Vulnerability

Hackers working for Russia compromised power companies' networks, giving them the ability to cause blackouts, federal officials warn.  Getty Images

Hackers could have caused blackouts, federal officials tell the Wall Street Journal.

cnet.com - by Steven Musil - July 24, 2018

Hackers working for Russia were able to gain access to the control rooms of US electric utilities last year, allowing them to cause blackouts, federal officials tell the Wall Street Journal.

The hackers -- working for a state-sponsored group previously identified as Dragonfly or Energetic Bear -- broke into utilities' isolated networks by hacking networks belonging to third-party vendors that had relationships with the power companies, the Department of Homeland Security said in a press briefing on Monday.

Officials said the campaign had claimed "hundreds of victims" and is likely continuing, the Journal reported.

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Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the Cambridge Analytica scandal with ads in multiple US and British newspapers Sunday.  JENNY KANE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

usatoday.com - by Marco della Cava - March 25, 2018

As Facebook continues to buffet winds of criticism, its founder took out full page ads in U.S. and British newspapers Sunday to apologize to consumers for not properly securing their personal data.

"This was a breach of trust, and I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time," Mark Zuckerberg said in the signed ad, which was published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and six British papers. "We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can't, we don't deserve it."

The ad refers to the misuse of 50 million Facebook profiles, which were mined through an app created by a Cambridge University professor and then sold, in violation of Facebook's terms of service, to Cambridge Analytica, a company that used the profiles to create election ad-targeting tools for the campaign to elect Donald Trump.

During Hurricane Harvey, Port Arthur in Texas experienced some the most extreme impacts of flooding - Getty Images

Scientists and engineers have teamed up across the Atlantic to "redraw" the flood map of the US.

bbc.com - by Victoria Gill - 11 December 2017

Their work reveals 40 million Americans are at risk of having their homes flooded - more than three times as many people as federal flood maps show.

The UK-US team say they have filled in "vast amounts of missing information" in the way flood risk is currently measured in the country.

They presented the work at the 2017 American Geophysical Union meeting.

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CLICK HERE - 2017 American Geophysical Union meeting