Cybersecurity and Cyberwarfare

At the Federal Communications Commission, we are focusing on five key principles to help guide our 5G future.

Twelve former top US national security officials are urging Congress to hit pause on a package of antitrust bills in order to consider how breaking up tech companies could harm the US 

A Pentagon program that delegated management of a huge swath of the Internet to a Florida company in January 2021 — just minutes before President Trump left office — has ended as mysteriously as it began, with the Defense Department retaking control of 175 million IP addresses. At its peak, the company, Global Resource Systems, controlled almost 6 percent of a section of the Internet called IPv4.

T-Mobile said the attack that breached its computer network pulled Social Security numbers and other personal information of more than 40 million current and prospective customers. The cellphone carrier said the stolen data included first and last names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and driver’s license information from a subset of current and potential customers.

T-Mobile is investigating a forum post claiming to be selling a mountain of personal data. The forum post itself doesn't mention T-Mobile, but the seller told Vice they have obtained data related to over 100 million people, and that the data came from T-Mobile servers. On the underground forum the seller is asking for 6 bitcoin, around $270,000, for a subset of the data containing 30 million social security numbers and drivers licenses.

The Internet Atlas Project at the University of California, Berkeley's goal is to shine a light on long-term risks to the internet. We produce indicators of weak points and bottlenecks that threaten the internet’s stability. Our research shows that the internet is facing twin dangers; on one side, there’s the threat of total consolidation. Power over the internet has been increasingly concentrated primarily in the hands of a few, US-based organizations. On the other side, there’s fragmentation.

SpaceX can keep launching broadband satellites despite a lawsuit filed by Viasat, a federal appeals court ruled June 20. Viasat sued the Federal Communications Commission in May 2021 and asked judges for a stay that would halt SpaceX's ongoing launches of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites that power Starlink Internet service.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted an Order that incorporates changes to the FCC's rules consistent with the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, which appropriated $1.895 billion for the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program. The Order is another step in ongoing FCC action to protect the communications networks from those who would harm the United States. Key changes include:

The platform ID.me is run by a software company in Virginia, and it’s now a required part of more than 20 states’ unemployment programs. For many people, the ID.me process is simple: they use their smartphones to scan their faces and upload pictures of their government-issued identity cards. The images are checked by a facial recognition system. ID.me is meant to block scammers who are using fake or stolen identities to claim unemployment benefits, but the process is also cutting off an unknown number of people who don’t have the right technology or the right identification.

The House Commerce Committee will delve into a slate of nine bills aimed at securing wireless networks. The bills focus on changes to the Federal Communications Commission and National Telecommunications and Information Administration related to both tech and cybersecurity policy, with an eye toward Chinese dominance in telecoms.