Latest news with #VoltTyphoon
Time of India
3 days ago
- Politics
- Time of India
Japanese cybersecurity expert warns of China's cyber tactics, undersea cable cuts as signs of looming Taiwan conflict
A Japanese expert on cybersecurity voiced concern at a security conference in Rome that China's cyberattacks and its severing of undersea cables in the Taiwan Strait might indicate future conflict in the region, as reported by Focus Taiwan. Mihoko Matsubara , the chief cybersecurity strategist at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in Japan, stated during a panel at a NATO Defence College Foundation conference on Tuesday that while a hot war has not yet erupted in the Taiwan Strait, cyberattacks have already commenced, according to Focus Taiwan. A report from Cisco Systems in March 2025 confirmed that state-sponsored groups from China "have been attacking critical infrastructure services in Taiwan, and their tactics and targets closely resemble those of [the actor] 'Volt Typhoon,'" she explained. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Prime Swing Trader Mr. Hemant Shares His Winning Strategy for Free! TradeWise Learn More Undo According to her, the ultimate aim of these attacks was "to instigate chaos, disrupt decision-making processes, and hinder or delay the deployment of U.S. forces to the area in the event of conflicts in the Taiwan Strait." She cautioned that "this is very concerning, and we may already be witnessing a possible precursor to conflict in the region." Matsubara mentioned that the "Volt Typhoon" group has infiltrated infrastructure in the United States, India, and Singapore; however, there have been no reports of such activities in Japan or Taiwan yet. Another "alarming" sign that could indicate impending conflict is the severing of undersea cables, she noted. Live Events Although cable cuts can occur anywhere and at any time in the world, these incidents have been more frequently observed near the Taiwan Strait compared to other regions, and their occurrence has intensified this year, which she described as "strange," according to Focus Taiwan. Additionally, she urged European nations to take the security situation in the Taiwan Strait seriously, highlighting that Taiwan is responsible for more than 60 per cent of the global semiconductor supply and over 90 per cent of its advanced chips. Furthermore, the Taiwan Strait is crucial for over 20 per cent of global trade, and around 30,000 European nationals currently live in Taiwan, Focus Taiwan reported. The high-level conference, named "Indo-Pacific 2025: Prevention and Dialogue," is taking place in Rome on Tuesday and Wednesday, gathering international experts to discuss practical initiatives, according to the NATO foundation.
Business Wire
12-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Veza Unveils New NHI Security Product to Tackle the Fastest-Growing Risk in Identity Security in the AI Era
REDWOOD SHORES, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Veza, the identity security company, today announced a significant platform expansion focused on securing Non-Human Identities (NHIs). The new NHI Security product and capabilities deliver visibility, ownership, and governance to machine identities—such as service accounts, secrets, keys, and workloads—across SaaS, cloud, infrastructure, and on-premises environments. As enterprises rush to adopt AI, they're unleashing a flood of machine identities faster than anyone can control. Every model, training run, and inference call spins up new credentials that access sensitive data and systems. These AI workloads don't just add scale, they introduce chaos. Machine identities now outnumber humans 17 to 1, and most are invisible, ownerless, and dangerously overprivileged. They're powering core business processes, yet flying completely under the radar. Worse, threat actors like Volt Typhoon are deliberately targeting identity as their primary attack surface. Veza brings order to this chaos by giving organizations a structured, automated way to discover, govern, and lock down NHIs—with the same rigor applied to humans. From visibility to ownership to least privilege, Veza puts security back in control of the machines that now run your business. Veza's NHI adoption is surging because enterprises aren't waiting to become the next headline. The risk is real, the sprawl is unchecked, and the only way forward is to act now. 'Non-human identities in our Azure estate—service principals, managed identities, and the secrets that support our custom applications—have been a blind spot," said Lena Taylor, VP, Chief Information Security Officer at Crocs. "As we roll out Veza, we will have a single, centralized view to discover, monitor, and govern these machine identities. The ability to assign clear ownership, surface risk, and enforce least-privilege across Azure is already reshaping how we approach identity security, and we're excited to see the full impact as deployment continues.' Now available in the Veza Access platform, Veza NHI Security product provides a purpose-built product offering for machine identities—backed by deep analytics, full lifecycle insights, and automation integrated with Veza's platform. Highlights include: Comprehensive NHI Discovery and Visibility: Easily access the new NHI Security module in Veza to view a unified inventory of NHIs, including AWS EC2 instances, Azure VMs, GCP clusters, Entra ID service principals, Okta, Salesforce, HashiCorp, and many more. Veza automatically classifies NHIs using advanced logic and lets you refine via enrichment rules to fit your environment. Automated Risk Detection and Mitigation: Pre-built access risk dashboards highlight critical risks such as dormant keys, unrotated secrets, orphaned accounts, and NHIs with excessive permissions. Drill down into key and secret metadata—like last used, rotation status, and active state—across systems like AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, HashiCorp Vault, GitHub, and Salesforce. Human to Non-Human Ownership Management: Get real-time alerts when an NHI becomes orphaned or its human owner leaves the org. Veza suggests a new owner based on access intelligence and allows you to reassign with a single click. Use Veza Enrichment Rules for advanced use cases (e.g. workload identity, ephemeral instances, non-human to non-human, etc.). Integrated Compliance Control: Maintain compliance with automated tracking of NHI ownership, credential hygiene, and least privilege enforcement—backed by Access Graph visualizations and risk scoring for every non-human identity. With Veza's new NHI capabilities, customers: Improve Security: Eliminate dormant accounts, detect unknown access paths, and reduce the blast radius of potential breaches. Reduce Risk and Compliance Gaps: Prove key rotation and least privilege enforcement for machines and workloads. Eliminate Access Uncertainty: Understand the true scale of your NHI footprint—even when machine identities masquerade as human users. 'NHI discovery and lifecycle are mission-critical use cases for enterprises operating in the real world of cloud, identity complexity, and Agentic AI adoption,' said Tarun Thakur, CEO and Co-Founder of Veza. 'NHI Security isn't actually an identity in your directory services, the machine identities are everywhere across SaaS, databases, cloud, disconnected systems, and now AI apps. Veza is delivering the next-gen identity platform designed on the permissions and entitlements metadata to help organizations achieve least privilege at scale as the foundation to Zero Trust.' About Veza Veza is the leader in identity security, helping organizations secure access across the enterprise. Veza's Access Platform goes beyond identity governance and administration (IGA) tools to visualize, monitor, and control entitlements so that organizations can stay compliant and achieve least privilege. Global enterprises like Wynn Resorts, Expedia, and Blackstone trust Veza to manage identity security use cases, including privileged access monitoring, non-human identity (NHI) security, access entitlement management, data system access, SaaS access security, IAM hygiene, identity security posture management (ISPM), and next-generation IGA. Founded in 2020, Veza is headquartered in Los Gatos, California, and is funded by Accel, Bain Capital, Ballistic Ventures, Google Ventures (GV), NEA, Norwest Venture Partners, and True Ventures. Visit us at and follow us on LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.
Politico
05-06-2025
- Politics
- Politico
Cyber cuts are freaking out China watchers
Presented by With help from Anthony Adragna and Aaron Mak More than 1,000 cybersecurity professionals have either left or are set to walk off their jobs in the federal government in the coming months, as the Department of Government Efficiency initiative drives layoffs and buyouts across agencies. The timing could not be worse: staff numbers are plummeting just as China is ramping up its cyberattacks — and these efforts have soared in recent years. These operations include hacking group Volt Typhoon, found to have burrowed widely into critical infrastructure since at least 2022, with experts warning U.S. water systems and transportation networks have been compromised. And they also include Salt Typhoon, discovered to be in U.S. telecom networks last year. Together, these ramped up hacks from government-backed Chinese groups amount to advance work for sophisticated war, said retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, current senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. 'As a military planner, this is what I called operational preparation of the battlefield,' Montgomery said. 'China has continued to accelerate their efforts to gain access into U.S. and allied critical infrastructures and we are still playing a defensive game of trying to identify and remove [them].' The cuts affect a cross-section of the federal cyber army. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a part of the Department of Homeland Security, is expecting to lose about 1,000 employees, amounting to about a third of its personnel, as well its top leadership and programs around election security. The agency has been in President Donald Trump's crosshairs since the cyber chief he appointed, Chris Krebs, said the 2020 election was secure. Trump fired Krebs as a result. The State Department's cyber bureau is set to be split up in a reorganization of the office. The Office of the National Cyber Director at the White House and U.S. Cyber Command are without Senate-confirmed leaders. The Defense Information Systems Agency, which secures the Pentagon's IT and telecommunications infrastructure, is also set to lose about 10 percent of its workforce, as part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's drive to reduce the DOD's civilian workforce by between 5 and 8 percent. Lawmakers from both parties are sounding the alarm. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said during a Senate hearing Thursday that Salt Typhoon hackers still 'have unlimited access to our voice messages, to our telephone calls,' describing it as 'astounding.' A group of House Democrats led by Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) sent a letter Thursday to both Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asking about what has been done to respond to Salt Typhoon. The lawmakers wrote that agency personnel cuts showed that 'instead of rising to meet the moment, the Trump administration seems intent on dismantling the core institutions responsible for cyber defense.' The ODNI and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Noem told cyber experts at the RSA Conference in San Francisco in April to 'just wait until you see what we are able to do' on cyber, noting that 'there are reforms going on' around the topic. Last year provided a case study for the threat when the Chinese government hacking group Salt Typhoon was discovered to have penetrated U.S. telecommunications systems, including devices belonging to then-candidate Trump and his running mate JD Vance. The breach was so vast that Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.), a former telecoms executive, estimated earlier this year that it would take '50,000 people and a complete shutdown of the network for 12 hours' to fully weed out Chinese hackers from U.S. telecommunications systems. Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told POLITICO in a recent interview that 'China is just increasing the pace of what they're doing,' noting that the nation is 'just the biggest, broadest threat out there.' Relief seems a long way away. The Senate Homeland Security Committee held a nomination hearing Thursday for Sean Cairncross as the next national cyber director at the White House. Cairncross has virtually no experience in cyber. He previously led the Millennium Challenge Corporation and worked in various leadership roles at the Republican National Committee. The nomination of Sean Plankey to lead CISA is still pending. Plankey is a former cyber official at the Energy Department and on the National Security Council. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has blocked Plankey's confirmation vote in the full Senate until CISA publicly releases a 2022 report on telecom vulnerabilities. Jim Lewis, distinguished fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and a Washington cyber expert, said that it was understandable that the new administration would take time to establish its cyber policies, and anticipated that agencies might stabilize when new funding becomes available after the fiscal year ends in September. But he said the gap until then leaves a dangerous opening. 'Will the Chinese figure out that they have an opportunity and do they need to take it? I think right now the answer is no,' Lewis said of the delay. 'But that's three months of open season.' An Apple appeals setback A federal appeals court rejected Apple's emergency request to halt court-ordered changes to the company's app store — primarily an order that it can't charge commissions for certain payments. Wednesday's order from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it considered a host of factors in denying Apple's request for a stay, including whether Apple was likely to succeed in its appeal, whether it would be irreparably harmed absent court action and whether a stay of the lower court's order would be in the public interest. Briefs in the appeal are due this summer. 'After reviewing the relevant factors, we are not persuaded that a stay is appropriate,' the court wrote. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the Northern District of California previously ruled Apple could no longer charge a commission when a link took users to a third-party payment app. The judge said in late April that Apple violated a prior injunction and that a company executive 'outright lied' under oath. 'We are disappointed with the decision not to stay the district court's order, and we'll continue to argue our case during the appeals process,' an Apple spokesperson said. 'As we've said before, we strongly disagree with the district court's opinion. Our goal is to ensure the App Store remains an incredible opportunity for developers and a safe and trusted experience for our users.' State AI rules threaten national security When House Speaker Mike Johnson defended the controversial 10-year moratorium on enforcement of state AI laws in the spending bill, he invoked national security as the reason. 'We have to be careful not to have 50 different states regulating AI, because it has national security implications, right?' Johnson told POLITICO's Meredith Lee Hill and Anthony Adragna on Wednesday. The speaker's office declined to elaborate when DFD followed up. Republicans have generally justified the moratorium — and potentially preempting state laws — as crucial for business development. So why does this now matter to national security? Johnson's national security argument has been emerging on the edges of the current reconciliation debate. The House's Bipartisan Artificial Intelligence Task Force floated a moratorium in a report last year, suggesting that states do not have the expertise to evaluate the national security ramifications of their AI legislation. Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, wrote last week that the patchwork of state laws disrupts the supply chains enabling the Department of Defense to implement AI. James Czerniawski, senior policy analyst for Americans for Prosperity, also endorsed Johnson's national security framing on Wednesday, citing the tight race with China for AI leadership. Is it a real concern, or just expediency? National security has been a reliable argument for lawmakers struggling to get a provision over the line, from the TikTok ban to the CHIPS Act. Whatever the rationale, whether the moratorium survives the Senate parliamentarian is the real question now. post of the day THE FUTURE IN 5 LINKS Stay in touch with the whole team: Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@ Steve Heuser (sheuser@ Nate Robson (nrobson@ and Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@
Axios
05-06-2025
- Politics
- Axios
Exclusive: Dems press Trump admin. for response to China-backed cyberattacks
A group of Democratic lawmakers are pressing the Trump administration to clarify who is leading the government's efforts to eradicate China-backed hackers from U.S. critical infrastructure and telecom networks. Why it matters: Roughly 1,000 people have already left the nation's top cyber agency this year through voluntary buyouts and other workforce cuts. Those cuts could create dangerous weaknesses in the nation's cyber defenses, the lawmakers argue in a letter exclusively shared with Axios. Zoom in: Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) sent a letter today to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard demanding more clarity on who is leading the response against two major China-backed cyberattacks uncovered during the Biden administration. Democratic Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi, Kathy Castor, Ro Khanna, Haley Stevens, Shontel Brown and Jill Tokuda joined Torres as signatories. The lawmakers are also requesting Noem and Gabbard provide an update on any ongoing investigations into both the Volt Typhoon attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure and the Salt Typhoon campaign to surveil high-profile individuals' cell phones. The group is also asking for an update on how proposed budget cuts and the recent workforce reductions at CISA will impact those investigations. What they're saying: "This is not a partisan issue. It is a matter of grave consequence for the security of America both at home and abroad," the lawmakers write. "We owe it to the American people to protect them from the specter of a cyber 9/11 at the hands of our most formidable foreign adversary." Threat level: For years, top American officials have been warning about increasing cyber threats from China. China-backed Volt Typhoon has been prepositioning in critical infrastructure — such as water utilities, power plants and railways — for at least five years, according to congressional testimony. Salt Typhoon, another Chinese government-backed group, was caught hacking into several high-profile politicians' phones last year, including President Trump's. "Somewhere, Xi Jinping is smiling at America's insistence on degrading its own cyber capabilities," the lawmakers write.
WIRED
04-06-2025
- Business
- WIRED
The US Grid Attack Looming on the Horizon
Jun 4, 2025 6:00 AM A major cyberattack on the US electrical grid has long worried security experts. Such an attack wouldn't be easy. But if an adversary pulled it off, it'd be lights out in more ways than one. Photograph: Michael Tessier When the lights went out across the Iberian Peninsula in April, everything ground to a halt. Scores of people were trapped in Madrid's underground metro system. Hospitals in Lisbon had to switch to emergency generators. Internet service as far away as Greenland and Morocco went down. While the cause remains unclear, the actual damage to the Iberian power grid—and the people it serves—was relatively minor. Less than 24 hours after the outage began, the region's electricity operators managed to get the grid back online. Even if things could have been much worse, the outage was both an unnerving reminder of how suddenly things can go offline. For years, cybersecurity professionals, watchdogs, and government agencies have warned that a malicious cyberattack on the US power grid could be devastating. With ample evidence that state-sponsored hacking groups are eyeing the decentralized and deeply vulnerable power grid, the risk is more acute than ever. Case in point: Hackers, believed to be linked to the Chinese government, spent years exploiting vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure across the mainland United States and Guam to obtain access to their systems. The operations, dubbed Volt Typhoon, could have used this access to shut down or disconnect parts of the American power grid—throwing millions into the dark. The effort was, luckily, disrupted and the vulnerabilities patched. Still, it is an unnerving illustration of just how vulnerable the electric system truly is. We know what such a hack could look like. In 2015, Ukraine experienced the world's first large-scale cyberattack on an electrical grid. A Russian military intelligence unit known as Sandworm disconnected various substations from the central grid and knocked hundreds of thousands of people offline. The attack on Ukraine was repaired quickly, but cybersecurity experts have been warning for years that the next one might be more devastating. Unlike Ukraine, America does not have a single power grid—it has three large interconnections, broken down into a network of smaller regional systems, some of which stretch into Canada. Most of the East is on one grid, most of the West is on another, while Texas and Alaska run their own interconnections. Keeping these networks running is a wildly complicated effort: There are thousands of utility operations, tens of thousands of substations, and hundreds of thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines. Photograph: Michael Tessier To some degree, this decentralized network is an asset, as it means there is no core vulnerability that risks knocking the entire country offline. But the interconnections mean that a failure in one corner of the grid could cause a cascade that takes down the entire system. In 2018, researchers from Northwestern University ran large-scale models, gaming out what would happen if parts of the grid failed. They found that, generally, the American power grid was resilient. However, they found that about 10 percent of power lines in the US were susceptible to the kind of failure that could trigger this domino effect under some conditions. A 2022 study that looked at possible disruptions to the Texas grid also found that, in some cases, a relatively small disruption could cause a series of downstream outages 'rapidly in succession.' This means that even if malicious actors manage to take only a small number of nodes in the network offline, it has the potential to do enormous downstream damage. Photograph: Michael Tessier Photograph: Michael Tessier Insurance underwriter Lloyd's of London has looked at the effects of such an outage. In this hypothetical, first drafted in 2015 but updated in the years since, Lloyd's estimates that a Trojan virus that manages to infect just 50 generators—removing 10 percent of the grid's total power—can trigger this cascade effect and knock out power for most of the East Coast, including New York City and Washington, DC. The Lloyd's report states that this is an 'extreme' but 'not unrealistic scenario.' Eastern Interconnection Over 120 million people across 36 US states and parts of Canada. Western Interconnection 14 US states, two Canadian provinces, and a portion of Baja California in Mexico. Approximately 80 million people. Texas Interconnection (ERCOT) Most of Texas, operating largely independently from the other interconnections. Over 26 million people. Quebec Interconnection Around 8.5 million people. Alaska Interconnection Approximately 730,000 people. 'Images of a dark New York City make front pages worldwide,' they write, 'accompanied by photographs of citizens stuck underground for hours on stranded subway cars and in elevators in the summer heat.' These rolling blackouts would stretch through 36 states over the course of a day, throwing some 93 million people into the dark. It could take up to three days for half of those people to get back online—while hardware damage and other problems could require up to three weeks to fix. As the outages continue, more difficulties arise. The analysts warn that an information campaign running parallel to the cyberattack could prompt strikes, protests, or general unrest. In 2016, then Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Craig Fugate was summoned to Congress to testify on the possible impacts of a cyberattack on the US electric grid. Water and wastewater systems are some of the first things to go down, he noted. 'There is not really a good way to manage that if those systems go offline for extensive periods of time,' Fugate said. He explained that the emergency response will become a game of triage: distributing enough power, gas, and generators to emergency services and utilities, while also trying to keep consumer-facing supply chains operating. 'Can you get enough life support and infrastructure going to keep the major supply lines up?' Fugate continued. 'You are not going to have everything. You are not going to have what the normal consumption rates are.' Lloyd's estimates that the total economic costs and losses could hit $1 trillion.
