Sunday, July 19, 2020

Has Hollywood finally decided to fight “Reel Life Racism”

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Syed Ahmed Uzair

Article Title

Has Hollywood finally decided to fight “Reel Life Racism”

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Global Views 360

Publication Date

July 19, 2020

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Al Jolson in Warner Bros. publicity photo for the film The Jazz Singer (1927)

Al Jolson in Warner Bros. publicity photo for the film The Jazz Singer (1927) | Source: Wikimedia

Back in the 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement was slowly gaining momentum in the United States, broadcasting services were employed to gather support for the movement. Images of various kinds of atrocities and violence being rendered to nonviolent Black demonstrators were broadcasted into American houses to raise awareness about the movement.

However, the response of Hollywood so far can be explained in a single word- tragic! Hollywood as a major media and content producer has massively shaped the American culture. However it has not much to show as a positive influence on race issues.

A classic 1940’s musical movie, Holiday Inn had the famous song in which White stars performed in blackface. In a 1980s hit, “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” the Indians are depicted as barbaric and uncivilised. The list of such racial stereotypes is huge to be reproduced here.

Legendary Hollywood actor John Wayne made highly offensive comments in a playboy interview. His exact words are, “I believe in white supremacy until the Blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.” He further goes on to make a series of comments, that ideally should not be coming from someone with so much influence in Hollywood.

Many legendary actors and industry icons too have struggled due to racism in Hollywood. Bruce Lee is a fine example of a person who fought against racism in the industry and refused to be cast in many roles that portrayed Chinese people in a negative light. He ultimately moved back to Hong Kong, partly due to the lack of appropriate roles. Actress Lucy Liu has also spoken about how she was too naïve to understand back in the early days as to why her friend would get multiple auditions every day, while she managed two or three in a month.

In 2015, there was a massive uproar regarding the Oscar winners after the academy awarded all 20 nominations to white actors. It quickly gained momentum with the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite becoming a global trend. Before #OscarsSoWhite, no one would have bothered to notice that 86% of top films predominantly featured white actors.

As per a Washington Post survey, film directors who ranked as the most influential decision-makers at Hollywood were predominantly whites. Hollywood might stress for newer reforms against racism on the big screen but that is not the reality at all. To put things into perspective, the Hollywood academy has never revealed information about the diversity of its members involved in the branches of the academy, such as writers, directors, etc.

The response of Hollywood movers and shakers was always akin to a tokenism, a call to push for producing more content involving black writers, producers, and actors.

George Floyd’s death was just the trigger it needed to burst out in the open the pent up anger over the centuries of discrimination, oppression, and systematic injustice meted out to black people. The way black people are portrayed in reel life directly impacts society’s attitude towards them in real life.

People started demanding that Hollywood production companies and studios should involve the people from the community in the decision-making process when the movie plot is based considerably on the members of those communities. They have also demanded that older movies depicting racially insensitive narratives should be taken out of circulation.

Disney, one of the most reputed names in Hollywood, chose to remove the movie “Song of the South” from US distribution, when the criticism for the movie grew, even though it remains available for those who know where to look. They have also announced the plan to revamp the famous Splash Mountain ride at Disneyland and Disney World to include the character of Princess Tiana- Disney’s first African American princess from the movie The Princess and the Frog.

UK TV broadcaster Sky has added a disclaimer to approximately a dozen films stating, “This film has outdated attitudes, language and cultural depictions which may cause offence today."

HBO max recently pulled the iconic film, Gone with the wind because of its controversial depiction of black stereotypes. It returned with a four and a half minute introductory video by black scholar Jaqueline Stewart for a better understanding about racism.

Ever since the resurfacing of the playboy interview of John Wayne, students and alumni at USC have been protesting against Wayne’s exhibit at the campus. However, USC has finally decided to remove the exhibit.

All these reforms are a direct result of the audience being more and more aware of racism and prejudice. However, it is Hollywood’s turn to step up and push for bigger reforms. While it would be a challenging and bold endeavor, Hollywood’s global influence makes it imperative for the industry to undergo much-needed reforms.

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February 4, 2021 5:20 PM

SolarWinds Attack and its implication for U.S. Security: Sabotage or espionage?

SolarWinds, a publicly listed Texas-based company with a value of more than $6 billion, has a very reputed customer list including multiple U.S. government agencies. The company develops softwares for businesses and agencies to help manage and monitor their networks, systems and  IT infrastructure. The company is a service provider to over 425 of the Fortune 500 companies, top 5 U.S. accounting firms, all major U.S. telecom providers, the U.S. treasury, several global universities and educational institutions, the NSA and the White House.

A set of hackers managed to sneak a malicious code into the software update of SolarWinds for a tool called “Orion”. Earlier, in 2020, the hackers had injected malware into the updates of Orion which were released between March and June of 2020. On 5th of Jan, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure security Agency (CISA), the Office of the director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the National Security Agency (NSA) made an official joint statement stating, "an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor, likely Russian in origin, is responsible for most or all of the recently discovered, ongoing cyber compromises of both government and non-governmental networks". U.S. government agencies like The Pentagon, National institute of Health, FBI, DHS, the Department of Energy and the Department of Veterans affairs were some significant users of Orion. In fact, in August 2020, the Department of Veterans affairs renewed its Orion license in a 2.8-million-dollar order. The Department of Veterans affairs has been heavily involved in COVID-19 relief.

The Orion hack began as early as March 2020. Over 18,000 customers had installed the compromised software which implies that these customers were vulnerable to spy operations throughout 2020. The malware inserted in the updates provided remote access of an organization’s network to the elite hackers. Since the malware was undetected for months, it gave the hackers an opportunity to obtain information from their targets. In fact, the hackers could also monitor emails and other internal communications. FireEye, the cybersecurity company who were the first to discover the breach describes the capability of the malware, from initially lying dormant up to two weeks, to hiding in plain sight by masquerading its investigation as “Orion Activity”. In 2016, Russian Military hackers used a method called “supply chain” to infect companies performing business in Ukraine with a hard-drive wiping virus called NotPetya. This attack is considered to be one of the most damaging cyber-attacks till date. The infiltration tactic used in the current hack is also identified to be similar to the “supply chain” method.

The Orion software framework contained a backdoor that communicated via HTTP to third party servers. Cybersecurity firm, FireEye has been tracking the trojanized version of Orion plug-in as SUNBURST.

FireEye Logo

FireEye described the use of SUNBURST backdoor on one of its blogs published on 13th December 2020. It stated,

“After an initial dormant period of up to two weeks, it retrieves and executes commands, called “Jobs”, that include the ability to transfer files, execute files, profile the system, reboot the machine, and disable system services. The malware masquerades its network traffic as the Orion Improvement Program (OIP) protocol and stores reconnaissance results within legitimate plugin configuration files allowing it to blend in with legitimate SolarWinds activity. The backdoor uses multiple obfuscated blocklists to identify forensic and anti-virus tools running as processes, services, and drivers.”

FireEye described the attack through the SUNBURST backdoor as “highly evasive”. Meanwhile, SolarWinds is facing a class action lawsuit filed by a stakeholder of the IT Infrastructure Management software company in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas on 4th Jan 2021. The lawsuit is filed against SolarWinds’ ex-president, Kevin Thompson and chief financial officer, J. Barton Kalsu on the grounds of violating Federal Securities laws under Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The complaint states that SolarWinds Company failed to disclose that "since mid-2020, Orion monitoring products had a vulnerability that allowed hackers to compromise the server upon which the products ran". The complaint also mentioned that SolarWinds update server had a fairly weak and easily accessible password, ‘solarwinds123’.

Microsoft’s internal security research team found evidence that the same hackers had accessed some internal source code in their company’s systems. Microsoft mentioned that the attempted activities were beyond just the presence of malware SolarWinds code in their environment. Microsoft has “an open source like culture” which allows teams within Microsoft to view the source code. The company acknowledges that it is a threat model but they are downplaying the risk by saying “just viewing the source code should not cause any elevated risk”.

The Russian Hackers have also managed to breach the network of Austin City, Texas. The breach dates back to at-least mid of October 2020. The hackers have seemed to target the U.S. Treasury, Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security, The Pentagon, Cybersecurity firm FireEye, and SolarWinds. The breach of the network of the Austin city is an apparent win for Russian hackers. Theoretically, the compromise could have helped them access sensitive information in accordance with the city governance, elections, city police and by excavating deeper, the hackers can practically burrow inside energy, water and airport networks of the city.

Berserk Bear, the hacking outfit that is currently believed to be behind Austin’s breach appears to have used Austin’s network as grounds to stage larger attacks. Berserk Bear also known as BROMINE inter alia several names is believed to have been responsible for a series of breaches of significant U.S. infrastructures in the past year.

The attacks on SolarWinds, U.S. government and FireEye have been linked to another Russian group called APT29 also popularly known as Cozy Bear. Berserk Bear is allegedly a unit of Russian federal Security Service (FSB). Cozy Bear is known to be affiliated with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR. FSB and SVR are considered to be successors of the Committee of State Security of the Soviet-era which was widely known as the KGB.

The Austin Council seems to have been aware of the breach from October 2020. The FBI and CISA had published an initial advisory warning of “advanced persistent threat actors” (APTs) on October 9th, 2020. The advisory warned the city council of APTs targeting state and local governments. On October 22nd, a follow-up advisory was published in which both agencies accredited the breach to Berserk Bear. CISA published a heat map listing the types of organizations that were breached, scanned or targeted by Berserk Bear. The reputation of Berserk Bear of lurking fit their common pattern of espionage-oriented attacks. Sami Ruohonen, a researcher at Finnish cybersecurity firm F-Secure said that the adversaries have already been in the network for more than a couple of months before someone discovers their existence. Ruohonen also mentioned that this technique is specially preferred by APT groups because, the longer they go unnoticed, the longer they have a remote access to the network. F-Secure, in a report published in 2019, compared Berserk Bear and similar groups to the cyber equivalent of sleeper cells.

The cybersecurity experts have warned Austin city and the U.S that Berserk Bear hackers are not just involved in espionage and sabotage. They can gear up at any moment and create havoc in the United States. These Russian Hackers can cause city blackouts, disturbance in water supply and can even disrupt COVID-19 relief. Vikram Thakur, a technical director at Symantec who has tracked Berserk Bear for years quotes,  “We should be cognizant of the level of information that they have, turning on valves or closing valves, things of that sort — they have the expertise to do it.”

Kevin Thomson, the ex-CEO of SolarWinds | Source: SolarWinds Facebook

SolarWinds replaced their ex-CEO Kevin Thomson with Mr Sudhakar Ramakrishnan. Unlike his predecessor Thomson, who is an accountant by training, Ramakrishnan comes from a security background having led Pulse Secure in the recent past. The new CEO publicly stated that the company will be making 5 critical changes to put security front and center. The company also hired ex-CISA chief Chris Krebs and Facebook’s former security lead, Alex Stamos. Krebs and Stamos work as independent consultants to help the company coordinate its crisis response. Krebs told the Financial Times that it could even take years to uncover the full extent of the hack. On the brighter side, the new CEO mentioned that the company has engaged several cybersecurity experts to assist SolarWinds in its efforts to become more secure.  We can hope that, with better expertise, vision and understanding of threat and vulnerability management, the company is now headed towards a better future.

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