Hillicon Valley: Biden to confront cyberattacks following Kaseya attack | JEDI contract axed | Tech giants warn Hong Kong
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White House press secretary Jen Psaki said President Biden is scheduled to meet with leaders across federal agencies to discuss solutions to the spike in ransomware attacks. Psaki’s announcement about Biden’s meeting to address the issue came the same day software company Kaseya acknowledged that as many as 1,500 companies worldwide were potentially compromised in last week’s attack.
BIDEN TO CONFRONT RANSOMWARE ATTACKS: President Biden on Wednesday will meet with officials at several federal agencies to discuss solutions for confronting the ongoing wave of ransomware attacks.
“Tomorrow the president will convene key leaders across the interagency, including the State Department, Department of Justice, DHS [Department of Homeland Security], and members of the intelligence community to discuss ransomware and our overall strategic efforts to counter it,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Tuesday.
She stressed that the spike in ransomware attacks, including one Friday on software group Kaseya that potentially compromised up to 1,500 companies, was a key topic of concern for Biden.
“It is something that from Day One he has made a priority and has asked his team to focus on where we can have an impact, how we can better work with the private sector, and what we can do across the federal government to help address and reduce ransomware attacks on our critical infrastructure, but also on a range of entities in the United States,” Psaki said.
Speaking of cyberattacks: As many as 1,500 companies around the world were potentially compromised by a ransomware attack late last week on software company Kaseya, it acknowledged Monday.
Kaseya, which was hit by a ransomware attack likely carried out by a Russian cyber criminal group, announced that while about 50 of its customers were directly impacted, those customers provided information technology services to between 800 and 1,500 companies that were also potentially compromised.
Kaseya stressed that the number of groups hit by the attack would have been far higher — as many as 1 million companies managed by Kaseya’s 35,000 customers — but that the breach had only a “limited impact.”
“Our global teams are working around the clock to get our customers back up and running,” Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola said in a statement. “We understand that every second they are shut down, it impacts their livelihood, which is why we’re working feverishly to get this resolved.”
THE END OF THE JEDI: The Pentagon on Tuesday axed a $10 billion cloud computing project after it became sidelined by a legal battle involving Amazon and Microsoft.
Both companies, however, will likely win deals from a new, multibillion-dollar, multivendor effort to create the Defense Department’s cloud capability.
“Today, the Department of Defense (DoD) canceled the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud solicitation and initiated contract termination procedures,” the department said in a statement.
Amazon for more than a year has contested the $10 billion contract awarded to Microsoft in October 2019.
ICYMI: A WARNING TO HONG KONG: Tech giants including Facebook, Google and Twitter have reportedly issued a warning to Hong Kong’s government that their services may be cut off in the city if authorities proceed with data protection laws that would make the companies liable if individuals’ personally identifiable information is released without their consent, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The warning was made in a previously unreported letter sent on June 25 from the Singapore-based Asia Internet Coalition (AIC), the Journal reports. Other members of the coalition include Apple, Amazon, Yahoo and LinkedIn.
The proposed amendments to Hong Kong’s data protection laws call for fines of up to 1 million Hong Kong dollars, about $128,800, and as much as five years in prison to combat “doxxing,” in which an individual’s private data is shared online. The Journal notes that this practice became prevalent when pro-democracy protests broke out in the city in 2019.
An op-ed to chew on: America’s global leadership in human-centered AI can’t come from industry alone
Lighter click: Happy sixth!
NOTABLE LINKS FROM AROUND THE WEB:
Racist graffiti, ‘plantation’ jokes and 100 potential lawsuits: Ex-workers say Tesla is still racist (Protocol / Anna Kramer)
This Manual for a Popular Facial Recognition Tool Shows Just How Much the Software Tracks People (TheMarkup / Alfred Ng)
Meet the Republican behind the House’s bipartisan antitrust deal (The Verge / Makena Kelly)
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