Ninety miles from the South Eastern tip of the United States, Liberty has no stead. In order for Liberty to exist and thrive, Tyranny must be identified, recognized, confronted and extinguished.
In the aftermath of the global WannaCry ransomware attack, which has spread around the globe like wildfire, a significant number of corporations and public services have found their infrastructure grinding to a halt, unable to operate with unprotected if mission-critical computers taken offline indefinitely. Some of the more prominent examples so far include:
NHS: The British public health service - the world's fifth-largest employer, with 1.7 million staff - was badly hit, with interior minister Amber Rudd saying around 45 facilities were affected. Several were forced to cancel or delay treatment for patients.
Germany's Deutsche Bahn national railway operator was affected, with information screens and ticket machines hit. Travelers tweeted pictures of hijacked departure boards showing the ransom demand instead of train times. But the company insisted that trains were running as normal.
Renault: The French automobile giant was hit, forcing it to halt production at sites in France and its factory in Slovenia as part of measures to stop the spread of the virus.
FedEx: The US package delivery group acknowledged it had been hit by malware and said it was "implementing remediation steps as quickly as possible." .
Russian banks, ministries, railways: Russia's central bank was targeted, along with several government ministries and the railway system. The interior ministry said 1,000 of its computers were hit by a virus. Officials played down the incident, saying the attacks had been contained.
Telefonica: The Spanish telephone giant said it was attacked but "the infected equipment is under control and being reinstalled," said Chema Alonso, the head of the company's cyber security unit and a former hacker.
Sandvik: Computers handling both administration and production were hit in a number of countries where the company operates, with some production forced to stop. "In some cases the effects were small, in others they were a little larger," Head of External Communications Par Altan said.
One place which seemed to have emerged relatively unscathed from the global cyber-havoc (aside from the US, which is ironic as it is the U.S. NSA that was created the hacking software) has been China. Or so it seemed due to lack of media reports from the mainland. Now, courtesy of 95cn.org, and its twitter account, we have the first visual evidence that China too was materially impacted, to the point where not only local ATMs had been taken offline, but Chinese traffic police, immigration authorities and various public security bureaus and schools have suspended normal work until the malware threat is ...
ABOARD THE USS GEORGE H.W. BUSH, Persian Gulf — While NavyF/A-18 Super Hornets deal death from the sky on Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria, the EA-18 Growler is jamming enemy communications — and potentially enemy drones too.
The Bush, which has been launching sorties in support of the counter-ISIS fight since early in the year, has four Hornet squadrons flying constant missions against the enemy. But also key to the fight are its squadron of Growlers and E-2C Hawkeye aircraft, which can detect airborne threats at distance and coordinate strikes from the air.
All fall under the command of Adm. Ken Whitesell, commander of the Bush carrier strike group. In an interview aboard the carrier, Whitesell said he believes the importance of the airborne Growler capability is underscored in the current fight with the emergence of small, commercially available unmanned aircraft systems as a weapon against coalition ground troops.
“You’ve probably been watching the unmanned aerial vehicles — homemade, Amazon-delivered, radio-controlled,” Whitesell said. “[ISIS militants can fly] homemade bombs over the top of forces and drop them by crashing the gyro-copters. So how can we attack those? The easiest way to do that is potentially to jam the signal and stop them flying.”
The Growler, which is nearly identical to the Hornet, features wingtip ALQ-99 jamming pods and ALQ-218 radar warning receiver equipment. Growlers fly regular sorties in concert with Hornets, though it’s much less easy to see the effect they have on the fight.
While Whitesell believes electronic warfare assets play a role in countering enemy radio-frequency capabilities, from small drone control to improvised explosive device detonation and...
When students from Charlotte’s Victory Christian Center School decided to revive a rocketry team tradition of naming their rockets, one of the groups christened their rocket Trump.
And if there’s anyone who likes seeing his name on things, it’s the president. So when the team went to Washington, D.C., on Friday to get ready for the national competition, they ended up showing their entry to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
“That’s a mean-looking machine, huh?” the president said as the team set down their sleek black projectile with his name in gold letters.
Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, introduced the team when the national press corps came in. They spent a little under 5 minutes exchanging pleasantries and having their pictures taken.
“How did you come up with the name Trump?” the president asked...
