Month: July 2021

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  People catch a ride on a construction truck as they evacuate their homes after the area was inundated with flooding from Hurricane Harvey. This gallery highlights scenes from around a ravaged Houston. [credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images ]

When Hurricane Ike made landfall in 2008, Bill Merrell took shelter on the second floor of a historic brick building in downtown Galveston, Texas, along with his wife, their daughter, their grandson, and two Chihuahuas. Sustained winds of 110 mph lashed the building. Seawater flooded the ground floor to a depth of over 8 feet. Once, in the night, Merrell caught glimpses of a near-full moon and realized they had entered the hurricane’s eye.

Years earlier, Merrell, a physical oceanographer at Texas A&M University at Galveston, had toured the gigantic Eastern Scheldt storm surge barrier, a nearly 6-mile-long bulwark that prevents North Sea storms from flooding the southern Dutch coast. As Ike roared outside, Merrell kept thinking about the barrier. “The next morning, I started sketching what I thought would look reasonable here,” he said, “and it turned out to be pretty close to what the Dutch would have done.”

These sketches were the beginning of the Ike Dike, a proposal for a coastal barrier intended to protect Galveston Bay. The core idea: combining huge gates across the main inlet into the Bay from the Gulf of Mexico, known as Bolivar Roads, with many miles of high seawalls.

Enlarge / "People really still use '1234567' as a password? Really?" (credit: Kremlin official photo)

The discovery of Russia's devastating SolarWinds spy campaign put the spotlight on the sophisticated supply chain hijacking techniques of Moscow's foreign intelligence hackers. But it's now apparent that, throughout that SolarWinds spying and its fallout, another group of Kremlin hackers has kept up up their usual daily grind, using basic but often effective techniques to pry open practically any vulnerable network they could find across the US and the global Internet.

On Thursday the NSA, the FBI, the DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the UK's National Cybersecurity Centre issued a joint advisory warning of hundreds of attempted brute-force hacker intrusions around the world, all carried out by Unit 26165 of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency, also widely known as Fancy Bear or APT28. The hacking campaign has targeted a broad swath of organizations, including government and military agencies, defense contractors, political parties and consultancies, logistics companies, energy firms, universities, law firms, and media companies. In other words, practically every sector of interest on the Internet.

The hacking campaign has used relatively basic techniques against those targets, guessing usernames and passwords en masse to gain initial access. But cybersecurity agencies warn that the Fancy Bear campaign has nonetheless successfully breached multiple entities and exfiltrated emails from them—and that it's not over.