Cybersecurity and Cyberwarfare

The Federal Communications Commission has received several petitions and requests from E-Rate stakeholders through the annual E-Rate eligible services list (ESL) proceedings, asking that the FCC permit the use of E-Rate program funds to support advanced or next-generation firewalls and services, as well as other network security services. The FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau seeks comment on these petitions as well as the related funding year 2023 ESL proceeding filings.

The federal government plans to invest $1.5 billion to help spur a standards-based alternative for the gear at the heart of modern cellular networks.

The Federal Communications Commission's recent restrictions on five Chinese telecoms’ technologies — adopted on Nov. 25, 2022 — could impact state and local governments in ways previous bans haven’t. “Up until now … the federal agencies have been prohibited from buying this kind of technology, but it's still been widely available to state and local governments, to private companies, individuals,” said Jack Corrigan, research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).

Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge said they would stop trusting new certificates from TrustCor Systems that vouched for the legitimacy of sites reached by their users, capping weeks of online arguments among their technology experts, outside researchers and TrustCor, which said it had no ongoing ties of concern.

As inventions go, the Internet stacks up with the best of them: the lightbulb, automobile, maybe even fire. However, it’s time for policymakers to look carefully at how its swift transformation of society has affected freedom. Today’s disconcerting answer is that it breaks some essential tools for a civilized society. Furthermore, it equips people with “superpowers” that further rob individuals of their agency. Regulation focused on data privacy and misinformation misses this larger societal threat; public authorities must attend to civilizing the Web.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted new rules prohibiting communications equipment deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to national security from being authorized for importation or sale in the United States. This is the latest step by the FCC to protect our nation’s communications networks.

This report is a culmination of three years of investigation into domestic terrorism and the federal response. This report focuses on the rise in domestic terrorism, the federal response, the allocation of federal resources to addressing domestic terrorism, and the role of social media companies in the proliferation of extremist content. The expansion of social media has led to increased recruitment, dissemination, and coordination of domestic terrorist and extremist related activities.

There’s one bit of the future that Elon Musk has built and isn’t interested in using: A potential power that researchers have identified in his Starlink satellite system. For the past two years, Todd Humphreys, an Army-funded researcher at the University of Texas in Austin, and a team of researchers reverse-engineered signals sent from thousands of Starlink internet satellites in low Earth orbit to ground-based receivers, finding that the constellation could form a precise navigation sy

During a closed-door session with lawmakers, FBI Director Christopher Wray was asked whether the bureau had ever purchased and used Pegasus, the hacking tool that penetrates mobile phones and extracts their contents. Director Wray acknowledged that the FBI had bought a license for Pegasus, but only for research and development.

The future-of-tech conversations at Web Summit  in Lisbon could have played on a split screen.