U.S. Taps Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Others to Help Fight Ransomware, Cyber Threats

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Source: The Wall Street Journal.

WSJ NEWS EXCLUSIVE U.S.

U.S. Taps Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Others to Help Fight Ransomware, Cyber Threats

Creation of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative follows high-profile cyberattacks on critical U.S. infrastructure

By Robert McMillan
Aug. 5, 2021 9:00 am ET

The U.S. government is enlisting the help of tech companies, including Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google, to bolster the country’s critical infrastructure defenses against cyber threats after a string of high-profile attacks.

The Department of Homeland Security, on Thursday, is formally unveiling the initiative called the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative. The effort will initially focus on combating ransomware and cyberattacks on cloud-computing providers, said Jen Easterly, director of the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Ultimately, she said, it aims to improve defense planning and information sharing between government and the private sector.

“This will uniquely bring people together in peacetime, so that we can plan for how we’re going to respond in wartime,” she said in an interview. Ms. Easterly was sworn in as CISA’s director last month. She was previously a counterterrorism official in the Obama White House, and the commander of the Army’s first cyber operations unit at the National Security Agency, America’s cyberspy agency.

Over the past year, ransomware attacks have disrupted large parts of daily life in the U.S. They have diverted ambulances, caused long lines at gas stations in the southeast, and disrupted the production of hot dogs and other meat products.

Following a ransomware attack last month on cloud services provider Kaseya Ltd., President Biden warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that the U.S. would take “any necessary action” to protect its infrastructure from these incidents. Just days later, the administration blamed hackers affiliated with China’s Ministry of State Security for a separate set of attacks on users of Microsoft Exchange Server software.

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The U.S. government is enlisting the help of tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft and Google, to bolster the country’s critical infrastructure defenses against cyber threats after a string of high-profile attacks

Link to tweet

[seta1950]

1. I'm so glad

With all the tech companies in the U.S. why haven’t we done this before.

[Tetrachloride]

2. 1. Microsoft has lured us to never-ending security update ls

because of their well known “spaghetti “ code.
1a. this is to keep old fogey software running
2. The security services of the world like insecure systems so they can break in.
3. The cyber criminal elements of the world like this also.
4. Lazy corporations don’t want to spend for secure isolated networks.
5. Apple , Microsoft, Google Facebook are focused on enabling new features in devices. By slicing and dicing definitions of security and privacy, they claim our property is secure.


Solutions include

1. Ad blockers
2. web data blockers
3. hosts.txt file properly installed. ( yah how about that. they don’t tell this one)
4. turning off Javascript
5. turning off in home smart devices
6. putting some tape over web camera
7. router reboot
8. there’s more but will often involve really big interventions