business development

For his part, the PEACE Cable’s COO, Sun Xiaohua, said in a statement that the new infrastructure would “bring more business development to this region.” From Kenya, the cable will later be extended further down the continent’s east coast to South Africa. 

It’s estimated that 95% of international data flows via submarine cables, and in terms of Africa, China dominates, with the most projects aimed at connecting the continent. Aside from the PEACE cable, China’s proposed 2Africa cable will become one of the biggest undersea projects in the world when it goes live in 2024. 

But China’s massive digital infrastructure investments in Africa and elsewhere have not been without controversy, and Washington has expressed deep concerns that Beijing is attempting to monopolize networks and possibly use them for espionage.  

Safety concerns

Some analysts are concerned the technology could be misused by authoritarian leaders on the continent, but Cobus van Staden, a senior China-Africa researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs, said most Africans simply want better internet. 

“I think this PEACE Cable generally plays very positively in Africa. Obviously, the United States has raised … concerns around this, particularly in relation to security, but I think for lot of African countries, the security issue is actually balanced by the wider issue of a lack of connectivity,” van Staden told VOA.  

Huawei was sanctioned by the U.S. under former president Donald Trump, but the company has built about 70% of Africa’s 4G networks, and van Staden said it seems China is winning the race for digital soft power on the continent. 

“I think there’s a space there for competition, but Western actors will have to step up,” he said.  
…

Up to 40% of food in the U.S. is discarded. But as VOA’s Julie Taboh reports, a company in the Netherlands has come up with technology that can help reduce food waste in industrial kitchens.

Camera: Tina Trinh, Orbisk;         
Produced by Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum
…

Negotiators from the European Parliament and EU member states agreed Thursday on a landmark law to curb the market dominance of U.S. big tech giants such as Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple.

Meeting in Brussels, the lawmakers nailed down a long list of do’s and don’ts that will single out the world’s most iconic web giants as internet “gatekeepers” subject to special rules.

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) has sped through the bloc’s legislative procedures and is designed to protect consumers and give rivals a better chance to survive against the world’s powerful tech juggernauts.

“The agreement ushers in a new era of tech regulation worldwide,” said German MEP Andreas Schwab, who led the negotiations for the European Parliament.

“The Digital Markets Act puts an end to the ever-increasing dominance of Big Tech companies,” he added.

The main point of the law is to avert the years of procedures and court battles needed to punish Big Tech’s monopolistic behavior in which cases can end with huge fines but little change in how the giants do business.

Once implemented, the law will give Brussels unprecedented authority to keep an eye on decisions by the giants, especially when they pull out the checkbook to buy up promising startups.

“The gatekeepers – they now have to take responsibility,” said the EU’s competition supremo Margrethe Vestager.

“A number of things they can do, a number of things they can’t do, and that of course gives everyone a fair chance,” she added.

‘Concrete impacts’

The law contains about 20 rules that in many cases target practices by Big Tech that have gone against the bloc’s rules on competition, but which Brussels has struggled to enforce.

The DMA imposes myriad obligations on Big Tech, including forcing Apple to open up its App Store to alternative payment systems, a demand that the iPhone maker has opposed fiercely, most notably in its feud with Epic games, the maker of Fortnite.

Google will be asked to clearly offer users of Android-run smartphones alternatives to its search engine, the Google Maps app or its Chrome browser.

A Google spokesperson told AFP that the US internet giant will “take time to study the final text and work with regulators to implement it.”

“While we support many of the DMA’s ambitions around consumer choice and interoperability, we remain concerned that some of the rules could reduce innovation and the choice available to Europeans,” the spokesperson said.

Apple would also be forced to loosen its grip on the iPhone, with users allowed to uninstall its Safari web browser and other company-imposed apps that users cannot currently delete.

In a statement, Apple swiftly expressed regret over the law, saying it was “concerned that some provisions of the DMA will create unnecessary privacy and security vulnerabilities for our users.”

After a furious campaign by influential MEPs, the law also forces messaging services such as Meta-owned WhatsApp to make themselves available to users on other services such as Signal or Apple’s iMessage, and vice versa.

France, which holds the EU presidency and negotiated on behalf of the bloc’s 27 member states, said the law would deliver “concrete impacts on the lives of European citizens.”

“We are talking about the goods you buy online, the smartphone you use every day, and the services you use every day,” said France’s digital affairs minister, Cedric O.

Stiff fines

Violation of the rules could lead to fines as high as 10% of a company’s annual global sales and even 20% for repeat offenders.

The DMA “will have a profound impact on the way some gatekeepers’ operations are currently conducted,” said lawyer Katrin Schallenberg, a partner at Clifford Chance.

“Clearly, companies affected … are already working on ways to comply with or even challenge the regulation,” she added.

The Big Tech companies have lobbied hard against the new rules and the firms have been defended in Washington, where it is alleged that the new law unfairly targets U.S. companies.

With the deal now reached by negotiators, the DMA now faces final votes in a full session of the European Parliament as well as by ministers from the EU’s 27 member states.

The rules could come into place starting Jan. 1, 2023, though tech companies are asking for more time to implement the law.
…

U.S. and British officials on Thursday accused the Russian government of running a yearslong campaign to hack into critical infrastructure, including an American nuclear plant and a Saudi oil refinery.

The announcement was paired with the unsealing of criminal charges against four Russian government officials, whom the U.S. Department of Justice accused of carrying out two major hacking operations aimed at the global energy sector. Thousands of computers in 135 countries were affected between 2012 and 2018, U.S. prosecutors said.

Cybersecurity analysts described the moves as a shot across the bow to Moscow after U.S. President Joe Biden had warned just days ago about “evolving intelligence” that the Russian government might be preparing cyberattacks against American targets.

John Hultquist, whose firm Mandiant investigated the Saudi refinery hack, said that by making the criminal charges public, the United States “let them know that we know who they are.”

In one of the two indictments unsealed on Thursday and dated June 2021, the Justice Department accused Evgeny Viktorovich Gladkikh, a 36-year-old Russian Ministry of Defense research institute employee, of conspiring with others between May and September 2017 to hack the systems of a foreign refinery and install malware known as “Triton” on a safety system produced by Schneider Electric SE.

The refinery wasn’t named, but the British government said it was in Saudi Arabia and had previously been identified as the Petro Rabigh refinery complex on the Red Sea coast.

In a second indictment, dated August 2021, the Justice Department said three other suspected hackers from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) carried out cyberattacks on the computer networks of oil and gas firms, nuclear power plants, and utility and power transmission companies between 2012 and 2017 — a campaign researchers have long attributed to a group sometimes dubbed “Energetic Bear” or “Berserk Bear.”

The Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

The three accused Russians in the second case are Pavel Aleksandrovich Akulov, 36, Mikhail Mikhailovich Gavrilov, 42, and Marat Valeryevich Tyukov, 39. None of the four defendants have been arrested, a U.S. official said.

Britain’s Foreign Office said that the FSB hackers targeted the systems controlling the Wolf Creek nuclear plant in Kansas “but failed to have any negative impact.”

“Russia’s targeting of critical national infrastructure is calculated and dangerous,” British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said in a statement. She said it showed Russian President Vladimir Putin “is prepared to risk lives to sow division and confusion among allies.”

A Justice Department official told reporters that even though the hacking at issue in the two cases occurred years ago, investigators remained concerned Russia will carry out similar attacks in future.

“These charges show the dark art of the possible when it comes to critical infrastructure,” the official said.

The official added that the department decided to unseal the indictments because they determined the “benefit of revealing the results of the investigation now outweighs the likelihood of arrests in the future.”

The 2017 Saudi refinery attack stunned the cybersecurity community when it was made public by researchers later that year. Unlike typical digital intrusions aimed at stealing data or holding it for ransom, the attack appeared aimed at causing physical damage to the facility itself by disabling its safety system. U.S. officials have been tracking the case ever since.

In 2019, those behind Triton were reported to be scanning and probing at least 20 electric utilities in the United States for vulnerabilities.

Two weeks before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the Russian government-backed Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics. Prosecutors believe Gladkikh worked there. On Thursday, British officials also announced sanctions on the institute.

The Foreign Office said FSB hackers had targeted British energy companies and had successfully stolen data from the U.S. aviation sector. It also accused the hackers of trying to compromise an employee of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon who fell afoul of the Kremlin and now lives in London. 
…

Seattle-based teenager Avi Schiffmann is doing what he can to help Ukrainian refugees. He has launched a website that helps refugees find safe places to stay, matching refugees with people willing to share their homes. Anush Avetisyan has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.
…

Okta whose authentication services are used by companies including Fedex and Moody’s to provide access to their networks, said on Tuesday that it had been hit by hackers and that some customers may have been affected.

The scope of the breach is still unclear, but it could have major consequences because thousands of companies rely on San Francisco-based Okta to manage access to their networks and applications.

Chief Security Officer David Bradbury said in a blog post that the computer of a customer support engineer working for a third-party contractor was accessed by the hackers for a five-day period in mid-January and that “the potential impact to Okta customers is limited to the access that support engineers have.”

“There are no corrective actions that need to be taken by our customers,” he said.

Nevertheless, Bradbury acknowledged that support engineers were able to help reset passwords and that some customers “may have been impacted.” He said the company was in the process of identifying and contacting them.

The nature of that impact wasn’t clear, and Okta did not immediately respond to an email asking how many organizations were potentially affected or how that squared with Okta’s advice that customers did not need to take corrective action.

On its website, Okta describes itself as the “identity provider for the internet” and says it has more than 15,000 customers on its platform.

It competes with the likes of Microsoft, PingID, Duo, SecureAuth and IBM to provide identity services such as single sign-on and multifactor authentication used to help users securely access online applications and websites.

Okta’s statement follows the posting of a series of screenshots of Okta’s internal communications by a group of ransom-seeking hackers known as Lapsus$ on their Telegram channel late on Monday.

In an accompanying message, the group said its focus was “ONLY on Okta customers.”

Lapsus$ responded to Okta’s statement on Tuesday by saying the company was trying to minimize the importance of the breach.

Some outside observers weren’t impressed with Okta’s explanation either.

Dan Tentler, the founder of cybersecurity consultancy Phobos Group, earlier told Reuters that Okta customers should “be very vigilant right now.”

There were signs that Okta customers were taking action to revisit their security.

Web infrastructure company Cloudflare issued a detailed explanation  of how it reacted to the Okta breach and saying the company did not believe it had been compromised as a result.

FedEx said in a statement that it too was investigating and “we currently have no indication that our environment has been accessed or compromised.” Moody’s did not return a message seeking comment.

Lapsus$ is a relatively new entrant to the crowded ransomware field but has made waves with high-profile hacks and attention-seeking behavior.

The group compromised the websites of Portuguese media conglomerate Impresa earlier this year, tweeting the phrase “Lapsus$ is now the new president of Portugal” from one newspaper’s Twitter accounts. The Impresa-owned media outlets described the hack as an assault on press freedom.

Last month, the group leaked proprietary information about U.S. chipmaker Nvidia to the Web.

More recently the group has purported to have leaked source code from several big tech firms, including Microsoft. In a blog post published Tuesday and devoted to Lapsus$, the software firm confirmed that one of its accounts had been compromised, “gaining limited access.”

The hackers did not respond to a message left on their Telegram group chat seeking comment.

 
…

Three companies have lodged a complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft, accusing the U.S. technology giant of anti-competitive practices in its cloud services, sources told AFP on Saturday, confirming media reports.

Microsoft is “undermining fair competition and limiting the choice of consumers” in the computing cloud services market, said one of the three, French company OVHcloud, in a statement to AFP.

The companies complain that under certain clauses in Microsoft’s licensing contracts for Office 365 services, tariffs are higher when the software is not run on Azure cloud infrastructure, which is owned by the U.S. group.

They also say the user experience is worse and that there are incompatibilities with certain other Microsoft products when not running on Azure. 

In a statement to AFP, Microsoft said, “European cloud service providers have built successful business models on Microsoft software and services” and had many options on how to use that software.

“We continually evaluate how best to support all of our partners and make Microsoft software available to all customers in all environments, including those with other cloud service providers,” it continued.

The complaint, first reported this week by The Wall Street Journal, was lodged last summer with the EU Commission’s competition authority.

Microsoft is also the subject of an earlier 2021 complaint to the European Commission by a different set of companies led by the German Nextcloud.

It denounced the “ever-stronger integration” of Microsoft’s cloud services, which it said complicated the development of competing offers.

Microsoft has already been heavily fined multiple times by Brussels for anti-competitive practices regarding its Internet Explorer browser, Windows operating system and software licensing rules. 
…

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, the groundwork had already begun — online. Russian disinformation is a key part of what many are calling a hybrid war.  VOA’s Tina Trinh explains.
…

Facebook owner Meta Platforms FB.O will help train Australian political candidates on aspects of cyber security and coach influencers to stop the spread of misinformation in a bid to boost the integrity of an upcoming election, it said on Tuesday.

Australia has not yet set a date for its next election, which is due by May. Authorities are already on high alert for electoral interference, having previously highlighted foreign interference attempts aimed at all levels of government and targeting both sides of politics.

“We’ll stay vigilant to emerging threats and take additional steps, if necessary, to prevent abuse on our platform while also empowering people in Australia to use their voice by voting,” Josh Machin, the company’s Australian chief of public policy, said in a statement that is to be posted online.

The social media giant added that it had drafted in a university to help with fact-checking operations in Australia and would require disclosure of the names of those paying for election-related advertisements, in what it called its most comprehensive election strategy.

The steps show how social media firms are seeking to combat online distortion and abuse of information during the lead-up to an election, a time when such efforts are typically at their most heated.

The Facebook Protect security program for high-profile individuals launched in Australia in December, with the company vowing to work with election officials and political parties to offer training for candidates on its policies and tools and ways to keep safe.

To avert hacking, it will prompt candidates to upgrade security to two-factor authentication. The company said it would also coach influencers, or those who earn advertising income from online commentary, to spot fake news.

People seeking to run election-related ads will need to furnish government-issued identification, as well as mandatory disclosures of funding sources for them, it said.

Ads by unauthorized parties, without funding disclosure, would be taken down and stored in a public archive for seven years, it added.

RMIT University, which joined Meta’s third-party fact-checking effort, said it would review posts the company identified as potential misinformation and try to verify them via interviews with primary sources and checks of public data.

“A continuing focus of our work is to identify the super spreaders of misinformation and the ecosystems in which they operate,” said RMIT FactLab Director Russell Skelton in a statement. “High impact misinformation disrupts evidence-based public policy and debate and so it is crucial we gain a better understanding of what drives this.” 
…

For many Ukrainians, staying online has been daunting as Russia attacks telecoms and power supplies, but some people, like Oleg Kutkov, a software and communications engineer, are testing out a new way to stay connected.

In a FaceTime interview with VOA Mandarin from Kyiv, Kutkov held up the components of the two-part terminal needed to connect via Starlink, an internet constellation of some 2,000 satellites operated by billionaire Elon Musk’s private firm SpaceX, one of a growing number of enterprises supporting Ukraine.

The Starlink dish and modem setup is easy to use, according to Kutkov, who is in his mid-30s.

“You just place the receptor outside, power on, wait a few minutes, and then you can go online without any additional tuning,” he told VOA Mandarin on Monday.

Kutkov said, “Our government is communicating with citizens using social (media) channels, and we are getting all the information from them on the internet. Not from TV or radio, but the internet. So [having connectivity] is very important.”

Skylink arrived in Ukraine with next-generation speed. On Feb. 26, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation, tweeted to Musk, “while you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand.”

Hours later, Musk tweeted that Ukraine would soon have Starlink service and despite criticism that he was using the crisis as a marketing stunt, the hardware began arriving there on Feb. 28.

Fedorov tweeted on March 9 that a second shipment of Starlink equipment had arrived as the situation in Ukraine continued to deteriorate.

According to NetBlocks, a London-based organization tracking internet outages around the world, several major cities in southern Ukraine, including Kherson and Mariupol, have experienced severe internet disruption due to attacks on infrastructure and power supplies.

In other areas, including Kharkiv and Kyiv, internet connections were disrupted as Russian troops launched cyber assaults targeting financial and government websites in Ukraine.

And even though Musk has cautioned the Skylink connection is being used by Russia to target users, Kutkov has been sharing his experiences with the service on Twitter. He told VOA Mandarin that he has received requests for support from across the country, including from ordinary citizens, companies and even those in the military.

“Ukraine is a highly digitized country,” Kutlov said. “We have everything online.”

SpaceX is one of a growing number of private companies that began taking an active role in supporting Ukraine in the fight against Russia almost as soon as Russia began missile and artillery attacks on Feb. 24.

Mobile phone carriers including T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon have waived charges for calls and texts to and from Ukraine.

Tesla is allowing any electric vehicles to use its charging stations along the borders of Ukraine with Poland and Hungary.

Airbnb, the online marketplace for lodging, stepped up to organize free short-term accommodation for 100,000 refugees from Ukraine.

Google and Facebook have banned Russian state media from their European platforms while working with European governments to combat the spread of disinformation from the Kremlin. Twitter began labeling all tweets containing content from Russian state-affiliated media outlets on Feb. 28.

As of Friday, more than 340 companies have announced their withdrawal from Russia’s economy in protest of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the Yale School of Management.

Russia has threatened to counter that exodus by nationalizing foreign-owned businesses that have decided to flee the country in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

Eli Dourado, a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, told VOA Mandarin the reason that so many private companies have taken action is that Russia’s invasion has “shocked and disgusted much of the world.”

He said the circumstances of the conflict have left a lot of people feeling that “it’s almost pure good versus evil.”

Abishur Prakash, co-founder and geopolitical futurist at the Center for Innovating the Future, a Toronto-based advisory firm, said one of the reasons Western corporations, especially tech companies, are taking sides is “because the global landscape has now permanently shifted.”

“The West is trying to permanently decouple from Russia, and Western tech firms are more than complying,” said Prakash, author of The World Is Vertical: How Technology Is Remaking Globalization, in an emailed response to VOA Mandarin. “There is a tacit acceptance in the boardrooms of technology companies that Russia has become ‘off limits.'”
…

U.S. authorities have broadly expanded the use of a smartphone app during the coronavirus pandemic to ensure immigrants released from detention will attend deportation hearings, a requirement that advocates say violates their privacy and makes them feel they’re not free.

More than 125,000 people — many of them stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border — are now compelled to install the app known as SmartLink on their phones, up from about 5,000 less than three years ago. It allows officials to easily check on them by requiring the immigrants to send a selfie or make or receive a phone call when asked.

Although the technology is less cumbersome than an ankle monitor, advocates say tethering immigrants to the app is unfair considering many have paid bond to get out of U.S. detention facilities while their cases churn through the country’s backlogged immigration courts. Immigration proceedings are administrative, not criminal, and the overwhelming majority of people with cases before the courts aren’t detained.

Advocates said they’re concerned about how the U.S. government might use data culled from the app on immigrants’ whereabouts and contacts to round up and arrest others on immigration violations.

“It’s kind of been shocking how just in a couple of years it has exploded so quickly and is now being used so much and everywhere,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, senior campaign director for the Latino rights organization Mijente. “It’s making it much easier for the government to track a larger number of people.”

The use of the app by Immigration and Customs Enforcement soared during the pandemic, when many government services went online. It continued to grow as President Joe Biden called on the Department of Justice to curb the use of private prisons. His administration has also voiced support for so-called alternatives to detention to ensure immigrants attend required appointments such as immigration court hearings.

Meanwhile, the number of cases before the long-backlogged U.S. immigration court system has soared to 1.6 million. Immigrants often must wait for years to get a hearing before a judge who will determine whether they can stay in the country legally or should be deported.

Since the pandemic, U.S. immigration authorities have reduced the number of immigrants in detention facilities and touted detention alternatives such as the app.

The SmartLink app comes from BI Inc, a Boulder, Colorado-based subsidiary of private prison company The GEO Group. GEO, which runs immigration detention facilities for ICE under other contracts, declined to comment on the app.

Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, declined to answer questions about the app, but said in a statement that detention alternatives “are an effective method of tracking noncitizens released from DHS custody who are awaiting their immigration proceedings.”

In recent congressional testimony, agency officials wrote that the SmartLink app is also cheaper than detention: it costs about $4.36 a day to put a person on a detention alternative and more than $140 a day to hold someone in a facility, agency budget estimates show.

Advocates say immigrants who spent months in detention facilities and were released on bond are being placed on the app when they go to an initial meeting with a deportation officer, and so are parents and children seeking asylum on the southwest border.

Initially, SmartLink was seen as a less intensive alternative to ankle monitors for immigrants who had been detained and released, but it is now being used widely on immigrants with no criminal history and who have not been detained at all, said Julie Mao, deputy director of the immigrant rights group Just Futures. Previously, immigrants often only attended periodic check-ins at agency offices.

“We’re very concerned that that is going to be used as the excessive standard for everyone who’s in the immigration system,” Mao said.

While most people attend their immigration court hearings, some do skip out. In those cases, immigration judges issue deportation orders in the immigrants’ absence, and deportation agents are tasked with trying to find them and return them to their countries. During the 2018 fiscal year, about a quarter of immigration judges’ case decisions were deportation orders for people who missed court, court data shows.

Advocates questioned whether monitoring systems matter in these cases, noting someone who wants to avoid court will stop checking in with deportation officers, trash their phone and move, whether on SmartLink or not.

They said they’re concerned that deportation agents could be tracking immigrants through SmartLink more than they are aware, just as commercial apps tap into location data on people’s phones.

In the criminal justice system, law enforcement agencies are using similar apps for defendants awaiting trial or serving sentences. Robert Magaletta, chief executive of Louisiana-based Shadowtrack Technologies, said the technology doesn’t continually track defendants but records their locations at check-ins, and that the company offers a separate, full-time tracking service to law enforcement agencies using tamperproof watches.

In a 2019 Congressional Research Service report, ICE said the app wasn’t continually monitoring immigrants. But advocates said even quick snapshots of people’s locations during check-ins could be used to track down friends and co-workers who lack proper immigration authorization. They noted immigration investigators pulled GPS data from the ankle monitors of Mississippi poultry plant workers to help build a case for a large workplace raid.

For immigrants released from detention with ankle monitors that irritate the skin and beep loudly at times, the app is an improvement, said Mackenzie Mackins, an immigration attorney in Los Angeles. It’s less painful and more discreet, she said, adding the ankle monitors made her clients feel they were viewed by others as criminals.

But SmartLink can be stressful for immigrants who came to the U.S. fleeing persecution in their countries, and for those who fear a technological glitch could lead to a missed check-in.

Rosanne Flores, a paralegal at Hilf and Hilf in Troy, Michigan, said she recently fielded panicked calls from clients because the app wasn’t working. They wound up having to report in person to immigration agents’ offices instead.

“I see the agony it causes the clients,” Flores said. “My heart goes out to them.” 
…