SA Migration International

News Articles

.Which countries are preparing for cyberwar?

Source: , 15/02/2021

US intelligence briefings regularly list Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea as the major cyber threat actors to worry about. The US has long warned that Russia has a `highly advanced offensive cyber program` and has `conducted damaging and/or disruptive cyber attacks, including attacks on critical infrastructure networks`.
The Pentagon has said that China is looking to narrow the gap with the US in terms of cyberwarfare capabilities, and has warned that China has attempted to probe US networks for data useful in any future crisis: `Targeted information could enable PLA [People`s Liberation Army] cyber forces to build an operational picture of US defense networks, military disposition, logistics, and related military capabilities that could be exploited prior to or during a crisis,` it warned.
US cyberwarfare capabilities
However, it`s likely that the US still has the most significant cyberdefence and cyberattack capabilities. Speaking in 2016, President Obama said: `we`re moving into a new era here, where a number of countries have significant capacities. And frankly we`ve got more capacity than anybody, both offensively and defensively.`
Much of this capability comes from US Cyber Command, which has a dual mission: to protect US Department of Defence networks but also to conduct `full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries`.
Cyber Command is made up of a number of what it calls Cyber Mission Force teams.
The Cyber National Mission Force teams defend the US by monitoring adversary activity, blocking attacks, and manoeuvring to defeat them.
Cyber Combat Mission Force teams conduct military cyber operations to support military commanders, while the Cyber Protection Force teams defend the Department of Defense information networks.
By the end of fiscal year 2018, the goal is for the force to grow to nearly 6,200 and for all 133 teams to be fully operational. The US is believed to have used various forms of cyber weapons against the Iranian nuclear programme, the North Korean missile tests and the so-called Islamic State, with mixed results.
Reflecting the increased priority the US is putting on cyberwarfare capabilities in August 2017, President Donald Trump upgraded Cyber Command to the status of a Unified Combatant Command, which puts on the same level as groups such as the US Pacific Command and US Central Command. Other US agencies like the CIA and NSA have cyber espionage capabilities and have in the past been involved with building cyberweapons -- such as the famous Stuxnet worm (see below).
The UK has also publicly stated that it is working on cyber defence and offence projects, and has vowed to strike back if attacked in this manner. In April 2018 the director of GCHQ confirmed that cyberattacks by British intelligence services supported operations against the terror group ISIS.

Search

Latest News

As a South African who has adopted a nomadic work lifestyle alongside my wife, Ingrid Lotze, I’ve been an interested observer of South Africa’s snail-pace digital nomad visa (DNV) development process. Despite the optimism surrounding its introduction, the visa seems to miss several crucial marks for digital nomads like us.... Read more...

EREMY MAGGS: I want to stay with crime now. Individuals with a criminal record may be faced with significant challenges when seeking employment, I think that’s a given. Here in South Africa, employers may legally exclude an applicant from consideration for a position if having a clean criminal record is what is termed an inherent requirement of the job. That phrase, inherent requirement, is important, but what exactly does that mean, and when can an applicant be lawfully excluded for having a criminal record?... Read more...

There are fears that more people will be separated by the introduction of a minimum salary level for those wanting UK family visas. Families living in the UK and abroad have raised concerns about what new rules will mean for them as they try to reunite with foreign spouses. In December, the Home Office, which says migration to the UK is too high, announced a package of measures to reduce net migration, following a spike in arrival numbers.... Read more...

An Ethiopian asylum seeker, who does not speak English, claims he was duped by a senior immigration official into paying an admission of guilt fine when he thought he was paying for bail.Two Western Cape High Court judges have condemned the official`s `deplorable` behaviour, set aside the fine, and ordered the immigration official be taken off the case. Tsegaye Esyas claims Annelise van Dyk treated him like an animal which led to him attempt suicide while in police cells.... Read more...

An Ethiopian asylum seeker, who does not speak English, claims he was duped by a senior immigration official into paying an admission of guilt fine when he thought he was paying for bail. Two Western Cape High Court judges have condemned the official`s `deplorable` behaviour, set aside the fine, and ordered the immigration official be taken off the case. Tsegaye Esyas claims Annelise van Dyk treated him like an animal which led to him attempt suicide while in police cells.... Read more...

North Korean hackers have been exploiting the updating mechanism of the eScan antivirus to plant backdoors on big corporate networks and deliver cryptocurrency miners through GuptiMiner malware. Researchers describe GuptiMiner as `a highly sophisticated threat` that can perform DNS requests to the attacker`s DNS servers, extract payloads from images, sign its payloads, and perform DLL sideloading. Delivering GuptiMiner via eScan updates In a report released today, cybersecurity company Avast says that the threat actor behind GuptiMiner had an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) position to hijack the normal virus definition update package and replace it with a malicious one named ‘updll62.dlz.’... Read more...

Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) this week revealed that Cape Town International Airport (CTIA) has achieved a ground-breaking milestone by processing more than 10 million passengers over a single financial year. This is the highest number of regional and international passengers processed since COVID-19... Read more...

DA MP says hours lost continue to result in persons being unable to collect their ID documents due to unmanageable queues The DA has been inundated with complaints that the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) systems are offline, resulting in long queues and delayed processing of documents. Through questions posed to the Minister, the DA can now reveal that the DHA has lost over 77 years’ worth of working hours due to system downtime and load-shedding from 2019 to date. Concerningly, this data only relates to hours lost for the application of smart IDs, meaning decades more of working hours could have been additionally lost in other spheres such as passport or visa applications.... Read more...

Home Affairs’ seemingly endless court battles set the department back more than R110-million between April 2023 and the end of February this year. This was revealed in a written parliamentary response by minister Aaron Motsoaledi. He said the department accumulated a litigation bill of R117 692 996.3, higher than the R72 637 944.51 spent the year before.... Read more...

Due to system downtime and load-shedding, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) lost nearly 141,000 hours of Smart ID application and production time between the 2019/20 and 2022/23 financial years. Minister Aaron Motsoaledi revealed this figure in a recent response to questions raised in Parliament by Democratic Alliance MP Adrian Roos. Motsoaledi provided a breakdown of smart ID production and application hours lost to technical difficulties and load-shedding per province for each financial year from 2019/2020. These disruptions hit home Affairs offices in the Eastern Cape the hardest, with over 34,000 hours to rotational power cuts and system downtime. Mpumalanga offices lost the next-highest number of hours at 17... Read more...