House lawmakers on Friday introduced sweeping antitrust legislation aimed at restraining the power of Big Tech and staving off corporate consolidation across the economy, in what would be the most ambitious update to monopoly laws in decades.
[news release] The U.S. Justice Department today announced its participation in a multinational operation involving actions in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, and Romania to disrupt and take down the infrastructure of the online marketplace known as Slilpp.
The Biden administration is sounding increasingly urgent alarms about high-profile ransomware attacks that have caused widespread gas shortages, shut meat processing plants and paralyzed hospitals, as officials step up efforts to counter cyberthreats.
The U.S. Department of Justice is elevating investigations of ransomware attacks to a similar priority as terrorism in the wake of the Colonial Pipeline hack and mounting damage caused by cyber criminals, a senior department official told Reuters.
[news release] It took nearly seven years for the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) to log its first million complaints. It took only 14 months to add the most recent million.
Globally, ransomware increased 148 percent [PDF] from 2019 to 2020, and last year the FBI reported [PDF] nearly $25 million in losses, which is likely just a small fraction of the total cost. These are large numbers but they fail to capture the societal impacts that ransomware wreaks upon communities. Local governments oversee water utilities, airports, schools, health care facilities, and other services that people tend to take for granted, and cyber criminals are all too aware of our dependency on these services. 2,400 U.S.-based governments, health-care facilities, and schools were victims of ransomware in 2020. These attacks disrupted medical treatment during a global pandemic, interrupted remote learning, and disabled public transportation.
Fuel deliveries to the east coast of the United States have been brought to a standstill by cybercriminals that have gained access to Colonial Pipelines’ networks and forced the company to shut down its distribution system. This attack comes on top of a ransomware attack on natural gas infrastructure last year and an explicit warning [PDF] from the Director of National Intelligence in 2019 that China had the ability to disrupt our pipeline infrastructure.
Never before have so many countries, including China, moved with such vigor at the same time to limit the power of a single industry.
China fined the internet giant Alibaba a record $2.8 billion this month for anticompetitive practices, ordered an overhaul of its sister financial company and warned other technology firms to obey Beijing’s rules.
China’s top diplomat had an interesting rejoinder to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s call in Anchorage this month to “strengthen the rules-based international order.” Such an order already exists, answered Politburo member Yang Jiechi. It’s called the United Nations.
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg laid out steps to reform a key internet law on Wednesday, saying that companies should have immunity from liability only if they follow best practices for removing damaging material from their platforms.