dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Coast Guard lieutenant accused of terrorism granted release

GREENBELT, Md. (AP) — A federal magistrate has agreed to the pre-trial release of a Coast Guard lieutenant accused of being a domestic terrorist.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul Day noted on Thursday that 50-year-old Christopher Hasson hasn't been charged with any terrorism related offenses. Hasson was arrested Feb. 15 and is awaiting trial on firearms and drug charges. Prosecutors say he created a hit list of prominent Democrats, two Supreme Court justices, network TV journalists and social media company executives.

Day says he still has "grave concerns" about Hasson based on information prosecutors have presented. The magistrate says Hasson is "going to have to have a whole lot of supervision."

Day planned to order home confinement and electronic monitoring for Hasson. It's not clear where Hasson will be confined or when he'll be released.

https://www.wbal.com/article/385646/127/coast-guard-lieutenant-accused-of-terrorism-granted-release

FEMA ‘Stabilizing Core Infrastructure’ to Prevent Perfect Storm of Cyber Calamities

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is focused on “stabilizing the core infrastructure and the core environment” to keep the agency and its partners securely connected during a crisis, including upgrading aging infrastructure to support the latest security controls, said the agency’s acting deputy chief information officer for disaster operations.

“The biggest concern and the biggest issue as we move to the cloud is to ensure it’s a secure move, that the data is secure, that the environment is secure… ensuring that we have a secure connection is critical,” Scott Bowman, who has more than two decades of experience at FEMA, told HSToday at the Government Technology & Services Coalition’s Emergency Management 2019 event.

“Ensuring that we have scalability in that connectivity – we need to ensure that we just don’t have a very scalable, elastic cloud that has infinite compute capability, but we’re limited on the network side of the house,” he said. “So an area of focus is ensuring the bandwidth and connectivity to the cloud is through a secure connection that is adequate to meet the need.”

This spring, hackers were responsible for blaring tornado emergency warning sirens in Texas and one Illinois city said it planned to pull its sirens after multiple hacks.

Bowman said the vulnerability of systems such as these underscores how FEMA must be “building in security with everything, considering everything we do on a daily basis.”

“It’s not only having the physical security and securing the network but it’s also educating the users, because all it takes is one user accidentally giving out their password to a malicious actor, and they could exploit that,” he said. “Or not securing a device. So a lot of ‘trust but verify’ – people will say that they’ve secured a device, that they’ve secured a system, but continual scanning and continuous diagnostics and mitigation are required.”

“Because something may be secured today and tomorrow, but it’s possible a future change may be made to an environment that leaves it unsecure. So just continually monitoring and checking everything we can on the network systems, applications, network devices, laptops, phones, all of those, ensuring that penetration points are protected.”

Bowman noted that “a lot of users know that they shouldn’t click on something or shouldn’t do something, but it’s very tempting – they receive a spam email or a spear phishing email.”

“My big wish would be that we could alleviate the malware via the browsers and the spear phishing emails,” he said. “We have a sophisticated email system that blocks a lot of the malicious email, a lot of the spear phishing emails, a lot of those types of threats, but our adversaries are continually changing to bypass those products so we can’t catch all of them.”

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https://www.hstoday.us/federal-pages/dhs/fema-dhs-federal-pages/fema-stabilizing-core-infrastructure-to-prevent-perfect-storm-of-cyber-calamities/