Trump’s Second Edition Puts Indo-US Relations At The Crossroads – Analysis

P. K. Balachandran

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For India, Trump is a mixed bag. Some of his policies will help the Modi regime while others will prove to be challenging.

With the brash and unpredictable Donald Trump about to be President of the United States, there is anxiety in India about his domestic, foreign and trade policies.

Trump’s penchant for transactional relationships could mean that India cannot take America for granted or expect help from it without any thought of returning the favour. American scholar Ashely Tellis and Ambassador Eric Garcetti have complained that India has been taking from America but giving virtually nothing that America expects.

There is anxiety about Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) thrust. Questions that arise are: Does MAGA mean a pushy and aggressive pursuit of American interests at the cost of allies and strategic partners? Would Trump accept India’s claim to be a power in its own right, entitled to be treated on par with America’s traditional Western allies? Would he allow India to pursue strategic autonomy in its national interest often times running counter to American policies and interests?

Taiwan and Ukraine: Learning the right lessons

Mick Ryan

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In the nearly three years since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine of February 2022, many nations have re-examined their national security postures, defence budgets and alliances. The government of Taiwan has not been immune to the strategic reassessments driven by Russia’s conduct. The Ukraine war has served as a catalyst to address some complacency in sections of Taiwanese society about Chinese aggression.

Learning the right lessons from other people’s wars requires deep analysis, political commitment to change, and national security organisations able to rapidly absorb knowledge. There is more to it than watching from afar and copying innovation. Taiwan needs to observe the political, strategic and tactical lessons of Ukraine and filter them through its own context, including local geography and weather, regional politics, Taiwan’s political culture, and the military capabilities of China. Taiwan also needs to anticipate the kinds of lessons the Chinese leadership and the People’s Liberation Army might be learning from Ukraine and Russia.

A key lesson for Taiwan in the past three years has been the maintenance of national will. This has political, military and societal elements. Significant effort has been invested to improve military and civil defence capacity, while expanding the interaction between the two. As Taiwan’s representative in Australia, Douglas Hsu, told me in a recent interview, the Taiwanese government has “strengthened civil defence capabilities, including mobilisation, human resource deployment, training, and emergency preparedness. This aims to ensure prompt response to emergencies or dynamic changes in disasters, enhancing civilians’ self-defence and self-rescue capabilities to maintain social safety and order.”

Taiwan Lessons Learned from the Russia-Ukraine War

Kevin Pollpeter, Tsun-Kai Tsai, and April Herlevi

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INTRODUCTION

“Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow” is now a commonly used phrase in Taiwan.1 For decades, Taiwan treated a potential invasion by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a remote possibility. However, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has made a PRC invasion of Taiwan appear more credible and generated a sense of urgency among some leaders in Taiwan. This report examines the lessons learned that Taiwan government and defense officials are extracting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

According to Taiwan’s 2023 National Defense Report, the Russia-Ukraine war has taught Taiwan that “a totalitarian regime can ignore international rules and kick off invasion for the sake of its own national interests or political assertions.”

The Taiwan government and military have enacted multifaceted reform with the goal of turning the Taiwan military into a credible deterrent and warfighting force. Although some reform debates predate the Russia-Ukraine war, Taiwan government officials have taken lessons from Ukraine to guide restructuring of Taiwan’s military forces. Changes include lengthening the terms of service for conscripts and revising the military training cycle. The Russia-Ukraine war also highlighted the role of uncrewed autonomous systems, emphasized the need for satellite communications connectivity, and reinforced the importance of defending against cognitive warfare operations.

Is China Waking up to the Dangers of AI?

Benjamin Dubow

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Early last month, reports emerged that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had begun deploying a version of Meta’s Llama model for military purposes. Meta had made the artificial intelligence (AI) model open source, meaning anyone could build a version of their own. Its use for supporting an authoritarian regime – and Meta’s impotent response that such usage violated terms and conditions the U.S. firm could never enforce on the PLA – seemed like yet another parable about how democratic openness could easily turn to authoritarian advantage.

But by the end of the month, the script had flipped. An independent Chinese lab called DeepSeek announced their R1-Lite model achieved a 52.5 percent success rate on advanced mathematics problems. OpenAI’s o1-preview, the hitherto leader, had scored only 44.6 percent. Moreover, DeepSeek was open sourcing its model.

Despite China’s closed internet and media environment, this was hardly unusual. Beijing has thus far taken a more hands-off approach to AI development than would be expected given the stakes. But as AI’s power becomes clearer, that could soon change.

US, allies must rebuild air forces, invest in drones to counter China’s missile threat to runways: Stimson

Colin Clark

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The US, its allies and partners must change their air forces to cope with China’s enormous missile force that could cripple air bases throughout the Indo-Pacific for up to 12 days in event of war, according to a new report by the Stimson Center.

“By denying the United States the use of runways and taxiways in the region, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could gain air superiority without ever defeating America’s arsenal of advanced fighters and bombers,” says the think tank report, released today. “No combination of U.S. countermeasures — including the greater dispersal of aircraft in the region, improved runway repair capabilities, and more robust missile defenses — is likely to solve the problem. There is a real and growing danger that Beijing might conclude that it could keep American airpower at bay long enough to accomplish a quick fait accompli.”

Central to the analysis is US vulnerability to attacks on runways in Japan, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau. And it modeled how well missile defense, faster runway repair times and the dispersion of U.S. aircraft across the theater would perform against the Chinese threat.

At least 8 US telcos, dozens of countries impacted by Salt Typhoon breaches, White House says

Jonathan Greig & Martin Matishak

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The scope of the Chinese government hacking campaign came into further focus on Wednesday, as senior White House officials revealed that eight telecommunications giants in the U.S. were breached and that companies in multiple other countries were also hacked.

The breaches are part of the Salt Typhoon campaign, which first came to light after threat actors intercepted the correspondence of senior officials within both presidential campaigns, including from President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance.

Anne Neuberger, the U.S. deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies, reiterated to reporters on Wednesday that Chinese actors are still inside the breached systems.

Neuberger said President Joe Biden has been briefed on the incident several times, and the White House has created a Unified Coordination Group that meets daily to discuss the issue.

The campaign “has been underway … likely one to two years” and has compromised telecoms in the Indo-Pacific region, Europe and elsewhere.

“Our understanding is that a couple dozens of countries were impacted,” she said. “We believe this is intended as a Chinese espionage program focused, again, on key government officials, key corporate IP, so that will determine which telecoms were often targeted, and how many were compromised as well.”

Breaking the Circle: Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Infrastructure Rapidly Expands

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Summary

China is rapidly advancing its global propaganda strategies through international communication centers (ICCs), with over 100 centers established since 2018 — most since 2023. These centers aim to amplify the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) voice on the international stage, targeting specific audiences with tailored messaging (a strategy known as “precise communication”). ICCs coordinate local, national, and international resources to build China's image, share political narratives, and promote economic partnerships.

By leveraging inauthentic social media amplification, foreign influencers, and collaborations with overseas media, ICCs advance China’s multi-layered propaganda approach. For instance, Fujian's ICC reportedly manages TikTok accounts targeting Taiwanese audiences, likely including a covert account that is highly critical of the Taiwan government called Two Tea Eggs. On YouTube, the same ICC promotes videos of Taiwanese individuals praising China. These centers are strategically positioned to promote China's interests during geopolitical crises, despite challenges like limited credibility and resource constraints.

Breaking the Circle: Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Infrastructure Rapidly Expands

China’s Thickening Information Fog

Jonah Victor

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Introduction

China has been a “hard target” for the Intelligence Community (IC) since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Escalating demand for assessments of China since the 2010s has spurred the IC to expand its analytical and collection efforts. Last year, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines identified China as the IC’s “unparalleled priority.”1 CIA Director William Burns asserted this year that his agency has more than doubled its budget for Chinarelated intelligence collection, analysis, and operations during his tenure, extending work on China to “every corner of the CIA.”2 Even as the IC buckles down on China work, warning signs are emerging that the world is changing in ways that could disrupt business as usual. Washington’s ability to anticipate developments in the US-China relationship and assess risks and threats to national security is likely to get harder.

Amid heightened tensions with Washington, Beijing has redoubled efforts to stiffen controls on information to prevent access by its potential adversaries. PRC authorities are mounting increasingly conspicuous counterintelligence activities, issuing public warnings of infiltration attempts by foreign spies and restricting the use of US technology, like iPhones and Teslas, due to purported surveillance threats.3 While heightened counterintelligence will concern operational elements of the IC, intelligence analysts are likely to be most aware of the mounting problems they face in accessing opensource information. Open source, while usually easier and cheaper to obtain than other intelligence sources, has gotten harder to gather when it comes to China.

Syria After Assad

Robin Wright

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The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, was ashen-faced in Doha, on December 7th, as he met with envoys from Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, and Qatar to confer about Syria. Rebels were on the doorstep of Damascus just ten days after they had launched a sweeping offensive. By midnight, the representatives of the nations—with disparate political systems and conflicting regional goals—had concurred that the government of President Bashar al-Assad could not survive. They called for an urgent political transition. By dawn, Assad had departed Damascus for Russia, without a word to the people his family had ruled—and gassed, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered—for a half century. “No one believed it could happen,” Araghchi later told Iranian television. “What was surprising was, first, the Syrian Army’s inability to confront the situation, and, second, the rapid pace of developments.” Syria, a geostrategic centerpiece in the Middle East, was abruptly upended. So, too, was the region.

Assad’s Fall Is A Blow To Russia: Here’s What It Means For The War In Ukraine – Analysis

Roksolana Bychai and Steve Gutterman

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When he launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently believed Russian forces would topple the government within weeks and restore Moscow’s dominance over the country after 30 years of independence.

Putin was mistaken, and the war he started rages on nearly three years later. It’s hard to imagine Putin didn’t mull over his miscalculation when militant-led opposition forces seized Damascus and swept Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power less than two weeks after launching an offensive.

The Kremlin’s focus on the war against Ukraine is one of the factors that fed into the speed and success of the Syrian rebel offensive. Russian warplanes stepped up attacks on rebel-held territory as the offensive took hold, but with its military capabilities in Syria limited and its eyes on Ukraine, Moscow made no massive effort to stop it.

Now that Assad has fallen, what effect will Russia’s big Middle East setback have on its war against Ukraine?

On the battlefield, not a huge one, analysts say, though it will depend in part on the fate of Russia’s forces and bases in Syria: the airfield at Hmeimim and the naval facility at Tartus.

Unified war room & new drones: Syrian rebel commander reveals military doctrine that toppled Assad regime

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Top military commander of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham revealed that the rebel group began planning the military assault to topple Syrian President Bashar Al Assad's regime a year ago. In his first interview with foreign media, Abu Hassan al-Hamwi, the head of the HTS military wing, said that the group conducted a highly disciplined operation in which a new drone unit was deployed and where there was close coordination between opposition groups around the country.

HTS led the operation from the country's northwest and communicated with the rebel group operating in the south to encircle the country's capital, Damascus. During his conversation with The Guardian, Hamwi said that the planning to topple the regime started a year ago, the groups were preparing for a coup like this for years.

Hamwi noted that since 2019, HTS has been developing a military doctrine that it used to turn fighters coming from "disparate, disorganised opposition and jihadist groups into a disciplined fighting force." “After the last campaign [August 2019], during which we lost significant territory, all revolutionary factions realised the critical danger – the fundamental problem was the absence of unified leadership and control over battle,” the 40-year-old military commander said in an interview in Jableh.

What to Know About the Man Who Toppled Assad

John Haltiwanger

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After 13 years of devastating civil war, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was toppled in a stunning offensive led by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

The country now confronts an uncertain future—not least of which is how HTS, which evolved out of an al Qaeda affiliate with ties to the founder of the Islamic State, will approach governance.

Why the U.S. government is saying all citizens should use end-to-end encrypted messaging

Cheryl Winokur Munk

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Think twice before sending your next text message. Or better yet, make sure you are using an end-to-end encryption method.

Consumers regularly use different types of messaging technology from the biggest technology companies including Apple, Alphabet and Meta Platforms, including iMessage, Google Messages, WhatsApp and SMS, but the level of protection varies. Now, the U.S. government is expressing greater concern after a recent massive hack of the nation’s largest telecom companies.

Last month, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed a campaign by hackers associated with China, Salt Typhoon, that compromised AT&T and Verizon, and others, and was one of the largest hacks of U.S. infrastructure in history. Following that warning, CISA, the National Security Agency, the FBI and international partners published a joint guide to help protect Americans. One suggestion is to use end-to-end encryption, a method that makes communications more secure.

End-to-end encryption helps ensure that only the intended recipients can read your messages as they travel between your phone and another person’s phone. Secure messaging apps use end-to-end encryption to protect communications from hackers, surveillance and unauthorized access, so even messaging app providers can’t read your messages.

Understanding Strategic Missile Defense

Fabian Hoffmann

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Writing about missile technology and nuclear strategy often involves making implicit or explicit assumptions about missile defense. Many disagreements about what missile defense can or cannot achieve, whether in conventional or nuclear scenarios, stem from differences in these underlying assumptions.

Especially strategic missile defense, which is designed to intercept strategic nuclear warheads, is poorly understood outside expert circles. This is not a criticism of the general public; strategic missile defense is a very complex issue that encompasses not only technical considerations but also a wide range of political factors. This post aims to provide a short and hopefully accessible introduction to the topic.

Technical challenges

Strategic missile defense systems are designed to intercept incoming strategic nuclear warheads, typically deployed from intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs). These warheads descend from very high exo-atmospheric altitudes, sometimes several thousand kilometers above the Earth’s surface.

Mystery drone sightings keep happening in New Jersey. Here’s what we know (and don’t know)

BRUCE SHIPKOWSKI AND KEN MILLER

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A large number of mysterious drones have been reported flying over parts of New Jersey and the East Coast in recent weeks, sparking speculation and concern over who sent them and why.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy wrote to President Joe Biden asking for answers. New Jersey’s new senator, Andy Kim, spent Thursday night on a drone hunt in rural northern New Jersey, and posted about it on X.

Murphy and law enforcement officials have stressed that the drones don’t appear to be a threat to public safety, but many state and municipal lawmakers have nonetheless called for stricter rules about who can fly the unmanned aircraft.

The FBI is among several agencies investigating and has asked residents to share videos, photos and other information they may have about the drones.

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What’s the deal with the drones in New Jersey?

Dozens of witnesses have reported seeing them in the state starting in November.

At first they were spotted flying along the scenic Raritan River, which feeds the Round Valley Reservoir, the state’s largest aquifer, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of New York City.

The Simple Math Behind Public Key Cryptography

John Pavlus

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For thousands of years, if you wanted to send a secret message, there was basically one way to do it. You’d scramble the message using a special rule, known only to you and your intended audience. This rule acted like the key to a lock. If you had the key, you could unscramble the message; otherwise, you’d need to pick the lock. Some locks are so effective they can never be picked, even with infinite time and resources. But even those schemes suffer from the same Achilles’ heel that plagues all such encryption systems: How do you get that key into the right hands while keeping it out of the wrong ones?

The counterintuitive solution, known as public key cryptography, relies not on keeping a key secret but rather on making it widely available. The trick is to also use a second key that you never share with anyone, even the person you’re communicating with. It’s only by using this combination of two keys—one public, one private—that someone can both scramble and unscramble a message.

To understand how this works, it’s easier to think of the “keys” not as objects that fit into a lock, but as two complementary ingredients in an invisible ink. The first ingredient makes messages disappear, and the second makes them reappear. If a spy named Boris wants to send his counterpart Natasha a secret message, he writes a message and then uses the first ingredient to render it invisible on the page. (This is easy for him to do: Natasha has published an easy and well-known formula for disappearing ink.) When Natasha receives the paper in the mail, she applies the second ingredient that makes Boris’ message reappear.

The New Jersey Drone Mystery May Not Actually Be That Mysterious

Lily Hay Newman

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Across New Jersey, reports of mysterious drone sightings have been rising for weeks, with people contacting authorities and posting on social media about aerial vehicles behaving strangely, especially at night. The reports have spread in New York City as well, with alleged sightings in Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens. The United States Federal Aviation Administration imposed a temporary ban in New Jersey this week on flying drones over the Army's Picatinny Arsenal in Wharton and a golf course owned by US president-elect Donald Trump in Bedminster. While the mystery has become a growing sensation, virtually no information has been available about whether the sightings are connected or represent anything out of the ordinary.

Vague and noncommittal statements from state and federal authorities have only complicated the matter and fueled public intrigue. On Thursday, though, a joint FBI and Department of Homeland Security statement emphasized that ongoing state- and federal-level investigations have found no evidence of foreign involvement or a threat of any kind. The Department of Defense shared the same conclusion in a press conference on Wednesday. Furthermore, the FBI and DHS added that none of the sightings have been verified to have been drones at all.

War, Revolution, And Ambition – OpEd

Bert Olivier

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There are several wars happening in the world at present – those in the Middle East, the one in Ukraine, and recently the renewed war in Syria. Anyone who has kept track of the connections between these and the encompassing attempt, by a bunch of globalists, to bring about a totalitarian world government, will know that these wars are an integral part of this global putsch. Could it be, however, that the outcomes of these wars (which are by no means a foregone conclusion) could perhaps promote the interests of the worldwide Resistance against the globalist cabal?

Hannah Arendt, writing in the early 1960s, seems to have been prescient about what would be happening from 2022 onwards, and it is worthwhile taking note of her insights in this regard.

One might think that her reference to ‘the threat of total annihilation through war,’ which reflects the danger, around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, of nuclear conflict, would invalidate her earlier claim, that at the time ‘war and revolution still constitute[d] its two central political issues,’ and leave only (nuclear) war as the decisive political issue. This would be erroneous, however, considering that the passage concludes with the claim that the only remaining cause, and the oldest one, is ‘the cause of freedom versus tyranny,’ which unambiguously brings revolution back into the picture.

Russia And Ukraine May Agree To Ceasefire In 2025, But Peace Not Guaranteed – Analysis

Paul Goble

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Over the course of 2024, both participants and observers of Russia’s war on Ukraine have frequently changed their assessments of its likely outcome. Some once predicted the victory of one side, then shifted to predicting the triumph of the other, only to reverse themselves again at a later point (see EDM, January 16, July 1).

This behavior, of course, was on view even earlier in the conflict (see EDM December 13, 20, 2023, January 28.) On the one hand, this pattern reflects changing definitions in Kyiv and Moscow as to what victory would look like (Window on Eurasia, September 1). On the other hand, these shifting assessments are the product of major changes in the performance of the two forces on the battlefield, the domestic situations the two countries find themselves in because of the war, and the changing constellation of forces in the international system. As the war heads into 2025, however, a consensus is emerging that some kind of agreement that will end the fighting can and will be reached in the coming months (The Moscow Times, December 6; Gazeta.ru, December 7).

For Russian spies, existing cybercrime tools become avenues into Ukrainian military devices

Daryna Antoniuk

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Kremlin-backed hackers have turned to an unconventional tactic to target Ukraine's military, researchers have found. In a recent campaign, the group known as Secret Blizzard hijacked tools and infrastructure from Russian cybercriminals, repurposing them for espionage.

The likely aim of this approach is to diversify the group's attack vectors, according to a new report by Microsoft. Other researchers have previously noted that this tactic also complicates attribution, allowing the group to shift blame to other threat actors if their malicious actions are uncovered.

Secret Blizzard, also tracked as Turla, has tried the strategy elsewhere before using it in Ukraine. Researchers have identified at least four instances where the group appeared to embed itself in another threat actor’s operations. Earlier in December, Microsoft detailed Secret Blizzard’s attacks on government-related targets in India and Afghanistan, conducted through the infrastructure used by the Pakistan-based cyber-espionage group.

In a report published Wednesday, Microsoft said it discovered two campaigns in which Secret Blizzard used the infrastructure of fellow threat actors to deploy custom malware on devices associated with the Ukrainian military.

Jay Bhattacharya: another Covid-19 critic goes to Washington

David Faris

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Before President-elect Donald Trump chose Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor of medicine, to lead the National Institutes of Health, Bhattacharya rose to prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic. The doctor opposed lockdowns and, later, vaccine and mask mandates.

An elite doctor takes on the Covid consensus

Bhattacharya was born in Kolkata, India, and emigrated to the United States when he was a child. He attended Stanford University for both his undergraduate and Ph.D. work in economics as well as for his M.D. He first worked for the RAND Corporation as an economist during the late 1990s before securing a position at the Stanford School of Medicine. At Stanford, Bhattacharya has been a prolific researcher who focused on issues of aging, nutrition and wellness. He still serves as the university's director of the Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.

In 2020, he became one of the leaders of a movement pushing back against stay-at-home orders and business closures early in the Covid-19 pandemic. A widely shared March 24, 2020, Wall Street Journal op-ed that he co-authored with Eran Bendavid speculated that no more than 20,000 to 40,000 people would die of the virus in the United States. A policy of indefinite lockdowns "may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health," they said. In terms of the "claim-staking" article's accuracy, "for every death his estimate implied, there were, in the end, more than 35," said David Wallace-Wells at The New York Times.

Pentagon Establishes AI Rapid Capabilities Cell

Allyson Park

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On Dec. 11, the Defense Department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office announced the establishment of the AI Rapid Capabilities Cell, tasked with helping the department accelerate the adoption and delivery of advanced AI capabilities.

While the United States is at the “cutting edge” when it comes to AI capability development, advancements made by adversaries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are accelerating and pose significant national security risks, Dr. Radha Plumb, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, told reporters during a briefing at the Pentagon.

“We are taking an all hands on deck approach to ensuring the U.S. continues to lead the way and accelerate DoD adoption of these tools, and I’m confident we’re up to the challenge,” she said. “The United States’ decisive and enduring advantage lies in the innovation that’s inherent in [the] commercial sector and the department’s ability to incorporate that into our critical missions.”

Managed by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, the AI Rapid Capabilities Cell, or AI RCC, will be executed in partnership with the Defense Innovation Unit, which will serve as a principal liaison between the department and the national security innovation base.

We saw a demo of the new AI system powering Anduril’s vision for war

James O'Donnell

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One afternoon in late November, I visited a weapons test site in the foothills east of San Clemente, California, operated by Anduril, a maker of AI-powered drones and missiles that recently announced a partnership with OpenAI. I went there to witness a new system it’s expanding today, which allows external parties to tap into its software and share data in order to speed up decision-making on the battlefield. If it works as planned over the course of a new three-year contract with the Pentagon, it could embed AI more deeply into the theater of war than ever before.

Near the site’s command center, which looked out over desert scrubs and sage, sat pieces of Anduril’s hardware suite that have helped the company earn its $14 billion valuation. There was Sentry, a security tower of cameras and sensors currently deployed at both US military bases and the US-Mexico border, and advanced radars. Multiple drones, including an eerily quiet model called Ghost, sat ready to be deployed. What I was there to watch, though, was a different kind of weapon, displayed on two large television screens positioned at the test site’s command station.

I was here to examine the pitch being made by Anduril, other companies in defense tech, and growing numbers of people within the Pentagon itself: A future “great power” conflict—military jargon for a global war involving competition between multiple countries—will not be won by the entity with the most advanced drones or firepower, or even the cheapest firepower. It will be won by whoever can sort through and share information the fastest. And that will have to be done “at the edge” where threats arise, not necessarily at a command post in Washington.

Top 10 Most Devastating Cyber Incidents of 2024 and Lessons for 2025

Scott Bolen 

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As 2024 comes to a close, the cyber landscape has witnessed an array of attacks that have reshaped the way we view cybersecurity. These incidents highlight vulnerabilities in technology, supply chains, and human systems. Here’s a look at the top 10 cyber incidents of the year and the critical lessons they offer for the future.

1. Microsoft Executive Email Breach

A Russia-aligned group exploited a legacy account without multifactor authentication (MFA), gaining access to sensitive email communications within Microsoft’s leadership and federal agencies. The attack underscores the importance of enforcing MFA and zero-trust architectures in protecting legacy systems​.

2. Change Healthcare Ransomware Attack

A ransomware attack disrupted U.S. healthcare systems, affecting pharmacies, hospitals, and insurance claims for weeks. With 22 million dollars paid in ransom, the event demonstrated the dire need for resilient disaster recovery plans and robust cybersecurity in critical sectors like healthcare​

Cyber Week in Review: December 13, 2024

Kat Duffy, Kyle Fendorf, Zoë Moore and Maya Schmidt

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CSRB to host first meeting on Salt Typhoon telecom hack

The U.S. Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) held its first meeting earlier this week on a major telecommunications hack by Chinese threat actor Salt Typhoon that compromised at least eight telecommunications companies and exposed the call records of countless senior government officials. The cyberattack, which may have begun as far back as 2022, involved exploiting routers and switches used by telecommunications companies to burrow deep into their networks, allowing hackers to observe call log data and potentially monitor calls in real-time. The hack also piggy-backed off a system used by law enforcement agencies to carry out wiretaps, prompting criticism from some privacy and civil liberties groups, who argue that the insecure nature of the wiretapping system allowed the hack to take place. The CSRB is composed of a mix of government officials and private sector experts and is charged with delivering reports on major cyber incidents, although experts have warned that the CSRB lacks the resources and political independence necessary to ensure comprehensive, impartial reports. The CSRB faces a daunting challenge as it investigates the ongoing hack, especially given its sprawling nature, the depth of Salt Typhoon’s intrusion, and the fact that U.S. cybersecurity officials are still determining the true scope of the attack and working to evict Salt Typhoon. Lawmakers from both parties have signaled support for the investigation, and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced a bill to the Senate that would substantially tighten cybersecurity requirements for telecommunications companies.