Tuesday, December 22, 2020
The United States (US) approved its second COVID-19 vaccine by Moderna this week, ramping up its initial vaccine distribution and inoculations in America. Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) decided to expedite its vaccine approval process and is now on track to authorize the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines before the end of the month.
Talks between the United Kingdom (UK) and EU continued this past week. While some progress was noted, a significant breakthrough remains elusive. If a deal is reached in the coming days, accelerated ratification by both the European Parliament and the UK Parliament will be necessary before the UK’s formal exit from the customs union and single market on 31 December.
This story has been updated.
Dozens of U.S. Treasury Department email accounts were breached as part of the massive SolarWinds supply chain attack, according to a senior Democratic senator. The hack of the Treasury Department appears to be significant, says Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, in a statement. “According to Treasury staff, the agency suffered a serious breach, beginning in July, the full depth of which isn’t known.
He says an investigation into exactly what was accessed or stolen remains ongoing, but that dozens of email accounts were compromised.
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A data journalism project investigating thousands of cases of women missing in Mexico won $10,000 in financing and hands-on data visualization training, in a very competitive contest organized in a partnership between Microsoft and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin.
Journalist Itxaro Arteta from news site Animal Político will spearhead the project in a country where official counts say 19,450 girls, adolescents and women are reported missing. Half are between the ages of 10 and 24.
Journalist Itxaro Arteta from Animal Político will lead the winning project on missing women in Mexico. (Courtesy)
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Location of organizations that Microsoft has identified as having been exploited via second-stage attacks as part of the SolarWinds Orion supply chain attack
Hackers who infiltrated government and business networks via a stealthy software update appear to have genuinely impacted about 50 organizations, says FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia.
Speaking of the supply chain attack that implanted a backdoor in the Orion network monitoring software built by Texas-based SolarWinds, and which was pushed to 18,000 of the firm s customers, Mandia noted that, while many have been referring to it as potentially the biggest intrusion in our history, the focus of the apparent cyberespionage campaign was much more targeted.
Unclassified Treasury Systems Hit By SolarWinds Hack: Mnuchin
‘At this point, we do not see any break-in into our classified systems. Our unclassified systems did have some access,’ Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin tells CNBC Monday morning. By Michael Novinson December 21, 2020, 11:28 AM EST
The SolarWinds hackers only gained access to the U.S. Treasury Department’s unclassified systems and were unable to displace “large amounts of information,” said Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin.
“At this point, we do not see any break-in into our classified systems,” Mnuchin said on CNBC Monday morning. “Our unclassified systems did have some access. I will say the good is there’s been no damage, nor have we seen any large amounts of information displaced.”