Mediaboss Marketing

By Manjeet Sehgal: The Punjab Police failed to arrest fugitive Khalistani leader Amritpal Singh, on the run for the past 32 days. The searches in Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and in the border areas with Nepal have been unsuccessful. The police now suspect he may be hiding in villages along the borders of Punjab-Haryana or Punjab-Rajasthan.

After escaping the police dragnet on March 18, the Waris Punjab De's chief, Amritpal Singh, released a video on March 29 and claimed he managed to escape and was safe.

Who is helping Amritpal Singh?

Singh managed to evade the police at least twice while in Punjab. His springing hints that there was a leniency on the part of Punjab Police and other agencies which might have helped him easily escape. The escapades also appear like a well-scripted thriller.

Also Read | 'Amritpal Singh wanted' posters put up in Punjabs Gurdaspur, rewards announced

The question now is who is helping him. The deployment of police and other forces and their failure to arrest him have been questioned by the Punjab and Haryana High Court.

Sikh leaders openly said that the case against Amritpal Singh has deep-rooted political implications.

"A huge force was deployed to arrest Amritpal Singh but he escaped. The government is now trying to vent its frustration with the public. Houses were raided. It was said he was in Pilibhit, in Rajasthan's Kalibangan. What is their fault for being harassed?" asked former Jathedar of the Akal Takht, Jasbir Singh Rode, who is heading a committee to help the families of Singh's aides charged under the NSA.

But where is Amritpal hiding? Sources in the police said he is somewhere in the country and has not fled India. Had he managed to flee, he would have released a video as he claimed in the previous one released in March that he would appear before the public.

Amritpal isolated, disgraced

Escaping the police has eroded Amritpal Singh's image as a hardline Khalistani. He used to claim that he would never run away and desert his supporters before the police launched their massive crackdown.

Also Read | Man, woman who helped Amritpal Singh flee detained in Mohali: Sources

While nine of his aides were arrested and charged under the NSA, Singh was left on his own on March 28 at Marnaiyan in Hoshiarpur, when his close aide Papalpreet ran in a different direction.

Papalpreet Singh, who was arrested on April 10 from Amritsar's Kathu Nangal, previously arranged logistics and refuge for Amritpal for 11 days between March 18 and March 28.

Amritpal, as per the police sources, stayed at the Rajpur Bhaian village on March 28. The police arrested Kuldeep Singh and Hardeep Singh, who sheltered him.

It was said that Amritpal managed to give the police a slip and went to Uttar Pradesh. There were speculations that he wanted to surrender before the Punjab Police on the eve of Baisakhi. There were also some leads that he might be hiding in Sangria, Hanumangarh. The Punjab Police and their Rajasthan counterparts raided Sangria's Santpur areas on April 12 and April 13.

Also Read | Punjab: Court sends Amritpal's key aide to three-day police remand

They also searched in Sirsa's Nagrana on April 16 based on inputs that Singh was hiding in the house of his supporter, Kehr Singh.

Interestingly, while the Akal Takht did not accept Amritpal's demand to hold a Sarbat Khalsa, it opposed the decision to invoke NSA against him and his aides. His alleged proposal to surrender at a religious place was also not entertained. The Akal Takht chief in fact asked him to surrender before the police.

Crackdown on Amritpal irks Akal Takht, SGPC

Sikh authorities, including the highest temporal authorities - the Akal Takht and the SGPC, have conveyed their displeasure with the invoking of NSA against Amritpal Singh and his aides.

"We have decided to extend legal and financial help to the families of those arrested under the NSA. This matter is neither economic nor legal. This is a political matter," Jasbir Singh Rode said.

Also Read | Punjab Police arrests woman who sheltered Amritpal Singh for 6 hours

The crackdown on Singh and his supporters, besides the pro-Khalistani social media channels, annoyed the Akal Takht so much that it termed the action 'anti-Sikh'. The deployment of police at religious places was also opposed.

The national media also faced its ire and were accused of defaming the Sikh community. The Akal Takht even set up a cell to monitor the national news channels and threatened to sue the media houses.

The SGPC, the organisation that manages the gurdwaras, has now decided to render financial and legal aid to the families of Singh's nine aides who have been charged with the NSA.

The body arranged a meeting of these families with the accused in Assam's Dibrugarh, where they have been lodged for security reasons, on Thursday but it did not happen as the group failed to meet the deadline.

Also Read | Amritpal's aide Joga Singh who helped him hide in Pilibhit arrested

The rest is here:
32 days on, Amritpal Singh on the run despite police searches, raids - India Today

Louisiana State University (LSU) and five Louisiana ports have forged a partnership to develop a pipeline of cybersecurity talent and technology in support of the state and the nations critical infrastructure. The collaboration, which grew out of the schools Scholarship First Agenda, brings together the universitys burgeoning cybersecurity expertise with the river ports of Greater Baton Rouge, South Louisiana, New Orleans and St. Bernard, along with Port Fourchon, the states leading coastal energy port.

The memorandum of understanding between LSU and the ports makes the university their official academic research partner. Under the plan, LSU students and faculty will work with the ports to tackle both current and emerging cyber issues. The partnership could include the development of cybersecurity testbeds, or controlled cyber environments that allow for experimentation, along with joint research and broader collaboration with state and federal security and law enforcement agencies. According to the announcement from LSU, the partnerships primary goal will be to create a pipeline of homegrown cyber talent for Louisiana.

The agreement builds on LSUs designation in 2022 as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations by the National Security Agency (NSA).

Like our students and research expertise, Louisianas port system impacts every corner of the state and has national and global reach, LSU President William Tate said. The Scholarship First Agenda elevates domains that meet citizens most pressing needs and define Louisianas role in the world. These areasagriculture, biomedicine, coast, defense (including cybersecurity) and energyall converge in Louisianas ports. Our designation last year by the [NSA] as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations, or CAE-CO, positions us as one of the best and most technical cybersecurity schools in the country, and were now connecting our talented students and experts with our friends here at Louisianas ports to tackle cybersecurity and critical infrastructure challenges across Louisiana.

Sign up for Waterway Journal's weekly newsletter.Our weekly newsletter delivers the latest inland marine news straight to your inbox including breaking news, our exclusive columns and much more.

The critical nature of Louisianas ports, specifically the five that are part of the LSU cybersecurity partnership, is clear. The ports of Greater Baton Rouge, South Louisiana, New Orleans and St. Bernard comprise the largest port complex in the world. Overall, 20 percent of all jobs in Louisiana rely on the states ports.

The Port of Greater Baton Rouge ranks eighth in total tonnage nationally and handles a wide range of commodities, including asphalt, coal, coffee, forest products, biomass, chemicals, oats, pipes, steel and sugar.

As one of the countrys top ports in total tonnage, we pride ourselves in our ability to adapt to emerging needs, said Jay Hardman, executive director of the Port of Greater Baton Rouge. From our docks, we have direct lines of sight to both the Capitol and LSUs campus, so we are well-positioned and excited to work with this group on cybersecurity challenges and talent development.

The Port of South Louisiana is the second largest port in the Western Hemisphere by tonnage and the nations leading grain port. More than 60 percent of U.S. grain exports leave through the Port of South Louisiana, along with 100 million tons of petrochemical products exported annually. Both agricultural products and petrochemicals have national security and global security significance.

The commerce that happens along the Lower Mississippi River at the Port of South Louisiana is intertwined with the national security of the United States, Port of South Louisiana CEO Paul Matthews said. This partnership with LSU and our sister ports will ensure that our states infrastructure and assets are protected in this ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape.

In New Orleans, cybersecurity concerns extend to cruise ship traffic and container handling, in addition to bulk cargo ships, cargo handling and towboat and tugboat traffic. The Port of New Orleans operates the states only international container terminal and the nations sixth largest cruise business.

Louisianas maritime assets create jobs and connect our state to global markets, and the Port of New Orleans is proud to partner with LSU and all Louisianas deepwater ports to raise the cybersecurity bar to ensure the highest levels of protection of our critical port infrastructurenow and into the future, said Brandy Christian, president and CEO of the Port of New Orleans.

The only deep draft slackwater slip on the Lower Mississippi River is located within St. Bernard Port, which employs close to 20 percent of St. Bernard Parish. The port sees an annual average of more than 10 million tons of cargo move through its terminals.

Given our unique position as a primary bulk handler of everything from metals for advanced manufacturing to fertilizer for our national and state food producers, as well as the only place on the Lower Mississippi with a deepwater slip, we fully recognize the importance of cybersecurity and protecting these assets, said Drew Heaphy, executive director of St. Bernard Port. We appreciate the opportunity to participate and look forward to working closely with LSU on talent development and retention and projects critical to our operations.

Along the coast, almost all of the Gulf of Mexicos offshore energy production and one-sixth of the nations oil supply are serviced by Port Fourchon in Lafourche Parish.

Our agency has a rich history as a leader in cybersecurity-related affairs, as do the other ports we are joined with today for this announcement, said Chett Chiasson, executive director of the Greater Lafourche Port Commission. We look forward to assisting with this worthwhile endeavor moving forward because we understand how vital cybersecurity is, for not only our region, but our nation.

Besides the pipeline for expertise the partnership will foster, it will also enable LSU and partner ports to work with federal and other research groups in the fields of defense, homeland security and intelligence. LSU, which already operates student-run Security Operations Centers at its Baton Rouge and Shreveport campuses, will also offer threat intelligence and incident response for ports and the states cyber emergency response efforts.

See the original post:
LSU Partners With Louisiana Ports To Tackle Cybersecurity ... - The Waterways Journal

NSA leaders are fighting to persuade Congress to renew a controversial law that cuts red tape for intelligence agencies eavesdropping on foreign actors but which has also been improperly used hundreds of times to collect data on Americans.

So FISA Section 702 is up for renewal this year. And it is a vital source of intelligence. It is an authority that lets us do collection against a known foreign entity who chooses to use U.S. infrastructure, Rob Joyce, the National Security Agencys cybersecurity director, said Tuesday during a Center for Strategic and International Studies event. It makes sure that we don't afford the same protections to those foreign malicious actors who are on our infrastructure as we do the Americans who live here.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, gives the U.S. government the ability to digitally spy on foreign targets outside of the U.S. without a warrant. But civil-liberties groups have documented hundreds of times that U.S. citizens social-media interactions, phone calls, and emails have accidentally been gathered in 702-related surveillance. New America calls such violations inadvertent or unintentional yet extremely concerning because they reveal systemic problems that result from the scope and complexity of the Section 702 surveillance program. Even the court that oversees FISA cases has noted violations.

But supporters of the law describe it as integral to intelligence and law enforcement efforts. Section 702 is set to expire and is up for reauthorization this year with an expected debate to come. And NSA plans to advocate hard for keeping it, Joyce said.

I can't do cybersecurity at the scope and scale we do it today without that authority, and so we'll be working hard with Congress, with the administration, with our partners at FBI and others, DOJ, to figure out how we get 702 reauthorized. It's really vital.

New privacy laws, as well as privacy provisions in cybersecurity laws, are complicating things as well. The standards advanced in the European Unions five-year-old General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, have presented some roadblocks for intelligence agencies.

There were second-order effects that we didn'tI won't say we didn't appreciate, because there were people sounding the alarm. They were not fully considered in the weight of that, Joyce said.

For example, it became more difficult to force internet registries to disclose who owns a domain name.

The default was you couldn't know that thing. And so cybersecurity researchers all over the world lost the ability to follow connectivity between banned domains. So we've got to think about second-order reflections, Joyce said. There is a need for data privacy, but we've got to have rational connectivity to the rule of law processes that still makes cybersecurity effective.

TikTok and ChatGPT: our friendly AI overlords?

Joyce said the concern with TikTok isnt potentially exposing personal data of a subset of individuals but the possibility that the Chinese government could access every bit of metadata the platform gathers.

Do I think if I loaded TikTok on my phone, they're going to get to all the other sensitive things through that TikTok app tomorrow? Probably not. The cost of exposing to TikTok in that way to exploit one or a small set of users probably isn't worth it. But all the data, the metadata, that they do collect, that goes back to big servers, accessible to Chinathat's a problem, Joyce said.

TikTok CEO Shou Chew, who faced intense questioning from Congress last month, pledged that the app would remove U.S. users non-public data to servers that can only be accessed by U.S.-based employees. But the NSA cyber director said, echoing lawmakers' concerns, that even the algorithms pose a threat.

The idea that they own the algorithms that promote or suppress the content. That's a huge problem when you have millions upon millions of eyes consuming the content, and they can dial up something that is divisive, or they can dial down something that is threatening to the PRC. That's the advantage, he said.

ChatGPT, which holds some promise to improve daily operations in the Pentagon, also poses concern to cybersecurity, particularly when it comes to crafting more sophisticated phishing messages.

The technology's impressive. It is really sophisticated, Joyce said. Is it going to, in the next year, automate all of the attacks on organizations? Can you give it a piece of software and tell it to find all the zero-day exploits for it? No, but what it will do is it's going to optimize the workflow. It's going to really improve the ability for malicious actors who use those tools to be better or faster.

That includes phishing or fraud messages that read more like native English-language speakers.

And in the case of the malicious foreign actors, it will craft very believable native-language English text, that could be part of your phishing campaign or your interaction with a person or your ability to build a backstoryall the things that will allow you to do those activities or even malign influencethat's going to be a problem, Joyce said.

AI will also help certain hackers reach a new level, he said.

Is it going to replace hackers and be this super AI hacking? Certainly not in the near term, but it will make the hackers that use AI much more effective and they will operate better than those who don't, he said.

Read the original here:
NSA Pushes Eavesdropping Law, Hits TikTok, Braces for AI-Boosted Attacks - Defense One

WASHINGTON Generative artificial intelligence that fuels products like ChatGPT will embolden hackers and make email inboxes all the more tricky to navigate, according to the U.S. National Security Agency cybersecurity director.

While much-debated AI tools will not automate or elevate every digital assault, phishing scheme or hunt for software exploits, NSAs Rob Joyce said April 11, what it will do is optimize workflows and deception in an already fast-paced environment.

Is it going to replace hackers and be this super-AI hacking? Certainly not in the near term, Joyce said at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. But it will make the hackers that use AI much more effective, and they will operate better than those who dont.

U.S. officials consider mastery of AI critical to long-term international competitiveness whether thats in defense, finance or another sector. At least 685 AI projects, including several tied to major weapons systems, were underway at the Pentagon as of early 2021.

With enough training, the technology can handle menial tasks, such as answering questions and digging up contact information, or augment military operations by parsing tides of incoming information and facilitating exploration of areas deemed too dangerous for troops.

Something as sophisticated as OpenAIs ChatGPT, Joyce said Tuesday, can be used to craft very believable native-language English text that can then be applied to phishing attacks or foreign influence campaigns. ChatGPT is capable of holding humanlike conversations with enough prompting, and it can provide content like poetry, essays or computer code within seconds.

Thats going to be a problem, Joyce said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged potential risks, telling ABC News in March that he worries about how these models could be used for large-scale disinformation and could be used for offensive cyberattacks. He also sought to explain its guardrails, meeting with lawmakers earlier this year to demystify the product.

ChatGPT logged more than 1 million users within a week of its late-2022 launch. The application is thought to be the fastest growing in history, outpacing TikTok and Instagram to 100 million active monthly users.

Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.

Read the rest here:
AI tools like ChatGPT likely to empower hacks, NSA cyber boss warns - C4ISRNET

Global, Networks / Cyber

WASHINGTON Russias invasion of Ukraine last year sent American tech firms scrambling to shore up their operations, especially those with workers in danger zones. But a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would have even more chaotic consequences for which businesses should start planning today, said the National Security Agencys director of cybersecurity, Rob Joyce.

We had a lot of companies who had to had to endure hard decisions and take rapid action at the time of the invasion in February 2022, Joyce said at the Center for Strategic & International Studies this morning. Often they had people in Ukraine that were now going to be in a war zone and they had to think about getting them out. They had Russian or Ukrainian sysadmins [systems administrators], and they had to think about what privileges they wanted them to have. They had network segments in Russia or Ukraine and they had to think about whether they severed that or firewalled that. They had to think about whether they just pulled all the way out of their Russian businesses and what the implications were.

Joyce said for all that complexity, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would even worse, considering how [much] more intertwined Taiwan is with the global economy and how much more of a cyber threat China may pose compared to Russia.

Thats a really hard problem, he emphasized, and you dont want to be starting that planning the week before an invasion when youre starting to see the White House saying its coming. You want to be doing that now and buying down your risk and making those decisions in advance and its really hard, so tabletop it and see where your pain points are.

Ukraine is a major global supplier of grain and a throughway for Russian oil and gas, which continues to flow through pipelines to Europe right across the war zone, so the war had global economic impacts, including potential famines in poor countries. Ukraine is also a significant source of cyber crime, much of it historically aligned with Russia, so conflicts between formerly friendly Russian and Ukrainian hackers have disrupted the criminal world.

But Taiwan is the global hub of semiconductor manufacturer, producing 60 percent of all chips and 90 percent of the most advanced ones, with a GDP three times larger than Ukraines. And unlike Ukraine, Taiwans an island, with no neighbors to drive or take the train to when companies need to evacuate people and assets. Any movement on or off Taiwan would have to pass through disputed waters where Chinese forces can attack, while anything leaving Ukrainian territory headed west has legal sanctuary as soon as it crosses the land border.

And China is a much bigger country than Russia, with more GDP and more technical talent to deploy. The threat of China is capacity and resources, Joyce said. Were used to kind of a narrative of this unsophisticated, loud threat and yes, there is an enormous amount of unsophisticated, loud Chinese threat. But there are also elite units that have tools and tradecraft that [are] very sophisticated. Thats the concern, [if] theyre able to scale and use that elite set of concepts and tools at a much bigger pace.

Despite the differences, Joyce said theres a lot of lessons to learn from how the Ukrainians protected themselves that apply to other scenarios, including US firms operating on Taiwan.

They were very resilient. How did they get that? They got there because they practiced for years, he said. Theyve gotten to the point where, you know, the Ukrainian sysadmins knew they had to have backups, and when they got a [data destroying] wiper virus they shrugged their shoulders, they cleaned the machine, they reloaded from backup and they moved on.

Whats more, he said, around the invasion they got an uplift from the US government providing resources, but [also] a lot of pro bono industry support, to make them much harder targets. One of the most important cyber-maneuvers: moving activity off of data centers physically on Ukrainian territory to cloud servers in the West. So instead of being on servers amidst the war zone, with a handful of Ukrainian systems administrators struggling with power outages, bombardments, and even potential takeover by Russian troops, Ukrainian networks increasingly ran off servers in sanctuary, on Western territory with vast teams of Western government and industry cyber defenders.

You now went from two people who were maintaining and operating those servers to teams of hundreds or thousands, Joyce said. Whats more, he said, those centralized Western cloud providers were easy points of contact for the NSA and other government backup support that could never have found its way to all the individual small operations previously scattered across Ukraine.

I wasnt going to find those two server admins in in Ukraine and be able to help them directly like that, he said.

See the original post here:
US tech firms should wargame response if China invades Taiwan, warns NSA cybersecurity chief - Breaking Defense