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Aug 14, 2017-

In a decision that would shock country's swimming community, Nepal Swimming Association (NSA) has introduced a regulation barring swimmers from participating in more than four events, which according to NSA insiders serves a sole purpose to deny national teenage swimming sensation Gaurika Singh from participating in multiple events.

NSA intends to implement this new regulation in the upcoming National Swimming Championships scheduled to begin from August 17.

The National Swimming Competition organising committee under Vice Chairman Gita Rana, also a lawmaker, announced the competition dates and the regulation that would bar swimmers from participating in more than four events. The organising committee said such move was aimed at making the competition more inclusive.

Keeping in view the inclusiveness in the sport, we have introduced the regulation that no players will be allowed to participate in more than four events so that only one player will not win all the events, said NSA officials during a press meet on Sunday.

The final date for the submission of event participation form was August 26 and Singh had submitted application for entry form at the NSA, National Sports Council and Sports Ministry.

NSA, however, has also gone a step further and is mulling postponement of the national event in a bid to discourage the youngest Olympian in the history of the sport from participating in the competition. However, the association has not taken a final decision on the event postponement issue.

The associations one of a kind regulation is almost unheard in the swimming world.

Singh, 14, has 30 national records to her name and her competitors fear diving into the same pool with her as some of her timings fare much better even than her national male counterparts.

During the 12th South Asian Games, Singh won a record 4 medalsone silver and three bronze to better her own national recordat the age of 14.

Gaurika, who currently lives with her parents in London, England, arrived in Nepal on August 2 to take part in the national competition. Singh had reached the finals of English Age Group Championship and British Open Water Championship back in England but opted not to take part in it and instead fly to Nepal for the national competition.

Meanwhile, FINA (International Swimming Federation), the regulatory body for administering international competition in water sports, has no such regulation and allows athletes to participate in any events they wish to, even in the Olympics.

Katie Ledecky of the United States had won six medals at the World Swimming Championships that was held on July 30 in Hungary and legendary swimmer Michael Phelps also had won eight gold medals in the Beijing Olympics.

Likewise, in Nepal Karishma Karki had secured 12 gold medals in the 5th edition of national championships and and Shirish Gurung had claimed 14 gold medals in the 7th National Swimming Championships.

Similarly, Singh, during the 19th edition of the national swimming competition had won 8 gold and 1 silver medals along with national record in her belt at the age of 11 and on the 20th swimming championship she had won 6 gold medals.

Meanwhile, Paras Bahadur Singh, Gaurikas father, has said that they may be compelled to search for other options if NSA keeps on obstructing Gaurikas participation in national events.

Gaurika has achieved so much for the country in a small age, said Paras, For her (Gaurika) Nepal and swimming matters the most but if the association keeps on creating hurdles then we have to look for other options as well.

Published: 14-08-2017 13:34

Continued here:
NSA enforces regulation in bid to restrict Gaurka Singh's participation in multiple events - The Kathmandu Post

As leaked NSA software exploits have been redeployed to cause computer-based misery all over the world, the discussion about vulnerability disclosures has become louder. The argument for secrecy is based on the assumption that fighting an existential threat (terrorism, but likely also a variety of normal criminal behavior) outweighs concerns the general public might have about the security of their software/data/personal information. Plenty of recent real-world examples (hospital systems ransomed! etc.) do the arguing for those seeking expanded disclosure of vulnerabilities and exploits.

Former Deputy Director of the NSA Rick Ledgett appears on the pages of Lawfare to argue against disclosure, just as one would have gathered by reading his brief author bio. Ledgett's arguments, however, feel more like dodges. First off, Ledgett says the NSA shouldn't have to disclose every vulnerability/exploit it has in its arsenal, an argument very few on the other side of the issue are actually making. Then he says arguments against exploit hoarding "oversimplify" the issue.

The WannaCry and Petya malware, both of which are partially based on hacking tools allegedly developed by the National Security Agency, have revived calls for the U.S. government to release all vulnerabilities that it holds. Proponents argue that this would allow patches to be developed, which in turn would help ensure that networks are secure. On its face, this argument might seem to make sensebut it is a gross oversimplification of the problem, one that not only would not have the desired effect but that also would be dangerous.

At this point, you'd expect Ledgett to perform some de-simplification. Instead, the post detours for a bit to do some victim-blaming. It's not the NSA's fault if undisclosed exploits wreak worldwide havoc. It's the end users who are the problem -- the ones who (for various reasons) use outdated system software or don't keep current with patches. This isn't a good argument to make for the very reasons outlined in Ledgett's opening paragraph: software vendors can't patch flaws they're unaware of. This is where disclosure would help protect more users, even if it meant the loss of some surveillance intercepts.

Then Ledgett argues the NSA's leaked exploits weren't really the problem. If they hadn't been available, the malware purveyors just would have used something else.

The actors behind WannaCry and Petya, believed by some to be from North Korea and Russia, respectively, had specific goals when they unleashed their attacks. WannaCry seemed to be straightforward but poorly executed ransomware, while Petya appeared to have a more sinister, destructive purpose, especially in the early Ukraine-based infection vector. Those actors probably would have used whatever tools were available to achieve their goals; had those specific vulnerabilities not been known, they would have used others. The primary damage caused by Petya resulted from credential theft, not an exploit.

This is undoubtedly true. Bad actors use whatever tools help them achieve their ends. It's just that these specific cases -- the cases used by Ledgett to argue against increased disclosure -- were based on NSA exploits vendors hadn't been informed of yet. The patches that addressed more current vulnerabilities weren't issued until after the NSA told Microsoft about them, and it only did that because its toolset was no longer under its control.

Ledgett also points out that the NSA does better than most state entities in terms of disclosure:

Most of the vulnerabilities discovered by the U.S. government are disclosed, and at the National Security Agency the percentage of vulnerabilities disclosed to relevant companies has historically been over 90 percent. This is atypical, as most world governments do not disclose the vulnerabilities they find.

Maybe so, but there's not much honor than just being better than the worst governments. Ledgett only says the NSA is better than "most." This doesn't turn the NSA into a beacon of surveillance state forthrightness. All it does is place it above governments less concerned about the security and wellbeing of their citizens.

Ledgett then goes back to the well, claiming a) the two recent attacks had nothing to do with the NSA, and b) disclosing vulnerabilities would make the NSA less effective.

WannaCry and Petya exploited flaws in software that had either been corrected or superseded, on networks that had not been patched or updated, by actors operating illegally. The idea that these problems would be solved by the U.S. government disclosing any vulnerabilities in its possession is at best naive and at worst dangerous. Such disclosure would be tantamount to unilateral disarmament in an area where the U.S. cannot afford to be unarmed Neither our allies nor our adversaries would give away the vulnerabilities in their possession, and our doing so would probably cause those allies to seriously question our ability to be trusted with sensitive sources and methods.

The problem here is that Ledgett ignores the obvious: leaked NSA tools helped create the problem. The NSA never disclosed these vulnerabilities to affected software vendors -- at least not until it became obvious it could no longer keep these tools secret.

I'm guessing the NSA is already living through the last part of Ledgett's paragraph. A set of effective, still-undisclosed vulnerabilities being digitally spirited away and dumped into the public's lap probably makes it less likely foreign surveillance partners will be sharing their malware toolkits with the NSA.

This leads right into another argument against vulnerability hoarding: it has been shown with complete clarity that the NSA can't guarantee its exploits will never be used by criminals and malicious governments. The leak of its toolkit shows any suggestion that only the "good guys" will have access to undisclosed vulnerabilities is both ignorant and arrogant. The NSA isn't untouchable. Neither are all the surveillance partners the NSA has shared its tools with.

In the end, it's the private sector's fault, according to Ledgett. The solution is for vendors to write better software and end users to patch more frequently. This is good advice, but not an absolution of the NSA's vulnerability secrecy.

The NSA needs to do better balancing its needs and the security of the general public. Very few people are arguing the NSA should have zero undisclosed exploits. But the exploits dumped by the Shadow Brokers affected older versions of Microsoft system software dating back to Windows XP and they still weren't patched until the exploits had already been made public. These were exploits some in the NSA thought were too powerful, and yet, the NSA did nothing until the malware offspring of its secret exploit stash were taking down systems all over the world.

Read more:
Former NSA Official Argues The Real Problem With Undisclosed Exploits Is Careless End Users - Techdirt

The National Security Agencys mass surveillance has greatly expanded in the years since September 11, 2001. Disclosures have shown that, until recently, the government regularly tracked the calls of hundreds of millions of Americans. Today, it continues to spy on a vast but unknown number of Americans international calls, text messages, web-browsing activities, and emails.

The governments surveillance programs have infiltrated most of the communications technologies we have come to rely on. They are largely enabled by a problematic law passed by Congress the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which is set to expire this year along with Executive Order 12,333, the primary authority invoked by the NSA to conduct surveillance outside of the United States. The Patriot Act has also made it easier for the government to spy on Americans right here at home over the past 15 years. Although the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court oversees some of the governments surveillance activities, it operates in near-total secrecy through one-sided procedures that heavily favor the government.

Our Constitution and democratic system demand that government be transparent and accountable to the people, not the other way around. History has shown that powerful, secret surveillance tools will almost certainly be abused for political ends.

The ACLU has been at the forefront of the struggle to rein in the surveillance superstructure, which strikes at the core of our rights to privacy, free speech, and association.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA) gives the NSA almost unchecked power to monitor Americans international phone calls, text messages, and emails under the guise of targeting foreigners abroad. The ACLU has long warned that one provision of the statute, Section 702, would be used to eavesdrop on Americans private communications. In June 2013, The Guardian published documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden confirming the massive scale of this international dragnet. Recent disclosures also show that an unknown number of purely domestic communications are monitored, that the rules that supposedly protect Americans' privacy are weak and riddled with exceptions, and that virtually every email that goes into or out of the United States is scanned for suspicious keywords.

In 2008, less than an hour after President Bush signed the FAA into law, the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality. The case, Amnesty v. Clapper, was filed on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and organizations whose work requires them to engage in sensitive and sometimes privileged telephone and email communications with individuals located abroad. But in a 54 ruling handed down in February 2013, the Supreme Court held that the ACLU plaintiffs did not have standing to sue because they could not prove their communications had actually been surveilled under the law.

In March 2015, the ACLU filed Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA, a lawsuit challenging Upstream surveillance under the FAA. Through Upstream surveillance, the U.S. government copies and searches the contents of almost all international and many domestic text-based internet communications. The suit was brought on behalf of nine educational, legal, human rights, and media organizations, including the Wikimedia Foundation, operator of one of the most-visited websites on the internet. Collectively, the plaintiffs engage in more than a trillion sensitive internet communications every year, and each has been profoundly harmed by NSA surveillance.

Executive Order 12,333, signed by President Reagan in 1981 and modified many times since, is the authority primarily relied upon by the intelligence agencies to gather foreign intelligence outside of the United States. Recent disclosures indicate that the U.S. government operates a host of large-scale programs under EO 12333, many of which appear to involve the collection of vast quantities of Americans information. These programs have included, for example, the NSAs collection of billions of cellphone location records each day; its recording of every single cellphone call into, out of, and within at least two countries; and its surreptitious interception of data from Google and Yahoo user accounts as that information travels between those companies data centers located abroad.

In December 2013, the ACLU, along with the Media Freedom Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit demanding that the government release information about its use of EO 12,333 to conduct surveillance of Americans communications.

For many years, the government claimed sweeping authority under the Patriot Act to collect a record of every single phone call made by every single American "on an ongoing daily basis." This program not only exceeded the authority given to the government by Congress, but it violated the right of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment, and the rights of free speech and association protected by the First Amendment. For this reason, the ACLU challenged the government's collection of our phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act just days after the program was revealed in June 2013 by The Guardian. In May 2015, a court of appeals found that the phone records program violated Section 215, and Congress allowed the provision to expire in June of that year. The program was reformed by the USA Freedom Act, which passed days later.

To bring greater transparency to the NSA's surveillance under the Patriot Act, the ACLU filed two motions with the secretive FISC asking it to release to the public its opinions authorizing the bulk collection of Americans' data by the NSA.

Our earlier work to reform the Patriot Act includes a number of successful challenges to the government's use of and secrecy surrounding National Security Letters.

The ACLU has long fought to bring greater transparency and public access to the FISC the secretive court that oversees the governments surveillance programs. When the FISC was first established in 1978, it primarily assessed individual surveillance applications to determine whether there was probable cause to believe a specific surveillance target was an agent of a foreign power. In recent years, however, the FISCs responsibilities have changed dramatically, and the FISC today oversees sweeping surveillance programs and assesses their constitutionality all without any public participation or review.

The ACLU has been advocating and petitioning for access to the FISC for more than a decade, working with Congress and the executive branch, and appearing before the court itself to push for greater transparency. Days after the courts Section 215 order was published in the press in June 2013, we filed a motion seeking access to the secret judicial opinions underlying the NSA's mass call tracking program. We have since filed two other access motions in the FISC, seeking significant legal opinions authorizing bulk collection and those interpreting the governments secret surveillance powers in the years after 9/11. We also signed a brief filed in the FISC in support of the First Amendment rights of the recipients of FISC orders, such as telephone and internet companies, to release information about the type and volume of national security requests they receive from the NSA and the FBI.

Secret law has no place in a democracy. Under the First Amendment, the public has a qualified right of access to FISC opinions concerning the scope, meaning, or constitutionality of the surveillance laws, and that right clearly applies to legal opinions interpreting Americans' bedrock constitutional rights. We all have a right to know, at least in general terms, what kinds of information the government is collecting about innocent Americans, on what scale, and based on what legal theory.

See the original post:
NSA Surveillance | American Civil Liberties Union

Ms. Smith (not her real name) is a freelance writer and programmer with a special and somewhat personal interest in IT privacy and security issues.

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A Russian government-sponsored cyberespionage group has been accused of using a leaked NSA hacking tool in attacks against one Middle Eastern and at least seven European hotels in order to spy on guests.

Why reinvent the wheel, or a hacking tool, when the NSA created such an effective one? The NSAs EternalBlue was leaked online by the Shadow Broker in April. Now the security firm FireEye says it has a moderate confidence that Fancy Bear, or APT28, the hacking group linked to the Russian government and accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee last year, added EternalBlue to its arsenal in order to spy on and to steal credentials from guests at European and Middle Eastern hotels.

In a campaign aimed at the hospitality industry, attackers leveraged a malicious document in spear-phishing emails. The hostile hotel form, which Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center General Manager John Lambert tweeted about in July, appeared to be a hotel reservation document. If macros were allowed to run on the computers used by the hotel employees who opened it, then Fancy Bears Gamefish malware would be installed.

Fancy Bear, according to a report by the security firm FireEye, used novel techniques involving the EternalBlue exploit and the open source tool Responder to spread laterally through networks and likely target travelers. Once inside the network of a hospitality company, APT28 sought out machines that controlled both guest and internal Wi-Fi networks.

The Gamefish malware would download and run EternalBlue to spread to computers which were connected to corporate and guest Wi-Fi networks. After gaining access, Fancy Bear deployed Responder which listens for broadcasts from victim computers attempting to connect to network resources. Responder, FireEye explained, masquerades as the sought-out resource and causes the victim computer to send the username and hashed password to the attacker-controlled machine.

Its definitely a new technique for Fancy Bear, FireEyes cyber espionage researcher Ben Read told Wired. Its a much more passive way to collect on people. You can just sit there and intercept stuff from the Wi-Fi traffic.

While FireEye didnt observe business travelers credentials being stolen via hotel Wi-Fi networks in July, the security firm cited a similar hotel attack by Fancy Bear in 2016.

In the 2016 incident, the victim was compromised after connecting to a hotel Wi-Fi network. Twelve hours after the victim initially connected to the publicly available Wi-Fi network, APT28 logged into the machine with stolen credentials. These 12 hours could have been used to crack a hashed password offline. After successfully accessing the machine, the attacker deployed tools on the machine, spread laterally through the victim's network, and accessed the victim's OWA account. The login originated from a computer on the same subnet, indicating that the attacker machine was physically close to the victim and on the same Wi-Fi network.

The latest hotel attacks, FireEye added, is the first time we have seen APT28 incorporate this exploit [EternalBlue] into their intrusions. While the investigation is still going on, FireEye told Reuters it is moderately confident that Fancy Bear is behind the attacks. We just don't have the smoking gun yet.

The targeted hotels were not named, but were described as the type where valuable guests would stay. FireEye told Wired, These were not super expensive places, but also not the Holiday Inn. Theyre the type of hotel a distinguished visitor would stay in when theyre on corporate travel or diplomatic business.

FireEye wants travelers, such as business and government personnel, to be aware of the threats like having their information and credentials passively collected when connecting to a hotels Wi-Fi. While traveling abroad, high value targets should take extra precautions to secure their systems and data. Publicly accessible Wi-Fi networks present a significant threat and should be avoided whenever possible. Wired suggested the safest approach for travelers is to bring their own hotspot and altogether skip connecting to the hotels Wi-Fi.

Ms. Smith (not her real name) is a freelance writer and programmer with a special and somewhat personal interest in IT privacy and security issues.

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See more here:
Russian hackers used NSA's leaked EternalBlue exploit to spy on hotel guests - CSO Online

Print Sunday 13th August, 2017 Accra, Aug. 11, GNA - StarTimes, official Broadcaster of the Ghana Premier League, on Friday, met the leadership of the National Sports Authority (NSA). The StarTimes delegation held fruitful discussion with the Director General of the NSA, Mr. Robert Sarfo Mensah concerning the development of sports in the country. As part of StarTimes' aim of getting involved in promoting all sports in Ghana,

Accra, Aug. 11, GNA - StarTimes, official Broadcaster of the Ghana Premier League, on Friday, met the leadership of the National Sports Authority (NSA).

The StarTimes delegation held fruitful discussion with the Director General of the NSA, Mr. Robert Sarfo Mensah concerning the development of sports in the country.

As part of StarTimes' aim of getting involved in promoting all sports in Ghana, the NSA boss was consulted to partner the dream.

According to the Country Director of StarTimes, Leo Hao, sports must have a new look in Ghana.

"It is our dream to help grow Ghana sports.

"We want a successful collaboration that will see all sports get a better face lift as we are committed to grow sports in all aspects."

Mr. Sarfo Mensah was delighted to meet the StarTimes delegation and confirmed his office's readiness to partner them.

"My office wants to give Ghana sports the best, in terms of development.

"We are actually preparing to host the National Sports Festival, where more talents will be identified and nurtured. "

"I am very glad to have you and am confident that we can together promote Ghana sports," he noted.

GNA

Read this article:
StarTimes pay courtesy call on NSA boss - Ghana News Agency