Monthly Archives: July 2021

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The threat of ransomware dominates the cyber news right now, and rightly so. But this week Rachael Falk, chief executive officer of Australia's Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre, made a very good point.

Ransomware is "totally foreseeable and preventable because it's a known problem", Falk told a panel discussion at the Australian Strategy Policy Institute (ASPI) on Tuesday.

"It's known that ransomware is out there. And it's known that, invariably, the cyber criminals get into organisations through stealing credentials that they get on the dark web [or a user] clicking on a link and a vulnerability," she said.

"We're not talking about some sort of nation-state really funky sort of zero day that's happening. This is going on the world over, so it's entirely foreseeable."

There are "four or five steps you could take that could significantly mitigate this risk," Falk said. These are patching, multi-factor authentication, and all the stuff in the Australian Signals Directorate's Essential Eight baseline mitigation strategies.

The latest Essential Eight Maturity Model even comes with detailed checklists for Windows-based networks.

"Companies are on notice that this is a risk for them," Falk said. "There's a known problem often, and a known fix, but people haven't done it."

So given this laziness, given that cyber wake-up calls have been ignored since the 1970s, and given that organisations continue to willfully fail to follow the advice they're given, your correspondent has a question.

Has the time come to let Darwinism loose? Should we let all these lazy organisations get hacked, and just let God sort them out?

"I love that approach," Falk said. "It is glacial-like movement, and I think the only change now that might accelerate it is legislation, which obviously government is potentially seeking to introduce at the moment," she said, referring to proposed changes to critical infrastructure laws.

Maybe we'll only start paying attention when there's more 5G, more device-to-device communication, and more personal dependence on the network.

"I kind of wonder, though, in a macabre kind of way, will the test be when people just can't use their phones for half an hour," Falk said.

"That's when you'll get people going, oh, we just have to have law about this because we can't cope with [no] iPhones, internet, fridge, streaming, Netflix, you name it."

OK, we're joking. Probably.

In cybersecurity as in public health, blaming the victim is counterproductive. And in many cases it's the customers and citizens who'd really suffer from ransomware and other cyber attacks that take out an organisation.

"It could really, really impact life, and be a threat and risk to life. So I think people have to start thinking about this as not some sort of a joke," Falk said.

"The fact that we joke about, oh, the internet being down for 30 minutes, it could be the matter of a medical procedure is stopped and someone dies halfway through."

In Germany last year, for example, a patient died following a ransomware attack on a hospital in Duesseldorf, which caused her to be re-routed to a hospital more than 30 kilometres away. A police investigation found that she probably would have died anyway, but next time we may not be so lucky.

Fortunately, a global consensus on how to tackle ransomware does seem to be emerging.

Just one example is a new report from ASPI's International Cyber Policy Centre, Exfiltrate, encrypt, extort: The global rise of ransomware and Australia's policy options, of which Falk is co-author.

On the vexed question of whether organisations should pay a ransom or not, the report recommends that paying them should not be criminalised. Instead, there should be a "mandatory reporting regime ... without fear of legal repercussions".

This would be a major step in transparency. Out of all the major ransomware incidents in Australia -- Toll Holdings, BlueScope Steel, Lion Dairy and Drinks, legal document-management services firm Law in Order, Nine Entertainment, Eastern Health in Victoria, Uniting Care Qld, and JBS Foods -- only JBS has admitted to paying a ransom of $11 million.

Such a scheme has already been proposed by Labor in its Ransomware Payments Bill 2021 introduced onto parliament last month as part of its national ransomware strategy.

The ASPI report recommends expanding the role of the ASD's Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) to include the real-time distribution of publicly available alerts.

ACSC should also publish a list of ransomware threat actors and aliases, giving details of their modus operandi and key target sectors, along with suggested mitigation methods.

The ASD is already known to be using its classified capabilities to warn of impending ransomware attacks.

The report also recommends tackling the "low-hanging fruit" of incentivisation and education.

This includes incentives such as tax breaks for cyber investment, grants, or subsidy programs; a "concerted nationwide public ransomware education campaign, led by the ACSC, across all media"; and a "business-focused multi-media public education campaign", also led by the ACSC.

"[This campaign should] educate organisations of all sizes and their people about basic cybersecurity and cyber hygiene. It should focus on the key areas of patching, multifactor authentication, legacy technology, and human error."

Finally, the report recommends creating a "dedicated cross-departmental ransomware taskforce", including state and territory representatives, to share threat intelligence and develop policy proposals.

Your correspondent finds none of these recommendations unreasonable, though there are perhaps questions about whether ACSC is currently well-equipped to run an effective and engaging major public information campaign.

Nevertheless, given how slowly Australian organisations have adapted to cyber risks over the last couple of decades, maybe we need a little less carrot and a bit more stick.

Here is the original post:

May ransomware blight all the cyber stragglers and let God sort them out - ZDNet

Photo: HQ of New York Magazine, by David Shankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

In form, the fight over critical race theory in schools resembles earlier panics over the teaching of intelligent design and its cousin creationism, observes Sarah Jones in arecent articleforNew YorkMagazines onlineIntelligencerwebsite.

I found myself doing a double-take after reading that sentence. Does Jones really mean to suggest that those creating a panic over critical race theory (CRT) are like the dogmatic Darwinists who tried to create a panic over the teaching of intelligent design?

In her article, Jones essentially argues that worries about critical race theory have been ginned up by conservative provocateurs who play fast and loose with the facts. In her view, critical race theory is simply an effort to teach historical reality, and those attacking it are unfairly manufacturing a crisis over it.

But ifthatswhat she believes about those who are creating panic over CRT, then the logic of her comparison would seem to require a similar view of those who opposed intelligent design: The intolerant defenders of Darwinian evolution who tried to instill panic over the teaching of intelligent design must also have been provocateurs who were ginning up a fake controversy, while in reality there was nothing wrong with teaching intelligent design.

Surely Jones couldnt actually meanthat, I thought.

Sure enough, she didnt. Reading the rest of her article I realized she simply didnt know how to frame a proper comparison. She actually was attempting to malign those who support intelligent design, not those who tried to create panic over it. Apparently neither she nor her editor is particularly good with logic.

Later in her article, Jones takes a cleaner shot at supporters of intelligent design. However, that shot misses the mark just as much as her first, as I will explain shortly.

First, full disclosure: The primary target of Joness article on critical race theory is Christopher Rufo, a former colleague of mine at Discovery Institute in a different program. Rufo came to Discovery because of his work on poverty and homelessness, and he didnt have any involvement in the Center for Science & Culture, which I help run, and which deals with intelligent design. Likewise, I had nothing to do with his efforts on critical race theory.

Nevertheless, Jones thinks she has discovered a nefarious connection between Rufo and supporters of intelligent design:

At both the K-12 and college levels, education represented a challenge for the Christian right to which Rufos former employer, the Discovery Institute, belongs.Like many a young Evangelical, I encountered the think tank in the 1990s, when they battled the forces of Darwinism.They argued schools should teach intelligent design, if not as the sole truth of the world, then as a credible scientific theory. Rufo was surrounded by people long accustomed to classroom culture wars. Teach the controversy, they urged.Decades later, with Rufo, they appeared to have changed their minds. When did it conclude that some controversies matter more than others? [Emphasis added.]

They argued that schools should teach intelligent design, Jones opines wrongly. Discovery Institute opposed requiring intelligent design in K-12 schools. Its teach the controversy policy referred to teaching the scientific evidence for and against modern evolutionary theory, not teaching intelligent design along with evolution. Thats why Discovery Instituteopposedthe now infamous Dover school policy andurged its repealbefore there was any lawsuit. If you want to know Discovery Institutes real policy on science education, you can read about iton its website.

Jones next suggests that Christopher Rufo somehow caused Discovery to change its mind about schools teaching controversies. Her point seems to be that we favored teaching the controversy over evolution, but Rufo convinced us that we shouldnt teach the controversy over critical race theory: When did it conclude that some controversies matter more than others?

But in fairness to Rufo and other critics of CRT, I dont think they are really objecting to thecontroversyover CRT being taught. They are claiming that the problem with CRT is precisely that it doesnotteach the controversy. Discovery Institute founder Bruce Chapmanexplains:

The idea that criticizing Critical Race Theory programs is somehow anti-free speech is especially preposterous. Those programs are typically coercive, and they are themselves antithetical to free speech. Attendance is compelled, and the ability of participants to freely share their real views without punishment is nil. Critiquing such coercive programs is not an assault on free speech. It is a defense of it. Thus, claims that opposition to Critical Race Theory programs constitute an assault on free speech are nothing short of Orwellian.

Perhaps this view of CRT is correct; perhaps it isnt. My intention is not to wade into that debate, or to explain my own views about the serious issues of racial discrimination and disparities we still face in America. My point is that Joness analysis doesnt grapple with the actual concerns being raised by critics of CRT, let alone the idea of a teach the controversy approach to education on the topic of evolution. The idea of the teach the controversy approach was to fairly cover both the scientific strengths and weaknesses of modern evolutionary theory in the classroom, not to propagandize students.

Alas, Jones doesnt seem especially interested in understanding those she is critiquing. She has all the zeal of the impassioned convert, which can sometimes blur ones thinking. In prior centuries, conversion narratives were popular among the religious. They allowed those who came to God to share their personal journeys for the edification of fellow believers. In our own day, we have similar conversion stories offered by earnest secularists. Usually the story goes something like this: A poor oppressed and/or repressed young man or woman grows up in a fundamentalist home, goes to college, loses his or her faith, and then finds liberation in disbelief and secularism, which they then spend their lives promoting. This secularist conversion narrative has become a rather tired trope among contemporary writers, and Jones seems to be a prime example.

According to a profile intheNew York Times, Jones grew up in a fundamentalist family and lost her faith in God in college (a Christian college no less!). Then came what might be considered the secularist equivalent of missionary work: She volunteered for Planned Parenthood, followed eventually by a stint at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Now she has graduated to evangelizing for her views in various publications, often recycling stereotypes from her conversion narrative in the process.

By the way, Jones must have been quite intellectually advanced as a child. In her current article she says that Like many a young Evangelical, I encountered the think tank [Discovery Institute] in the 1990s, when they battled the forces of Darwinism. Discovery Institute did not start its program on intelligent design (the Center for Science & Culture) until 1996. According totheNew York Times,Jones was 26 in 2014. That would make her all of 8 years old in 1996. As I said, she must have been quite intellectually advanced for her age to become interested in the debate over Darwin in the early years of grade school.

Of course, Jones was homeschooled for much of her childhood, and homeschoolers are known for beingmore advanced academicallythan their peers. So perhaps that explains it.

Read more from the original source:

Critical Race Theory and Intelligent Design: The Mixed-Up Comparison of Sarah Jones - Discovery Institute

Photo: Charles Darwin, enthroned, by Elliott Brown from Birmingham, United Kingdom [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Over atScientific American, Allison Hopper has penned a scathing indictment of those who deny evolution. She states: I want to unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies. Apparently, it never even occurred to Hopper that some people might question evolution based on the many scientific problems with it, such as the Cambrian explosion, where myriads of new body plans emerged in a relatively brief geological time span (see Stephen MeyersDarwins Doubton this topic). No, according to Hopper, anyone questioning evolution is ipso facto a white supremacist.

But what if that someone who rejects evolution is a black African or an African-American or a Hispanic or a Muslim of whatever color or a Jew (and white supremacists are well-known for their anti-Semitism)? Hopper apparently has no clue that millions upon millions of people of color reject evolutionary theory, either because of scientific or religious reasons. Does that mean they are white supremacists?

In order to build her case against those who reject evolution, Hopper points to a few of the misguided ideas of racist Christians in the past. However, she implies that these ideas are still embraced by most Evangelical Christians, which is absurd. The ideas she discusses, such as the mark of Cain being dark skin, were never mainstream ideas among Evangelicals, even in the racist past. Im not sure if anyone today still believes that; if so, they are a tiny fringe element. Her claim that those who reject evolution believe that Adam and Eve were white is likewise ludicrous. Ive been involved in Evangelical Christian circles for most of my 62 years, and I have never heard anyone even the most uneducated, unsophisticated layperson make any such claim.

It seems that Hopper has taken some past beliefs of some racist Christians and insinuated that todays rejecters of evolution adhere to these outmoded dogmas.

Now lets ask ourselves: What happens if we look at past beliefs of evolutionists about race? Its not a secret that Charles Darwin himself was a racist. InThe Descent of Man, he wrote an entire chapter On the Races of Man,in which he said: The variability or diversity of the mental faculties in men of the same race, not to mention the greater differences between the men of distinct races, is so notorious that not a word need here be said. Darwin considered racial differences in physical, mental, and even moral qualities, a proof of human variability. He argued that the lower races (this is his term) would be exterminated by the civilised races.

Darwin was not idiosyncratic among evolutionists; most Darwinian biologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were racist and used racism as evidence for their theory. Konrad Lorenz, for instance, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist, argued in an article in 1940 that Darwinism was the best foundation for racial inequality. Its ironic in light of Hoppers article that the primary thrust of Lorenzs article was to combat creationism. American biology textbooks in the early 20th century taught scientific racism and used it as evidence for evolution. More recently the Nobel Prize-winning biologist James Watson has stirred considerable controversy with his racist views.

Now what happens if we examine the real white supremacists today? Are they creationists? I have done a good deal of research on this topic, and as it turns out, the vast majority of white supremacists today embrace Darwinian evolution and use it as evidence for their white supremacy. In a 2017 article in hisRadixjournal, Richard Spencer, a leading figure on the white supremacist Alt-Right argued thatGroup differences exist as consequences of evolution by natural selection and racial differences are a natural and normal consequence of human evolution. This is a commonplace view among white supremacists, as you can easily discover by looking at white supremacist websites and print publications.

In sum, most people today who reject evolution, which includes many people of color, are not racists. On the other hand, most of the leading white supremacists today embrace evolutionary theory with alacrity. Hoppers attempt to tar those who do not believe in evolution with racism may play well with the pro-evolution lobby, but unfortunately it is based on distortions and misrepresentations of those who reject evolution, as well as ignorance of the history of scientific racism and the ideology of contemporary white supremacists.

Read this article:

Is Denying Evolution a Form of White Supremacy? - Discovery Institute

The Purge universe is based on a simple and nihilistic premise: In a dystopian near-future, a democratically-elected American theocracy legalizes any and all crimeincluding murderfor 12 hours each year, with the starting bell a 7:00 p.m. siren blast on March 21 that announces anarchy until the following morning. The stated purpose is to psychologically purify a society wracked by unemployment and rampant crime, allowing Americans to live peacefully among each other for the remainder of the year.

In (this fictional) reality, however, its all just a ruse by bloodthirsty oligarchs to sell guns and insurance while culling the ranks of those who cant afford to hunker down for the night in gilded panic rooms. One part hardcore social Darwinism, one part Escape From New York and a sprinkle of The Handmaids Tale have combined to the tune of nearly $500 million at the worldwide box office.

Thats just a taste of the hazily sketched political philosophy the Purge films lay out. Regardless of their thematic ambiguity, theres an obvious hook: They serve as opportunities for the viewer to purge in their own mind over the course of 90-110 minutes, imagining how they might survive in a world of unbidden violenceor what they might be tempted to do if given the chance to act with impunity. The viewer can damn the Purges avaricious creators while enjoying the catharsis-by-proxy of the violence they unleash. Even better, the masters of this particular universe are drawn vaguely enough that viewers of all political stripes can imagine them as the foes of their choosing: religious autocrats, a shadowy global cabal of far-right fever dreams, or anything in between.

The political details of the world conjured by franchise creator and screenwriter James DeMonacoscattershot and contradictory as they arereveal the driving impulses of the populist id that drives todays politics. Now nearly a decade after its launch, one could do worse than squinting at the Purge franchise to glean an impressionistic, if woefully incomplete, picture of American social erosion.

In The Purge, the franchises 2013 maiden voyage, simplicity is a virtue. Produced on a relatively shoestring budget of $3 million, the film is effectively an old-school haunted house picture focusing on one familys efforts to make it through Purge Night at home. The civic trappings of the franchise are almost irrelevant here, replaced by a series of straightforward moral quandaries: What do we owe our neighbors? How much risk would you take on to protect them? How far are you willing to go to protect your own family?

Those are the questions the films protagonist, a McMansion-dwelling but economically insecure salesman played by Ethan Hawke, faces as he glowers his way through what recalls a lengthy, uber-violent, not-very-sophisticated episode of The Twilight Zone. The demons at Hawkes heavily-fortified doorhe happens to peddle security systems meant to keep those who can afford them safe from the Purgeare a roving gang of American Psycho-style preppies, who appeal to class solidarity by imploring Hawke to release a homeless man taken in by his compassionate offspring. With its sadistic elite antagonists, the film establishes the series crude populism, and although it doesnt amount to much of a social critique, the final product is probably the most satisfying in the series by virtue of its small-scale, human focus.

In its 2014 sequel, The Purge: Anarchy, the camera zooms way out. Were introduced to the wider sociopolitical context of the Purge, which has created a country where unemployment is below 5 percent and crime is virtually non-existent, while every year fewer and fewer people live below the poverty line, as the films opening title card helpfully explains. Eventually, via painstaking verbal exposition, the viewer learns that the ruling party (the perfectly vaguely named New Founding Fathers of America) is now simply deploying death squads to indiscriminately murder the poor, who apparently have not done an efficient enough job of it themselves come Purge time.

The sequel does some things effectively. By turning its focus to the people who cant afford to enter Ethan Hawkes bunker, it confronts the viewer more directly with the pitch-black implications of the series premise, up to and including a disturbing scene of threatened sexual violence. But in what becomes a recurring theme for the franchise, that strength is also the films weakness. Bogged down by dull action, bizarre pacing and the ham-fisted introduction of a Black resistance group for whom the term caricature would be generous, The Purge: Anarchy introduces a raft of provocative, upsetting ideas and proceeds to do less than the bare minimum with them.

That trend largely continues in the series third installment, The Purge: Election Year. As one might surmise from the title, the film tackles electoral politics head-on. Its plot follows an idealistic, crusading politician who seeks the presidency on a single-issue platform of abolishing the Purge. Although its cinematically more successful than its predecessorbenefiting from tighter action sequences as DeMonaco is clearly more comfortable with the larger budgetit still lacks real thematic punch or focus. Its protagonist, portrayed by Lost star Elizabeth Mitchell, invokes Lincoln in a debate speech against her opponent; one of the films scrappy rebels faux-cynically proclaims Shes full of it too, nothing will actually change.

By the time the film was released in mid-2016, critics were salivating for parallels between its bleak universe and the Manichean, id political landscape that years real-world election had shaped. They were hard to come by. Ironically, perhaps more than any other film in the franchise, Election Year dodges the explicitly topical in favor of the closest thing to a throughline that exists between the five films: its vague, stick-it-to-em populism. When its captured antagonist implores the films heroes to murder him in cold blood, he repeats a common refrain from Anarchy, smugly reassuring them that its their right as an American. Who across the political spectrum wouldnt like to stick it to their entitled opponents? (Here, its ultimately a moral victory, although action cult hero Frank Grillo does get in a solid below-the-belt shot and Arnold-style one-liner.)

The next entry, the 2018 prequel The First Purge, benefits from a shakeup. In its origin story of both the Purge itself and the dystopia that birthed it, we see glimpses of the political dynamics DeMonaco surmises could drive Americans to such depravitya housing crisis, an epidemic of opioid use, widespread and uncontrollable protests. Its the cinematic equivalent of a You Are Here sticker (and in case the setting wasnt immediate enough for you, theres a brief cameo from CNNs Van Jones interviewing the Purges in-universe creator).

Despite its head-on embrace of the imagined political conditions under which such an event could take place, The First Purge is the most entertaining film in the series by virtue of a street-level narrative focus that recalls the series origins. It also benefits from easily the most charismatic Purge lead in Ylan Noel (of HBOs Insecure), a laconic Staten Island drug kingpin who intends to lay low as the new government uses his borough as the Purges experimental testing ground.

Of course, he does not succeed, and the film follows him and a largely Black cast of Staten Islanders as they attempt to escape the Purge nights violence. Of all the Purge films, The First Purge most directly acknowledges the ugly reality that many Americans would no doubt use such an opportunity to vent their racial animus in horrific and violent ways. An indelible, disturbing image of Noel choking the life from a white stormtrooper in a Sambo mask hits far harder than similar agitprop from across the series. The filmmakers clearly grasp, for the first time, that without nailing the humanity part of inhumanity, depicting it is ultimately just an exercise in morbid juvenilia.

Which brings us to The Forever Purge. Like its predecessors, the newest Purge flick gleefully prods at raw wounds in the American psyche, depicting societal tensions as the basis for grisly violence. And it does so while providing an allegory more explicit than any film in the series thus far. In a town on the northern side of the U.S.-Mexico border, racist paramilitary groups keep the annual violence going past its legally-sanctioned window in an attempt to rid American society of non-whites. A Hallmark-handsome family of white ranchers with a pregnant matriarch and their Mexican migrant colleagues then must make a treacherous border crossing to Mexico to escape the violence, in a predictable inversion of the typical North American refugee narrative.

While its politics are stated more clearly than any other film in the series, the allegory isnt nearly clever enough to overcome the same two-dimensional characters and formulaic action that have historically depressed the franchises Rotten Tomatoes score. The audience is now apparently catching up to the critics, with the film opening to the series lowest box office even as movie theaters wake from their pandemic slumber. The film is, simply, not very good, an inert border-crossing thriller onto which the franchises stale trappings are welded.

It ends, however, on an odd but revealing note: an audio collage of news broadcasts reporting that across the country, people are banding together to fight back against the racist militias that have overwhelmed the racist theocracy. (I know.) It seems like an uncharacteristically hopeful note to end on for such a bleak series, but to close Purge watchers, it should make perfect sense: Against all odds, the films have a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. Time and again, its established that most people are, in fact, not interested in murder, rape, arson and the like, and that the depraved violence depicted is perpetrated by mostly either psychotic outliers or a government dissatisfied with its charges lack of bloodlust.

That confidence in human nature reveals the fundamental flaw at the heart of the Purge series, and why its politics seem so head-spinningly inconsistent. The films are abrasive, button-pushing, and purposely confrontational in a way that plays on the viewers own insecurities and fears about the state of Americas social contract. Their subliminal reassurance of the viewer, however, defangs them in the absence of any meaningful critique. The series fails to either confront the viewer directly enough to reach any kind of real insight about the world, or provide the quality of dumb-fun pulp entertainment that would make us not care.

To take The Purge franchise as emblematic of our times, then, might be done better by examining its style rather than its content: Angsty, fearful, lacking clarity but willing to point an omni-directional and accusatory finger at a moments notice. Judging by last weekends aforementioned box office, the past few years of American life have somewhat exhausted our appetite for such fare. The series creators, however, surely appreciate that fate on some level. To quote one of the universes various hulking brutes, who shouts the phrase unbidden like a mantra, its survival of the fucking fittest.

See the rest here:

The Head-Spinning Politics of the Purge Franchise - POLITICO