The IT Nerd

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts said in an October 15 statement that a cyberattack on British multinational defense contractor BAE Systems has disrupted the processing and distribution of bankruptcy notices across all U.S. federal bankruptcy courts.

The incident affected the Bankruptcy Noticing Center, which BAE operates on behalf of the federal judiciary. The outage began October 9 and has halted electronic and paper notices, while taking several court websites and the National Creditor Registration Service offline. BAE is investigating and working to restore services.

John Strand, Owner, Black Hills Information Security:

“This story highlights how unbelievably interconnected business and government processes actually are. A lot of people still think about computer security in terms of a DMZ. There’s an internal network to protect and an outside world to protect it from.

“But look at any modern large organization. They have multiple SaaS platforms, third-party integrations, and customer data flowing in and out of systems they don’t own or control. That perimeter is a lot messier than people want to believe.

“I still don’t think the industry has caught up with the risks we introduced through cloud computing and SaaS. Now we’re adding AI to the mix, giving attackers new ways to target those services and exploit the connections between them. We weren’t caught up before. We’re certainly not ready now.”

Jacob Krell, Senior Director: Secure AI Solutions & Cybersecurity, Suzu Labs:

“Bankruptcy notices are the machinery of due process, and the judiciary runs all of it through one contractor. The Section 341 meeting notice opens the window for creditor claims, deadlines attach to service of every order, and since October 9 those clocks have been frozen nationwide while BAE Systems investigates a cyber incident that took the Bankruptcy Noticing Center offline.

“Judges are already compensating, extending deadlines and continuing hearings district by district. That is the detail that should worry anyone procuring for the courts. The outage never touched a courtroom, yet it rewrote the calendar of every bankruptcy case in the country, because a vendor bought like routine IT has become load-bearing infrastructure for the justice system.

“Restoring service is the urgent job. The standing question is why the noticing architecture has no alternate path, and I would want the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to write continuity requirements into the next BAE contract as strict as the ones the courts impose on themselves.”

You are only as secure as your business partners. Thus you need to ensure that they are secure before you trust them completely. Otherwise you’re just asking for trouble.

Sens. Maria Cantwell and Mike Rounds are urging the administration to expand the federal role in AI safety and security, citing incidents of frontier models escaping sandbox protections and breaching real organizations. Their letter calls for measurable standards, independent and third-party testing of models, and more aggressive use of defensive AI.

More info can be found here: Senators Cantwell and Rounds press Trump administration for coordinated AI cybersecurity response

Bri Frost, Director of Product Management, Cloud Range had this to say:

“AI capability is not AI readiness. An agent that can complete a task hasn’t earned the authority to act inside your business.

Autonomy should expand only when the evidence supports it. If you can’t demonstrate that you can control an agent’s actions, it isn’t ready for more authority.

The senators are right to demand independent testing. Vendors should not get to define the test, grade their own systems and ask everyone else to just take their word for it. But security leaders also cannot punt accountability to a vendor or sit on their hands while waiting for Washington to set the rules. Giving an agent credentials is a security decision, and the organization granting that access owns the consequences.

A completed task is only part of the result; the path taken matters, along with confidence that path and result is going to happen repeatedly in the same manner. Before deployment, gain that confidence by requiring evidence from realistic, contained testing environments that can not just the constant results of a completed task, but the repetitive decisions made on the path to accomplishment.

Test the whole system—model, tools, permissions and human oversight—and retest when those change.”

I’ve said this multiple times. AI is useful, but it needs to have the right protections in place. And sadly most companies don’t have that and it is going to cost them.

The U.S. State Department announced a new visa restriction policy targeting foreign individuals responsible for or complicit in cybercrime and cyber-enabled crimes.

The restrictions may also apply to the immediate family members of those involved and are intended to disrupt overseas criminal networks.

The policy follows President Trump’s March executive order on combating cybercrime and fraud. According to the State Department, cyber scam operations cost Americans an estimated $10 billion in 2024.

John Carberry, Solution Sleuth, Xcape, Inc. had this comment:

   “Deploying diplomatic tools like targeted visa denials raises the personal stakes for transnational cybercrime syndicates, even if it seems odd that a dedicated policy was necessary to keep known criminals out of the country in the first place. By extending travel restrictions to immediate family members under Executive Order 14390, the State Department squeezes the mobility and secondary benefits of operators working from non-extradition jurisdictions. While federal sanctions target overseas infrastructure over time, enterprise security leaders cannot rely on immigration enforcement for threat mitigation. Executives must prioritize immediate technical controls, including strict identity verification, automated transaction monitoring, and robust inbound communication filtering to defeat cyber-enabled fraud at the edge.

   “Critical Takeaways

• Enforce borderless technical controls: Treat visa restrictions as a secondary diplomatic lever while maintaining strict identity verification, transaction monitoring, and inbound message filtering.
• Target criminal ecosystems: Recognize that expanding sanctions to immediate family members disrupts the lifestyle mobility that keeps transnational cyber syndicates motivated.
• Do not rely on state policy for defense: Focus enterprise security budgets on stopping fraud at the network edge rather than expecting federal travel bans to reduce attack volume.

   “While denying visas to transnational scammers is a welcome step, it is remarkable that keeping international criminals out required a new policy in the first place.”

Jacob Krell, Senior Director: Secure AI Solutions & Cybersecurity, Suzu Labs had this to say:

   “The State Department’s new visa restrictions on cybercriminals target people who chose their operating model specifically to avoid US jurisdiction. Scam compound operators in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos aren’t applying for US visas. They built fortified facilities in countries with weak governance because distance from Western oversight is the product feature.

   “This is industrialized crime running on franchise economics, shared financial infrastructure, trafficking pipelines, specialized service divisions. Rubio cited $10 billion in US losses for 2024. Regional losses hit $88-114 billion in 2025, tripled from 2023. You don’t get to that number with individual bad actors. You get there with an industry.

   “DOJ’s June seizure of Huione Group assets showed what effective disruption looks like at this scale, going after shared financial architecture that multiple franchises depend on. Visa restrictions are an individual-accountability tool applied to a problem that has outgrown individual accountability. The industry keeps running regardless of which operators can board a flight to JFK.”

This is an important step forward for sure. I for one would love to see it go further. Like arrest people that are involved in cybercrime and arrest their relatives in exchange for the criminals turning themselves in. That way either people don’t get involved in cybercrime, turn in the perpetrators, or distance themselves accordingly letting the authorities know about it. And other countries should follow suit.

US House representatives have unveiled the Ending Platform Monopolies Act today with Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) sharing a statement that I found in The Verge that aims to take big tech down a peg or two:

“Right now, unregulated tech monopolies have too much power over our economy. They are in a unique position to pick winners and losers, destroy small businesses, raise prices on consumers, and put folks out of work,” Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) said in a statement Friday. “Our agenda will level the playing field and ensure the wealthiest, most powerful tech monopolies play by the same rules as the rest of us.”

If eventually passed in the House and Senate, that could usher in the regulation of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google to ensure that they don’t have too much power. I am not sure that this is a great thing to do. But I guess we will see how this plays out.

I’ve talked about the fact that President Trump has been whining and complaining about nuking Section 230 which would strip the protections from nearly every internet venue with user interaction. That would include Facebook and Twitter among others. The Break Up Big Tech Act of 2020, introduced yesterday by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), seeks to strip companies of those protections if they take supposed actions like “acting as publishers and censoring certain users.”

The legislation if passed would remove Section 230 protections from online companies that perform the following activities.

• Selling and displaying targeted ads without a user’s consent
• Collecting data for “commercial purposes other than the direct sale of the interactive computer service.”
• Acting as a marketplace by “facilitate the placement of items into the stream of commerce.”
• Employing digital products intended to “engage and addict users” to the service.
• Acting as a publisher by using algorithms to moderate or censor content without opt-in from users

So this would effectively give Trump and conservatives who have been claiming that the Internet censors their voices what they want. Assuming that this passes. We’ll see if that actually happens or if this bill dies quietly after January 20th 2021.