Fancy Bears hackers target International Olympic Committee

In other news:

• A former contractor at the U.S. National Security Agency has agreed to plead guilty to stealing classified information. Harold Martin is scheduled to plead guilty to one count of willful retention of nation defense information at a federal court in Baltimore on Jan. 22. Martin, who was indicted in February 2017, is accused of stealing highly sensitive government information -- including national defense data -- from the NSA and other agencies for 20 years. Martin could serve up to 10 years in prison and have to pay a fine of up to $250,000. Martin was employed by several private companies and worked as a contractor for various U.S. government agencies from 2003 to 2016, during which time he maintained top-secret security clearance. With his top-secret clearance, Martin was able to access highly sensitive government data, and he collected both physical and digital documents, which he stored in his home and car, according to the documents released by the court. There is no indication yet about what, if anything, Martin did with the information he stole.
• Facebook now offers an encrypted group chat tool, despite the widespread government criticism of encrypted messaging systems. The tool, called Asynchronous Ratcheting Tree, or ART, was developed by Oxford University's Katriel Cohn-Gordon, Cas Cremers, Luke Garratt and Kevin Milner, as well as Facebook's Jon Millican. In their paper about ART, "On Ends-to-Ends Encryption: Asynchronous Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees," the group noted that the communication app for only two users is secure, but group messaging is not. "An adversary who compromises a single group member can intercept communications indefinitely," the group said about group messaging. "One reason for this discrepancy in security guarantees, despite the large body of work on group key agreement, is that most existing protocol designs are fundamentally synchronous, and thus cannot be used in the asynchronous world of mobile communications." With the ART protocol, a user can participate in a group message securely, even after one participating user is compromised. The ability comes from the use of different asymmetric keys. Technical details on the protocol can be found in the group's proof of concept.
• Cisco introduced a technology called Encrypted Traffic Analytics (ETA), which identifies malware in encrypted traffic without intercepting and decrypting the data. According to Cisco's white paper, ETA is "derived by using new types of data elements or telemetry that are independent of protocol details, such as the lengths and arrival times of messages within a flow. These data elements have the attractive property of applying equally well to both encrypted and unencrypted flows." The product has been in trials since the summer of 2017 and is now being rolled out to enterprise routing platforms. Cisco estimated that, by 2020, 80% of all traffic will be encrypted, and ETA aims to solve the problem of security scanners not being able to sift through that traffic for malware. Cisco said ETA uses "multilayer machine learning," advanced statistical modeling and enhanced telemetry to detect malware.