Mediaboss Marketing

A popular sports site has been listed as an asset of community value.

The Newark Sports Association (NSA) has seen its application to secure Newark Flowserve Sports & Social Clubs status as an asset of community value approved by the district council.

It means the site, which is home to Newark FC and a number of other sports clubs, will now receive additional protection from development plans should the landowner decide to dispose of it, either through a freehold sale, or the grant or assignment of a qualifying lease.

Matthew Norton, business manager at Newark and Sherwood District Council, said: The asset met the test set out in Section 88 (2) of the Localism Act, as the asset has had a recent use which furthered the social wellbeing or social interests of the community and it is realistic to think that it could have such a use again in the next five years.

Paul Baggaley, secretary of the NSA, stressed playing fields like the one at Lowfields were an essential part of residents daily lives.

Nominating a local asset as an asset of community value is not a hostile act, said Mr Baggaley.

The NSA will work positively with any organisation that wants to nominate local assets that contribute to the cultural, recreational or sporting life of the town.

Communities and users could bring threatened assets to life if they are given the opportunity.

The answer is not always to build houses.

Parks, playing fields and open space is infrastructure like roads, schools and hospitals and they are an essential part of our daily lives.

The pandemic has increased the importance of sport and the need to stay physically active.

There are people who have been physically affected by covid-19 but there is a much larger group who have been financially affected.

Protecting assets that are close to peoples homes and are free to use is absolutely crucial if we are to recover from the pandemic and build back fairer and fitter communities.

Lowfields is also home to Newark FCs youth teams and is a popular site for charity sports events and school tournaments.

Running clubs and bowls clubs also use the site.

The NSA welcomed sports groups or organisations to get in contact with them should they wish to nominate an asset as an ACV.

You can do so by calling Paul Baggaley on 07903 623369.

Go here to read the rest:
Newark Flowserve Sports & Social Club boosted after securing safety net thanks to Newark Sports Association - Newark Advertiser

LookingGlass Cyber Solutions, a leader in operationalizing threat intelligence, today announced the addition of William (Bill) P. Crowell to its Advisory Board. This announcement is the first in a series of new appointments the company will be making toward advancing its vision and expertise in next-generation cybersecurity products.

Crowell served as Deputy Director of Operations at NSA, Chairman of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Senior Advisory Group, and as a member of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Advisory Board. Through these experiences, Crowell spent years investigating and improving military command and control, intelligence and security systems. Currently, Crowell is a partner at Alsop-Louie and an independent consultant specializing in information technology, security and intelligence systems. He brings a wide range of experience having served as Chairman, Director, President and CEO of a variety of technology companies, including Broadware Technologies, SafeNet, Inc., Cylink Corporation, ArcSight, Inc., Narus, Inc. and Six3 Systems, among others.

I have witnessed firsthand the expertise and insights Bill brings to the table, said LookingGlass CEO, Gilman Louie. With decades of experience and a deep understanding of both offensive and defensive cyber, Bill will serve a vital role in advising the growth and success of LookingGlass.

I have a long association with LookingGlass and consider them a leader in cyber threat intelligence, said Crowell. Im looking forward to joining the Advisory Board and am particularly excited about the LookingGlass products and capabilities which I believe have great appeal in todays market.

(Visited 7 times, 7 visits today)

Read the original here:
William P. Crowell, Former Deputy Director of the National Security Agency, Joins LookingGlass Advisory Board - HSToday

With help from Martin Matishak

Editors Note: Weekly Cybersecurity is a weekly version of POLITICO Pros daily Cybersecurity policy newsletter, Morning Cybersecurity. POLITICO Pro is a policy intelligence platform that combines the news you need with tools you can use to take action on the days biggest stories. Act on the news with POLITICO Pro.

State and local officials are meeting this week to discuss how to approach cybersecurity and election security issues in a chaotic time.

Two House panels announced the lawmakers who will lead key cyber subcommittees during this Congress.

Democratic lawmakers want answers from the NSA about an old scandal that they say has taken on new urgency in light of SolarWinds.

HAPPY MONDAY and welcome to Morning Cybersecurity! Cant believe we banished Pluto from the planet club when it was already dealing with this. Send your thoughts, feedback and especially tips to [emailprotected] and be sure to follow @POLITICOPro and @MorningCybersec. Full team info below.

STATES TAKE STOCK The 2020 election may (finally) be over, but election security remains a top issue for state officials, and its one of several cyber topics that they plan to discuss at a pair of conferences this week. The National Association of State Election Directors is meeting all week, while the National Association of Secretaries of State meets Tuesday through Friday. To say that officials have their plates full would be an understatement, but scattered in between panels about online notarization, corporate transparency and pandemic emergency orders are sessions that will help shape states cybersecurity priorities for the next year and beyond.

Secretaries of state will hear from the lawmakers whose committees oversee elections, including the Democrats pushing a sweeping election security and reform bill and the Republicans vehemently opposing it. House Administration Committee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and incoming Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) are likely to receive a frosty reception as they discuss the For the People Act (H.R. 1 and S. 1), a Democratic bill that includes major election security provisions. State election officials have consistently opposed new federal rules covering voting technology and election administration.

NASS will also hear from Brandon Wales, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which coordinates cybersecurity assistance to states on issues including ransomware and election security. And secretaries will meet behind closed doors to discuss the cybersecurity lessons from the 2020 election cycle.

Over at NASED, two top CISA officials overseeing election security work will discuss lessons from 2020 and priorities for 2021. Other NASED sessions will cover information sharing, incident response, misinformation and pandemic disruptions. Speaking of misinformation, NASS will hold a session about strategies for correcting false election claims.

NASS cybersecurity committee will hear about the value of collaborating with independent security researchers. State IT officials will discuss their collaborations with security companies, including two that run vulnerability disclosure programs. Researchers have spent years urging state officials to launch VDPs so good-faith experts can report flaws in state government systems, and officials are increasingly overcoming their doubts about trusting outside researchers.

Election officials across the country are committed to protecting the sanctity and integrity of the vote, and Im looking forward to this opportunity to share best practices with my colleagues, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a co-chair of the cyber committee, told MC.

A second panel discussion during the cyber committee meeting will look at the state and local cybersecurity landscape. From ransomware to pandemic-related digital services, state and local officials face a growing array of cyber challenges, and multiple organizations have repeatedly urged Congress to provide grant funding.

MEET THE GAVEL-WIELDERS We now know who will be leading two key cyber-related subcommittees in the 117th Congress, giving outside experts, federal officials and fellow lawmakers a sense of who theyll need to persuade to advance priorities from international norms to bolstering CISA.

Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) will chair the House Homeland Security Committees Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Innovation Subcommittee, panel chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) announced on Friday. Clarke, who previously led the subcommittee during the 111th Congress, is no stranger to cyber issues, having sponsored or cosponsored bills to improve critical infrastructure security and expand the cyber workforce. She has also urged a focus on cyber hygiene and a nuanced approach to regulation informed by industry input.

Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), a freshman lawmaker, will be the cyber subcommittees top Republican, according to a statement from panel ranking member John Katko (R-N.Y.). Republicans promised to prioritize cybersecurity as the pre-eminent national security threat of our time that demands an evolved approach. Fun fact: Three of the four leaders of the full committee and cyber subcommittee now hail from the same state for what appears to be the first time.

The homeland panels cyber subcommittee will have its hands full in this Congress as it deals with the SolarWinds cyber espionage campaign, CISAs response to SolarWinds and the agencys overall readiness, the supply chain threats posed by foreign-linked telecom companies and many other issues.

William Keating (D-Mass.) will lead the House Foreign Affairs Committees Europe, Energy, the Environment, and Cyber Subcommittee, according to the panels chair, Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.). Democrats just added cyber to this subcommittees name for the first time, although it already handled the issue as part of its previous emerging threats mandate. Keating hasnt said much about cybersecurity, but in 2017, he criticized then-President Donald Trumps refusal to acknowledge Russias responsibility for its 2016 election cyberattacks.

Among the issues on Keatings plate will be scrutinizing the State Departments creation of its new cyber diplomacy bureau. The outgoing Trump administration green-lit a plan to create the bureau in its final days, but Democratic lawmakers, the Government Accountability Office and some former officials have raised concerns about the plan, saying it fails to coordinate the full spectrum of cyber issues. Republicans have not yet announced their ranking member for the foreign affairs panels cyber subcommittee.

ONCE IS A FLUKE, TWICE IS A COINCIDENCE A group of House and Senate Democrats is pressing the NSA for answers about the spy agencys involvement in the creation of a digital vulnerability that made its way into the firewalls of technology vendor Juniper Networks. Their missive signals a growing awareness on the Hill of the dangers of supply chain attacks, in which hackers compromise software used by their real targets. In a Jan. 28 letter to NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone, the lawmakers led by incoming Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and including new House cyber subcommittee chair Clarke asked for details about the NSAs probe of the Juniper breach.

The American people have a right to know why NSA did not act after the Juniper hack to protect the government from the serious threat posed by supply chain hacks, the lawmakers wrote. A similar supply chain hack was used in the recent SolarWinds breach, in which several government agencies were compromised with malware snuck into the companys software updates.

The group asked Nakasone to answer a series of questions and made requests for additional information, including a Juniper lessons learned report that an NSA official mentioned to Wyden, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, during a 2018 briefing. The spy agency has yet to make the report available.

MAKING GOOD PROGRESS A U.N. group charged with developing international norms of responsible behavior in cyberspace wrapped up its latest session last week, and the State Departments cyber team praised the groups chief for presiding over a valuable meeting. We appreciate Brazilian Ambassador Guilherme Patriota for effectively chairing the latest session of the @UN Group of Government [sic] Experts on #cyber this week, the cyber office said on Twitter, adding that the GGEs work will help all UN member states understand the importance of cyber norms and the value of helping developing nations build the capacity to defend themselves.

The GGE, a small group championed by the U.S. and other Western nations, faces competition from a separate U.N. body created in 2018 at the urging of Russia. The newer Open-Ended Working Group, or OEWG, has drawn criticism from Western diplomats and independent cyber experts, who accuse Russia of using it to launder dangerous policies that would restrict internet freedom.

HERES TO YOU Colorados chief election official has bestowed an award on former CISA Director Chris Krebs for his leadership of the governments cyber agency during the 2020 election cycle. Krebs fought back against election domestic and foreign misinformation, and fortified election cybersecurity, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) said in a statement. At times Krebs pushed back on misinformation spread by the former President, which ultimately cost him his job. His courage, commitment, and leadership are one of the reasons the 2020 Election was the most secure in our nations history.

PEOPLE ON THE MOVE:

Ian Wallace has joined the State Department as a senior adviser in its cyber office. Wallace previously served as a senior fellow in the digital innovation and democracy program at the German Marshall Fund.

TWEET OF THE DAY Patch your bodies as soon as possible!

Nearly a third of victims in the SolarWinds campaign didnt use SolarWinds software and were instead hacked through a different vector. (Wall Street Journal)

By breaching the federal court system, the SolarWinds hackers may have accessed highly sensitive sealed documents. (Associated Press)

A far-right activist with a security clearance helped Russian hackers spread hacked documents stolen during Frances 2017 election. (Southern Poverty Law center)

A social media campaign used fake, AI-generated profiles to attack Belgiums plan to ban Huawei from its 5G network. (CyberScoop)

If hackers stole your identity and used it to get unemployment benefits, you might soon get a shocking tax bill. (Krebs on Security)

Thats all for today.

Stay in touch with the whole team: Eric Geller ([emailprotected], @ericgeller); Bob King ([emailprotected], @bkingdc); Martin Matishak ([emailprotected], @martinmatishak); and Heidi Vogt ([emailprotected], @heidivogt).

Here is the original post:
What to expect from NASS and NASED conferences - Politico

Sports News of Monday, 1 February 2021

Source: GNA

Coronavirus active cases are rising in Ghana

The National Sports Authority (NSA) has expressed dissatisfaction over the unacceptable behaviour of fans and the blatant disregard for COVID-19 safety protocols during a match-day 11 encounter between Hearts of Oak and Great Olympics played at the Accra Sports Stadium, last Saturday.

In a press statement signed by Mr Charles Amofah, Head of Public Relations of NSA, it said despite all the measures that have been put in place such as spaced out marked seats to ensure social distancing, fans were found jubilating, singing, hugging each other when their team scored, thus ignoring the safety protocols.

"In view of this, the Authority is using this medium to inform the Ghana Football Association(GFA) and the clubs using the facility that it would not hesitate to resort to matches being played behind closed doors, in order to ensure total adherence to the COVID-19 safety protocols.

"The Authority would like to assure the general public of its commitment to ensuring strict compliance with the COVID-19 safety protocols, in collaboration with the law enforcement agents deployed to our facility," the statement said.

In other related development, the President of the Republic, Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo has entreated the NSA and GFA to ensure the compliance with a 25% capacity rule in our stadium with spectators adhering to social distancing rule and the wearing of masks.

View original post here:
NSA fumes over the violation of coronavirus safety protocols - GhanaWeb

Gen. Paul Nakasone, the National Security Agency director, told NPR ahead of the 2020 elections that the U.S. was "going to expand our insights of our adversaries. ... We're going to know our adversaries better than they know themselves." Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption

Gen. Paul Nakasone, the National Security Agency director, told NPR ahead of the 2020 elections that the U.S. was "going to expand our insights of our adversaries. ... We're going to know our adversaries better than they know themselves."

Back in November, Kevin Mandia, CEO of the cybersecurity firm FireEye, opened his mailbox to find an anonymous postcard. It had a simple cartoon on the front. "Hey look, Russians," it read. "Putin did it."

He might not have given it a second thought were it not for one thing: His company had recently launched an internal security investigation after officials discovered someone had tried to register an unauthorized device into its network. That inquiry eventually led to the discovery of something even more worrisome: the breach of a Texas-based network monitoring company called SolarWinds.

U.S. officials now believe that hackers with Russia's intelligence service, the SVR, found a way to piggyback onto one of SolarWinds' regular software updates and slip undetected into its clients' networks. That means potentially thousands of companies and dozens of government departments and agencies may have been compromised.

President Biden was concerned enough about the attack that he brought it up in his first official call as president on Tuesday with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. It is unclear how Putin responded, but Russia has denied involvement in the past.

"We'll be poised to act"

A little over a year ago, the head of U.S. Cyber Command and the NSA, Gen. Paul Nakasone, began to talk openly about America's cyber operations and something he called "defend forward." The strategy is aimed at going toe-to-toe with adversaries in their networks instead of waiting for them to come and hack Americans here at home.

"Defend forward is a DOD strategy that looks outside of the United States," Nakasone told NPR as Cyber Command prepared for the 2020 elections. To impact adversaries, he said, the U.S. was "going to expand our insights of our adversaries. ... We're going to know our adversaries better than they know themselves. ... We're going to harden our defenses and ... we'll be poised to act."

At the time, the decision to talk about American cyber forces seemed like a classic deterrence strategy. Traditionally the NSA's mission was kept secret; Nakasone broke from that partly to assure Americans months before the 2020 elections that Cyber Command was prepared to defend U.S. networks while at the same time making clear to adversaries that U.S. cyber operators were primed.

Then Nakasone went a step further. He revealed in an NPR story large portions of Operation Glowing Symphony, an offensive cyber campaign the U.S. launched against ISIS that went a long way toward hobbling the terrorist organization's media and recruitment operation. If Russia were wondering just how skillful U.S. cyber operators were, Nakasone appeared to be saying, here's a little preview.

"It's a little bit different in cyberspace," Nakasone said at the time, "because you have foes that can come and go very, very quickly. They can buy infrastructure, they can develop their capabilities, they can conduct attacks. And what you have to do, from what I've learned, is you have to be persistent with that, and making sure that whenever they do that type of thing, you're going to be there and you're going to impact them."

In that spirit of low-grade confrontation, a few weeks before Americans cast their ballots in the 2020 election, NSA operators gave their Russian counterparts a little tweak: They sent individualized emails to specific Russian hackers, just to let them know U.S. cyber forces had their eye on them. It was an electronic version, in a sense, of that postcard that went to FireEye's Mandia.

Did Nakasone's discussion of U.S. cyber capabilities inspire Russian hackers to do something epic just to prove they could? Kiersten Todt, managing director of the Cyber Readiness Institute, said that while that might have played a small role, Russian cyber forces hardly needed an excuse to try their hand at compromising American networks.

"I think the Russians are emboldened to work against us and come after us for lots of reasons," she said. "And not the least of which could be us saying, 'Hey we're going to, you know, have a secure and safe 2020 election,' that would inspire them to say, 'Oh, no you're not, and while you are focusing on the election, we're actually going to come into your networks.' "

And that's what SolarWinds did it gave them entree into a roster of networks so they could look around to see what they could find. Even without any prodding from Nakasone, cybersecurity experts say, it was inevitable a supply chain hack such as this would happen.

The next-generation hack

There was a simpler version of this kind of breach back in 2013 when criminal hackers, not nation-states, got into the electronic registers at Target Corp. and stole credit card information. The theft made national news, and, for many Americans, it was an early harbinger of how hacking could affect them directly.

It turns out, the hackers didn't compromise Target's network that was too hard. Instead, they cracked into the network of the company that serviced Target's heating, ventilation and air conditioning system and stole its credentials, which allowed them to roam around Target's system unnoticed.

The HVAC contractor was part of the store's vast supply chain. Experts say we should see the SolarWinds hack as a more sophisticated version of that. Breaking into the Treasury Department is too hard, so the intruders found a comparatively easier mark a company whose job it is to monitor the very networks that were compromised.

With the SolarWinds breach, hackers have made clear that something doomcasters have been warning about for years has finally arrived. If adversaries pick the right contractor to hack, everyone that company works with is potentially vulnerable, too, said Richard Bejtlich, a former military intelligence officer who is now the principal security strategist at Corelight, a cybersecurity firm.

"If you were one of those organizations that had enough money to say, 'We want to have inventory management, we wanted to have network management, let's go with SolarWinds,' well, suddenly, that's opened you up to a whole new set of problems," he said.

That's why this is called a supply chain hack.

Bejtlich expects that in the coming weeks more companies will come forward and disclose they were part of this hack, too. So far the tally includes not just SolarWinds but also Microsoft and a cybersecurity firm called Malwarebytes. The NSA and U.S. Cyber Command haven't said anything about the attack publicly and declined to comment for this article.

They are part of a roster of intelligence officials still trying to assess the damage. Cyber officials told NPR that the investigation is in its earliest stages, but what they have determined so far is that to launch the attack and not be noticed, the SolarWinds breach had to have been planned long in advance. They said that likely hundreds of Russian software engineers and hackers were involved and that they spent time in the various networks for at least nine months before FireEye and later Microsoft discovered the breach.

"We think they were surprised it worked so well," one source who is helping trace the damage told NPR. He declined to be identified further because he is not authorized to speak about what they are discovering. "We think that once they got into SolarWinds and were inside their clients' network they had trouble deciding where to go next. It was successful beyond their wildest imaginations, and they didn't have enough people to work it all."

Biden has asked his new national security team for an assessment of the SolarWinds attack. He wants to know how it happened, how far it went and how to fix it. These kinds of reviews are standard operating procedure when administrations change hands.

Among the questions officials will try to answer is whether the SolarWinds hack was a straightforward espionage operation or something more sinister. Were the hackers just looking for information, or have they inserted backdoors into systems across the country that could allow them to turn things off, or change information with just a couple of keystrokes?

Another thing investigators would like to know: whether the hackers themselves sent that postcard to FireEye's Mandia.

Continued here:
NSA Warned Russia to Stay Out Of 2020 Election And Got SolarWinds Hack Instead - NPR