Day: October 18, 2023

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday was set for its second vote on a new speaker, a day after hardline Republican Jim Jordan failed in his first bid for the gavel.

Here are a few next options lawmakers are considering in their 16th day without a leader:
JIM JORDAN

Jordan, one of the most prominent members of the Republican right flank, is expected to be nominated again by Republicans to serve as speaker after winning just 200 votes on Tuesday, less than the 217 he needed, after 20 Republicans voted against him.

As chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Jordan is a driving force in the impeachment investigation of Democratic President Joe Biden and has tormented his administration with other probes as well.

Since he was first elected in 2006, the Ohio lawmaker has clashed with past Republican House leaders as a founder of the hardline House Freedom Caucus and helped amplify Republican former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. Trump has endorsed his speaker’s bid.
PATRICK MCHENRY

Republican Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina was named to serve as speaker temporarily following Kevin McCarthy’s ouster. Some Republicans have suggested he could stay on in the job if they cannot elect Jordan, and the Democrats have said they would be open to empowering the acting speaker.

Two former Republican speakers, Newt Gingrich and John Boehner, have both publicly said that he should continue to stay in the job.
STEVE SCALISE
The Louisiana lawmaker currently serves as the No. 2 House Republican and was widely seen as ousted Speaker McCarthy’s heir apparent. He was nominated as speaker last week but withdrew after he was unable to unify Republicans — a development some of his colleagues blamed on Jordan.

Scalise was severely wounded in a shooting during practice for a charity baseball game in 2017. He faced questions about his health, as he has been in treatment for multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, since August.

Scalise received seven votes on Tuesday, a distant second to Jordan.

KEVIN MCCARTHY
The former speaker, McCarthy, has sent conflicting signals on whether he would seek a return, should other candidates lose a speaker vote. McCarthy netted six votes during Tuesday’s vote.
TOM EMMER

Republican Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota currently serves as his party’s chief vote counter and No. 3 leader overall. He has been floated as a possible candidate should Jordan fall short, and received one vote during Tuesday’s vote.
TOM COLE
Powerful Rules Committee chair Tom Cole has served since 2003, representing Oklahoma as one of only five Native Americans in Congress. He is widely considered a steady hand at the wheel and could gain support from Democrats if nominated.

However, he has repeatedly tamped down talk of putting his name forward, though he received one vote on Tuesday.

Lee Zeldin, a former four-term representative from New York who resigned to make a run for governor of that state, netted three votes during Tuesday’s session.

Though the House speaker has always been drawn from the ranks of that chamber, the Constitution does not specify that the speaker must be a lawmaker.

Thomas Massie is a libertarian lawmaker who has been in Congress since 2012, where he represents a district in Kentucky. Massie received one vote on Tuesday, but said publicly that he had told the lawmaker who voted for him to back Jordan.

Mike Garcia is a Navy veteran and a two-term congressman from California who serves on several important committees, including the appropriations and intelligence panels. He received one vote on Tuesday.

Kevin Hern is chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group of conservative Republicans. He told reporters that he was considering a speaker bid last week, but later abandoned it. Still, his name has come up as a possible Jordan alternative since then.
HAKEEM JEFFRIES

Democrats are expected to vote unanimously for their leader, Hakeem Jeffries, though, as the minority party in a chamber controlled 221-212 by Republicans, they do not have enough votes to elect him speaker.

The New Yorker has said he is open to a bipartisan compromise if Republicans cannot muster enough votes on their own to elect Jordan or another one of their members. However, it is exceedingly unlikely that such a compromise would result in Jeffries becoming speaker.

Related Galleries:

When it comes to women and spying, popular culture fixates on the femme fatale: a Mata Hari type of female agent, wanton and—of course—sinister, using her sex to steal secrets. This “honeypot” stereotype recently cropped up in The Sun, a British tabloid, in a piece claiming that Russia is assembling an “army” of “deadly beauties” to help win its contest with the West. A throwback to the spicy if dubious intrigue of Cold War-era spy tales, the article cited a handful of small-time models and beauticians apprehended in various London suburbs as evidence of massive spy “networks.” Vladimir Putin, it seemed, was running “seduction schools” to train “glam spies” and turn them loose on the U.S. and Britain. It was surely no coincidence that the thinly sourced piece ran alongside a lurid string of photos of bikini-clad hotties looking ruthless.  

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

It’s true that human intelligence (HUMINT) remains a critical piece of the spy landscape, even in our era of Russian bot farms and AI-powered drone attacks. But historically, when it comes to women and espionage, the most effective agent is generally not a “Bulgarian bombshell,” but rather the woman you’d never give a second glance. Historically, women spies have traded not on their sexuality but their perceived insignificance. So useful are the trappings of drab domesticity—the trundling baby carriage, the hefting of grocery bags—that the CIA had a term for the safety they confer: it was called “housewife cover.” And many of the people who have used this cover were, in fact, actual wives.

For decades during the Cold War, thousands of women kept the Central Intelligence Agency running. Chief among these were the wives of male agents, who often served alongside their husbands, receiving tradecraft training but little to none of the pay. Back then, free spousal labor was common in government service: during much of the Cold War, even into the 1980s, wives of politicians and diplomats were expected to serve as full-time adjuncts. At the U.S. State Department, male diplomats’ performance evaluations took into account wives’ willingness to roll bandages and host potlucks. In the military, wives formed auxiliaries, even broke enemy ciphers, observing a strict hierarchy depending on the rank of the men they married.

But the CIA took the expectation of free spousal labor to new heights. Many wives functioned as clandestine extensions of their spymaster husbands. At the CIA, the formal title for spy is “case officer.” The job entails working overseas and convincing foreign “assets” to hand over their country’s secrets. Case officers work undercover, often posing as executives or diplomats. And it’s this kind of secretive yet social role in which spouses are natural allies; at a diplomatic reception, who better than a wife to sidle around to the wife of a potential asset, chat her up, and issue an invitation to dinner, cracking open the door to a recruitment? While James Bond movies are set in casinos and ski resorts, much real-life spy work unfolds in the home, where a case officer can expect privacy and exert control. Wives were the people who made that happen.

The Cold War spywife also needed to know how to react in an emergency. At any time of day or night, a wife might hear a knock on the door and find herself confronted with a “walk-in,” the term for a foreign national who shows up unannounced, with secrets to hand over. “You answer the door, and it’s a Russian wanting to defect,” recalls Lisa Harper, a retired case officer who, in the 1970s, was obliged to serve as an unpaid wife before ascending to the case officer ranks. Often, the husband would be away on a mission, and the wife had to handle the walk-in. “The smart husband has prepared his wife for this eventuality. Who do you call at the embassy? What is the code word you say?”

For decades, it was an open secret that many senior CIA officers built their careers with the help of apt and loyal wives. Director William Colby’s 1978 memoir Honorable Men: My Life In the CIA is full of praise for his first wife, Barbara Colby, who, on an early posting to Sweden, “did much to shore up my weak cover” by jumping into the “job of the junior diplomat’s wife with her typical enthusiasm and charm.” In Vietnam, her “warm and outgoing personality” carried them through dinners and receptions.

Women made great spies, but the CIA nonetheless discriminated against women who wanted to join the case officer ranks; for decades, it was widely held that female spies could not operate in male-dominated cultures. Yet at the very same time, spy wives were proving the opposite: housewife cover transformed an apparent weakness—lower status—into a strength. Whatever a housewife was doing—shopping, lunching—it surely wasn’t important, adversaries thought. If she reached beneath a chair to pick up a message, who would notice? The more patriarchal the culture, the more a wife could get away with.

The Soviet spy service, KGB, tracked suspected CIA officers as they moved from one diplomatic posting to another, so that by the time a case officer was posted to Moscow, his true identity was likely known to the KGB. The minute an American case officer pulled out of a garage or parking space, three or four Soviet surveillance cars—or more—would materialize.

In these “hard target” countries—the Soviet Union, Cuba, China—the bulk of a case officer’s job was physical, low-tech, exhausting, and time-consuming. A huge amount of time was spent trying to elude surveillance. Sometimes, the goal was to make a dead drop, which entailed placing a message in a fake rock, tree trunk, or other hiding place; or, leave a coded signal such as a chalk mark on a wall or mailbox; or make a “brush pass,” where a message or payment could be handed off on, say, an escalator. Even harder was a “car toss” in which the case officer would fling a message out of a car, in a bottle or other projectile, aimed at a bush or other pickup site.

With a wife to help, all these feats became more doable. The wife, sitting innocently in the passenger’s seat, might roll down the window and make the toss. Or she could drive so her husband could toss when a bend in the road caused the surveillance car to lose sight of them. Not only did a female companion make a man less conspicuous, but an alert wife could help spot a tail. Wives working in hard targets underwent the same CIA anti-surveillance training as did their husbands, and often turned out to be better at detecting a disguised stranger. Women are always alert to interlopers in their personal space.

All in all, a competent wife was a case officer’s most important asset. Take the example of Shirley Sulick, a much beloved CIA spouse who was one of the best. Shirley and her husband Michael (Mike) Sulick were an early biracial couple: Mike, now retired, is white, and Shirley, who died in 2021, was Black. During Mike’s CIA career—he rose to head the agency’s clandestine service—Shirley’s charisma and good nature were crucial to his well-being and his career trajectory. For a lot of wives, “If they haven’t been overseas before, whether it’s Tokyo or Peru, whatever, it could be daunting,” Mike Sulick told me. But no aspect of overseas work was daunting for Shirley, who could socialize with anybody. She was elated when they went to Moscow and she could concentrate on pleasures like evasive driving. “This,” she said, “is my wheelhouse.” Shirley had a heavy foot and enjoyed messing with the Soviet adversaries. “I’m going to go out and play with the boys,” she would tell her husband, before setting out in the car to lead their surveillance on a chase.

Working a hard target made for a constrained marital existence, since apartments were bugged. But there were ways to exploit the lack of privacy. At one New Year’s Eve party, Mike Sulick pretended to get very drunk, and Shirley propped him up as he staggered home. Knowing the Soviets were listening, he slurred his words and demanded she bring him Irish coffee. His surveillers assumed they could safely sleep in on the following holiday morning. Instead, Mike got up early and struck out unobserved.

Wives could also help with dead drops. Shirley Sulick made a point of carrying a huge purse, out of which she would let fall a pencil or lipstick, and sweep up a message along with it. They’d go on a picnic or tour a church, and Mike would make a big production of taking a photo. While the KGB officers watched, Shirley would go around the side and pick up whatever had been placed there.

So effective was this time-tested housewife cover that, as women finally began to be hired and paid to do spy work in the 1970s and 1980s, female case officers continued to deploy harmless domesticity, when it made sense to do so, as a cover identity. Sometimes the tactic even fooled other CIA women. One female operative recalled to me about being in an U.S. embassy compound and seeing an American woman suntanning by a pool. She experienced a flash of envy, thinking this was some languid wife accompanying her husband on a cushy posting. Only later did she realize it was a colleague, doing the same work she was. These days, the helpmeet might be a husband or same-sex partner, but the point remains the same: the best spies are the ones you’d never suspect.

Adapted from the book THE SISTERHOOD: The Secret History of Women at the CIA by Liza Mundy. Copyright © 2023 by Liza Mundy. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

“Anxiety.” The very word evokes discomfort. Its effects—shortness of breath, pounding heart, muscle tension—are outright distressing. And there’s more of it than ever. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, half of young American adults have significant symptoms. It’s no wonder that the anxiety epidemic is causing us much consternation and concern.

But, as a clinician and researcher, I see a much bigger problem. In our society’s quest to be anxiety-free, we tend to miss out on many valuable opportunities presented by this normal human emotion.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

In and of itself, anxiety is not deadly, and it certainly is not a disease or pathology. Quite the contrary: being able to feel anxious shows that our fight-or-flight system is operational, which is an indicator of brain and sensory health. Once we accept that anxious arousal is a normal, albeit uncomfortable, part of life, we can use it to thrive.

Here are three ways anxiety can help you:

It can build your emotional strength and resilience

Working out at the gym is supposed to be hard. By its very nature, a “good workout” is uncomfortable, since it involves pushing our physical strength and aerobic capacity past what you can easily do. Yes, you can overdo it in the gym and push too hard, but the sweet spot of exercise is always a somewhat strenuous experience.

Similarly, if you want to build emotional strength and resilience, you need to face some degree of mental adversity. Of course, traumatic events and abuse tend to cause more harm than good, but the experience of—and perseverance through—occasional anxiety, stress, and tension substantially increases your emotional fortitude.

Read More: Anxiety Feels Terrible, But It Has an Upside. Here’s How to Make It Work in Your Favor

For example, one of the most effective treatments for anxiety is exposure therapy, which involves systematically confronting one’s fears, head-on, in reasonable and increasing doses, over time. With the help of a therapist, individuals with phobias to anything from snakes or spiders, to heights or medical procedures, gradually encounter that which makes them anxious. As they exercise their emotional strength—voluntarily and courageously—they become desensitized to their anxiety, and its effects decrease.

In my clinical practice, I have treated hundreds of patients with exposure therapy, and in many instances, individuals emerge not only less phobically anxious, but also with greater resilience in general. In one particularly memorable case, I helped a young woman overcome a severe case of hypochondriasis (anxiety fixated on her health) with this method. Years later, when her newborn child had a serious health complication requiring life-saving surgery, she handled the situation with incredible fortitude and calm. Anxiety can provide opportunities to flex our neural and emotional muscles, developing greater mental capacity to face day-to-day stressors more effectively.

It can increase your emotional intimacy and connection

Humans are social creatures. The number one predictor of happiness and flourishing in late life is not great genes, financial success, or fame. It’s the quality of our relationships. In this same way, clinical science has identified that sharing our anxieties with our loved ones is one of the most effective strategies to build connection. When my patients learn to open up and share their anxieties with their partners, they almost always report a greater sense of emotional intimacy.

Again, anxiety is a normal human emotion, and if you’re lucky enough to find yourself in a relationship that matters enough, you will feel anxious at some point! Even in the most secure relationships, we naturally feel some anxiety from time-to-time about whether the love we receive is truly unconditional. As international relationship expert Sue Johnson teaches, when we embrace and express our need for connection during challenging moments (e.g., “I’m having a hard time right now and could really use your support”) it begets greater connection and turns our anxiety into love.

Recently, a young married couple (let’s call them Marty and Sheryl) came to me in distress over a significant financial dispute. Sheryl was anxious about Marty’s spending relative to their bank balance, and Marty saw Sheryl as being overly frugal. Months of mutual blame and recrimination had eroded trust and connection, without any change in monetary behaviors or financial status.

I encouraged the couple to express the roots of their fears to one another. Marty opened up that he was terrified of Sheryl losing interest in their relationship if they weren’t materially comfortable. Sheryl, in turn, shared that she had seen her own parents almost divorce due to financial strain. It took several months, but the financial dispute eventually became less of an issue, since Marty and Sheryl both realized their respective behaviors were coming from a place of love: They simply had different ways of trying to preserve their connection. By recognizing and expressing their anxieties, they were able to strengthen their emotional bond and deepen their connection.

It can help you recalibrate and rebalance

From time to time, all of us find ourselves at the end of our rope. Our responsibilities pile up, our resources break down, and we just don’t have enough time to get everything done. We feel uncomfortably anxious most, if not all, of the time.

In such cases, what we’re experiencing is called stress. Simply put, the demands placed upon us outweigh our available resources. Just like a set of scales going out of balance, dealing with stress is almost mathematical: We either need to decrease our demands, or increase our resources (or both). There are no other solutions.

Many times, when my patients are overwhelmed they tend to take on more demands. Ironically, they take on additional projects at work, volunteer for community service, and provide additional support to their friends. This happens because it’s hard to acknowledge when we are struggling, and easier to avoid thinking about how overwhelmed we feel—and pretend that everything is ok—when we’re focused on work.

Unfortunately, this can lead to disastrous consequences since, at some point the scales cannot stand being out of balance and they break. Working harder, faster, and longer hours when one is already ragged can create chronic stress, which has been associated with heart disease, cancer, and stroke, as well as numerous less severe medical conditions.

Medicating away symptoms of stress may help us to function day-to-day for a while, but this tends to make things worse in the long run. Again, the only real solutions to stress are to decrease our demands or increase our resources.

Therefore, when we feel genuinely overwhelmed and anxious because of stress, it’s our body’s way of telling us to recalibrate and rebalance. Ultimately, we are all finite creatures in a massive world, and nobody is truly limitless. When we heed our internal cues and acknowledge our fallibility, we emerge more focused and healthier overall—and also less stressed and anxious.

Anxiety can be a healthy, helpful emotion that is a constructive aspect of human life. Acute anxiety can strengthen our emotional capacity when we face our fears. Anxiety can foster emotional connection when we convey our vulnerable feelings to others. And in the form of stress, anxiety can serve as an internal barometer to remain balanced and healthy. It’s about time we start to put it to good use.

A vulnerability in Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) could be exploited to decipher an administrator’s password.

Researchers from Claroty’s Team82 discovered a vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-2729 (CVSS score 5.9), in Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM).

Team82 discovered the use of a weak random number generator in Synology’s DiskStation Manager (DSM) Linux-based operating system running on the NAS products.

The issue resides in the insecure Javascript Math.random() function that is used to generate the administrator’s password for the NAS device.

“Under some rare conditions, an attacker could leak enough information to restore the seed of the pseudorandom number generator (PRNG), reconstruct the admin password, and remotely take over the admin account.” reads the advisory published by the company.

By observing the output of a few Math.Random() generated numbers, the researchers reconstructed the seed for the PRNG and used it to brute-force the admin password. Then they used the password to login to the admin account (after enabling it).

The vendor addressed the vulnerability with the release of updates in June 2023.

“To execute the attack, some Math.Random values need to be leaked. One possible way to achieve this is by leaking some GUIDs (e.g. 72e14742-b0e5-4826-b7c9-eb16284fe9cd) that are also being generated using Math.Random at the first installation wizard, which means they are based on the same PRNG seed as the admin user-account password.” continues the report.

In a real-life scenario, threat actors first need to leak the GUIDs, conduct a brute-force attack on the Math.Random state, and retrieve the admin password. The researchers noticed that tven after doing so, by default the builtin admin user account is disabled and most users won’t enable it.

“it’s important to remember that Math.random() does not provide cryptographically secure random numbers. Do not use them for anything related to security. Use the Web Crypto API instead, and more precisely the window.crypto.getRandomValues() method.” concludes the report. “We disclosed CVE-2023-2729 to Synology, which changed the vulnerable algorithm and has pushed the fix to affected devices. DSM 7.2 is affected by the vulnerability and users are asked to upgrade to 7.2-64561 or above.”

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Synology DiskStation Manager)

The post A flaw in Synology DiskStation Manager allows admin account takeover appeared first on Security Affairs.

This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox.

The United States “will continue to have Israel’s back as you work to defend your people,” U.S. President Joe Biden told Israel’s war cabinet Wednesday, amid his snap visit to the country on the 12th day of war between Hamas and Israel.

“We will continue to work with you and partners across the region to prevent more tragedy for innocent civilians,” Biden said.

“In the wake of Hamas’s appalling, terrorist assault, brutal, inhumane – almost beyond belief what they did – this cabinet came together and is standing strong, standing united” Biden continued. “And I want you to know you are not alone. You are not alone.”

In remarks that preceded Biden’s, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emphasized unity among members of the recently established war cabinet, saying “This will be a different kind of war because Hamas is a different kind of enemy.”

“While Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties, Hamas wants to maximize civilian casualties. Hamas wants to kill as many Israelis as possible and has no regard whatsoever for Palestinian lives,” Netanyahu said.

The post ‘We will continue to have Israel’s back,’ Biden tells Israel’s war cabinet in unprecedented visit appeared first on The Forward.