Posts Tagged ‘Equifax’

LinkSwarm for February 21, 2020

Friday, February 21st, 2020

Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Chinese Intel Officers Indicted for Stealing Personal Data of 145 Million Americans in Equifax Hack.”

    The Justice Department charged four Chinese intelligence officers on Monday with a 2017 hack of credit-reporting giant Equifax, which compromised the personal data of nearly 150 million Americans.

    “This was a deliberate and sweeping intrusion into the private information of the American people,” Attorney General William Barr said in a press conference on the announcement.

    Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei, members of the People’s Liberation Army’s 54th Research Institute, are charged with three counts of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, conspiracy to commit economic espionage, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, as well as two counts of unauthorized access and intentional damage to a protected computer, one count of economic espionage, and three counts of wire fraud.

    The indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in Atlanta last week, alleges that the soldiers used a vulnerability in Equifax’s online dispute portal to access its secure servers over several weeks. The group ran approximately 9,000 queries while routing traffic through 34 servers to secretly obtain names, birth dates, and social security numbers for nearly half of all American citizens, before compressing and exporting the data.

  • The Guardian reveals that the Sulemani strike was an even bigger blow to Iran’s terror network and regional ambitions than previously thought:

    “There were 11 bodies pulled from the wreckage,” said one official privy to the panicked conversations that swirled through the corridors of power that morning. “We are talking about the entire inner sanctum of the Quds Force. This wasn’t just Hajj Qassem [Suleimani] and Abu Mahdi [al-Muhandis]. This was everyone who mattered to them in Iraq and beyond.”

    Another source, a western intelligence agency, was more circumspect, suggesting that those killed may have been less decisive in the Iranian nexus than the Iraqis believed. “However, the [assassinations] may have significant repercussions for the relationship between the [Quds Force] and Iran-aligned groups in Iraq in the near term,” an official said.

    In the 40-day mourning period to mark the Iranian general’s death, which ended last Thursday, the fallout in Iraq has barely subsided. If anything, its impact has become more acute there, as well as in Suleimani’s homeland of Iran, and elsewhere in a region he had come to dominate like no other figure.

    From the bunkers of south Beirut to the battlefields of northern Syria and the combustible streets of Iraq, the loss of Suleimani and his entourage has derailed much of Iran’s momentum in the region and exposed to rare vulnerability the opaque Quds Force it has used to project its influence over two decades.

    The assassination has also shone a light on the complicated relationship between the Iranian leadership and the Iraqi government, senior members of which have scrambled ever since to resurrect Suleimani’s core regional projects located as far away as the Lebanese capital and Damascus. The reckoning started as soon as the dead were buried.

    Plus attempts by Iran to get Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to help fill the void.

  • “It’s Looking More and More Like Nevada Will Be Another Democratic Clusterfark.”

    In interviews, three caucus volunteers described serious concerns about rushed preparations for the Feb. 22 election, including insufficient training for a newly-adopted electronic vote-tally system and confusing instructions on how to administer the caucuses. There are also unanswered questions about the security of Internet connections at some 2,000 precinct sites that will transmit results to a central “war room” set up by the Nevada Democratic Party.

  • Margaret Thatcher warned about the perils of European integration:

    In a major speech about the future of Europe, delivered in Bruges on September 20th, 1988, she “began with a grand historical sweep, taking in the Romans, Magna Carta, the Glorious revolution and much more, all designed to show that Britain was part of European civilization.” Thatcher also made it clear that “Britain wanted no ‘cosy, isolated existence’ on the fringes: ‘Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.’”

    What Thatcher did oppose was the project of “ever-closer union,” and the resulting weakening of the influence of nation states. She believed that Europe should not be a centralizing power that incubated supranational institutions—particularly as this model of centralization was just then in the throes of spectacular failure within the Soviet Union. Instead, as she outlined in a speech at The Hague on May 15th, 1992, she favored a looser form of European co-operation, by which states retained their sovereign freedoms—including control of their borders. This, she believed, would accommodate the political and cultural diversity of Europe, including the eastern European countries that, she hoped, would be offered full EC membership. As Moore notes, in fact, she was one of the few prominent European politicians of the 1980s who had recognized that cities such as Warsaw, Prague and Budapest were very much European cities that had been cut off from their historical and cultural roots.

    In her speech at The Hague, as Moore summarizes it, “she prophesied that large-scale immigration caused by free movement would cause ‘ethnic conflict,’ and bring about the rise of extremist parties, that there would be ‘national resentment’ because of one-size-fits-all financial and economic policies under a single currency, and that a more centralized EC would not be able to work with the influx of new member states from the former Eastern Bloc.”

  • Washington Post is really concerned that elites don’t have enough say in choosing presidential candidates.
  • ICE isn’t having any of California’s nullification:

    ICE said in a statement that California’s law doesn’t supersede federal law and “will not govern the conduct of federal officers acting pursuant to duly enacted laws passed by Congress that provide the authority to make administrative arrests of removable aliens inside the United States.”

    “Our officers will not have their hands tied by sanctuary rules when enforcing immigration laws to remove criminal aliens from our communities,” David Jennings, ICE’s field office director in San Francisco, said in the statement.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Mexico is now the wall.
  • Clayton Williams, RIP. He was that close to beating Ann Richards for Texas governor in 1990 before he shot his mouth off, not realizing that you can never trusts journalists to keep something that hurts a Republican quiet. Had he won, it’s extremely doubtful that George W. Bush gets elected governor in 1994, and the modern history of America turns out very differently…
  • “The 25-year-old man accused of fatally stabbing a library security officer to death had been released without bail after being accused of trying to rape a woman at Montefiore Nyack Hospital in November.” Thanks to Democratic “reforms,” attempting to rape a woman in a hospital in New York is now effectively a misdemeanor.
  • Ilhan Omar DID marry her brother, reveals Somali community leader, who says both she and her husband told him Ahmed Elmi was her sibling and she would do what she had to do to get him ‘papers’ to keep him in US.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • See you in Hell. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • FATALITY!

  • One step closer to autonomous heroin-vending robots.
  • “Under financial stress, Oberlin College seeks to end unionized custodial and dining hall services.” Point and laugh, children…
  • Speaking of pointing and laughing: How #NeverTrumpers are the waterboys of the D.C. elite. “All of their predictions are based on the conventional wisdom and assumptions of an insulted and excluded D.C. intelligentsia, and all are wrong.”
  • White Bernie bro attacks black man wearing pro-gun T-shirt.
  • Trump plays the race card.
  • NASCAR driver Ryan Newman complained about safety so much that they added the “Newman bar” to their cars, which may have just saved his life.
  • Faster, Klingon! Kill! Kill!
  • How two different programmers made the same error in their code a decade apart, with the result that you can’t run two different programs if the other is running.
  • The pro-wrestling “heel” who helped desegregate Memphis.
  • Noble but sad dog tweet:

  • Funny dog tweet: