CyberWire Daily - The CyberWire Daily Podcast 2.9.16

Episode Date: February 8, 2016

In today's podcast, we continue to follow cyber crime's adoption of espionage tools. ISIS announces its priority targets. The UN and many member governments grapple with the challenge of developing counter-terror intelligence from online sources. Companies prepare for Privacy Shield. NSA supports undergraduate research at Marshall, East Tennessee State Universities. We also hear from the University of Maryland's Markus Rauschecker, who discusses the Department of Homeland Security's cyber mission. http://thecyberwire.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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but many challenges remain to be overcome. Support for weaker crypto weakens in the U.S. Congress, and NSA makes grants to support undergraduate participation in cyber research. This is John Petrick, the CyberWire's editor in Baltimore, filling in for Dave Bittner with your CyberWire Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 9, 2016. Kaspersky's been noticing increased adoption of cyber espionage tools by financial criminals. One group, the Russian gang using the Mattel crimeware package, has been able to establish the sort of complex persistence APT groups commonly achieve, and it's been using them for, among other things, raiding ATMs. ISIS has announced that its

principal targets in France will henceforth be demonstrations protesting immigration from the Middle East. Note that the targets announced are demonstrations, not groups, which suggests that physical violence against demonstrators is envisioned. It seems worth mentioning in this context that refugees' flight from the Middle East to Europe has been largely driven by ISIS itself. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon reported last week that some 34 groups, as he calls them, have in some fashion aligned themselves with ISIS. Police raids in Spain and Germany pull in suspected supporters of violent jihad, and another sometime Londoner

is identified as the western pointing face of atrocity in Syria. U.S. authorities appear to have turned one Jesse Morton into a snitch. Morton was the former proprietor of, quote, Revolution Muslim, unquote, an al-Qaeda recruiter and insider of violence against unbelievers and blasphemers. Morton has been released early from prison and is now reportedly following the path trod earlier by Lulzak Sabu, helping the feds build cases against his one-time clients and allies. Intelligence services would like very much to be able to mine social media for threat indicators and warnings, but data and social media are in many ways resistant to such analysis. The Baltimore Sun publishes notes on research efforts underway in DARPA and elsewhere designed to make the analytical problem more tractable. Part of the challenge lies in distinguishing bots from bods. More difficult still is distinguishing rants from serious threats,

irony from earnestness, and so on, as researchers grapple with the long recognized murkiness and fecundity of logical intentionality. Well, Willard Van Orman Quine called intentions creatures of darkness at least half a century ago, and creatures of darkness they remain, and in some ways that's probably a good thing. Twitter, like Google, is showing a tentative private sector contribution to combating radicalization. In Google's case, it's a display of counter-terrorist messages alongside search results that seem prompted by extremist leanings on the part of the searcher. With Twitter, on the other hand, it's deletion of accounts judged as belonging to extremists. There's still nothing to suggest that the private sector has a technical solution

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The director of NSA is considering reorganizing his own agency for greater efficiencies and effectiveness. The Department of Homeland Security, which owns responsibility for the.gov domain, among other things, is another significant player in federal cybersecurity. We spoke recently with the University of Maryland's Marcus Rauschecker, who gave us an overview of the department's roles and missions. Joining me is Marcus Rauschecker from the University of Maryland's Center for Health and Homeland Security. They are one of our academic and research partners. Marcus, the Department of Homeland Security, what are their roles and responsibilities in cybersecurity? Yes, so the Department of Homeland Security plays a lead role in cybersecurity. It is one of the agencies that is charged with a tremendous amount of roles and responsibilities when it comes to cybersecurity.

One of those important roles is the coordination of all of the cybersecurity efforts that are going on. So DHS will help coordinate a lot of the efforts on the federal side. It'll work with state and local partners to use all the resources available to make sure that the country as a whole has a good cybersecurity strategy. And it's my understanding that their role is expanding with new cyber legislation? Absolutely. So DHS's role is going to become ever more important, especially now that we have new cybersecurity legislation. DHS will essentially be the portal for all of the cyber threat information that the private sector is going to start sharing with federal government. All of the information that the private sector wants to share with the federal government

is going to go through DHS. So why DHS? Why specifically is their role expanding? So I think DHS's role is expanding for a couple of reasons. First, they've traditionally been the agency is expanding for a couple of reasons. First, they've traditionally been the agency that has done a lot of the coordination of cybersecurity information, cyber threat information on the civilian side. And it was also very important for privacy groups and civil liberties groups when the new cybersecurity legislation was passed, the Cyber Information Sharing Act was being formulated, that all the information going from private sectors should be going to a civilian agency. And of course, DHS was the

natural choice. Marcus Roschekker, thanks for joining us. Legislation aimed at limiting access to strong encryption seems to be losing momentum in the U.S. Congress as policymakers explore alternative approaches to law enforcement and intelligence collection. The recently concluded U.S.-EU Privacy Shield data transfer accord still needs to be worked out in practice. European mistrust of U.S. surveillance capabilities and presumed intentions are in conflict with U.S. and, in truth, European desire for more threat information sharing. EU officials think details of implementation will be firmer in about two months. sharing. EU officials think details of implementation will be firmer in about two months.

In the meantime, observers warn companies not to misread Privacy Shield as an agreement with only regional implications. It's expected to have far-reaching effects on how data are handled, especially in clouds. Some new educational initiatives are out and they're worth watching. NSA has made research grants to two universities, Marshall University of Huntington, West Virginia, and East Tennessee State of Johnson City, Tennessee. Both institutions are located in Appalachia. The NSA grants would support research that involves some significant undergraduate participation with the additional goal of bringing members of underrepresented regional groups into the cyber workforce.

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