UPDATE – Breaking News

Microsoft has said the UK and six other countries outside the US have been affected by a suspected Russian hacking attack that US authorities have warned poses a grave risk to government and private networks.

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s chief legal counsel, said the company had uncovered 40 customers, including government agencies, thinktanks, NGOs and IT companies, who were “targeted more precisely and compromised” after the hackers had gained initial access earlier this year.

Eighty per cent were in the US, including, it is feared, agencies responsible for the US nuclear weapons stockpile. But the remainder were spread out across other countries.

The attack appears to have started when an updated popular IT network management tool called Orion, made by SolarWinds, was compromised from March this year. Around 18,000 customers installed the compromised update, many of whom were in the US federal government.

Of these, at least 40 were then selected by the attackers for further exploitation, including the US Treasury and Department of Commerce, where emails are thought to have been read, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

The hackers’ intention appears to have been a “high end espionage operation” according to security sources, designed to steal government and military secrets. Information has not thought to have been destroyed, although the assessment is ongoing.

It emerged overnight that the US National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the US nuclear weapons stockpile, had evidence that hackers accessed its networks. The NNSA also supplies some nuclear technology to the UK.

Originally published Dec. 15th

The US Treasury, Department of Commerce,  Department of Homeland Security, State Department, and the National Institutes of Health are known victims of a months-long, highly sophisticated digital spying operation by Russia whose damage remains uncertain but is presumed to be extensive.

Russian hackers are being accused of carrying out the biggest cyber-raid against the US in more than five years, targeting federal government networks in a sophisticated attack, according to American officials and sources.

The hackers, linked to Russian spy agencies, were able to monitor internal emails in what is being described as a highly sophisticated state-level attack.

Security agencies in the UK and elsewhere were also scrambling to assess the impact on their systems – while the revelation was deemed so grave it led to a national security council meeting at the White House over the weekend.

On Monday, the US national security council said it was working closely with the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) “to coordinate a swift and effective whole-of-government recovery and response to the recent compromise.”

The US has not formally named the country it believes is responsible, but multiple sources blamed Moscow. The Washington Post specifically cited a well-known Russian hacking group – known as Cozy Bear or APT 29 – linked to the country’s FSB and SVR spy agencies.

Among the greatest U.S. intelligence failures of modern times

Over the past few years, the United States government has spent tens of billions of dollars on cyber-offensive abilities, building a giant war room at Fort Meade, Md., for United States Cyber Command, while installing defensive sensors all around the country — a system named Einstein to give it an air of genius — to deter the nation’s enemies from picking its networks clean, again.

It now is clear that the broad Russian espionage attack on the United States government and private companies, underway since spring and detected by the private sector only a few weeks ago, ranks among the greatest intelligence failures of modern times.

Einstein missed it — because the Russian hackers brilliantly designed their attack to avoid setting it off. The National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security were looking elsewhere, understandably focused on protecting the 2020 election.

“Stunning,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote on Tuesday night. “Today’s classified briefing on Russia’s cyberattack left me deeply alarmed, in fact downright scared. Americans deserve to know what’s going on.”

Trump took the nation in the wrong direction on cybersecurity

President Trump took the nation in the wrong direction on cybersecurity, according to a solid majority of experts polled by Cybersecurity 202.

During four years in office, Trump failed to hold adversaries including Russia accountable for hacking U.S. targets, removed experienced cyber-defenders from their posts for petty reasons and undermined much of the good work being done on cybersecurity within federal agencies, according to 71 percent of respondents to The Network, a panel of more than 100 cybersecurity experts who participate in our ongoing informal survey.

The survey concluded before news broke about probably the most significant breach of the Trump administration — a hack linked to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, that infected at least five federal agencies  and probably several others, as well as foreign governments and companies across the globe.

The respondents’ comments reflect widespread concern Trump is disinterested in the damage that hack has done to national security, unwilling to take Russia to task and preoccupied instead with his own efforts to sow baseless doubts about his election loss.

ELECTION EDITIORAL — Fortified by the solidarity of a majority of Trump-Party Republicans..,  Trump has wantonly rejected the outcome of America’s most sacred institution of democracy, free elections and the public’s choice of its leaders.

President elect Joe Biden decisively scored a 306-232 electoral college victory. In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump by 3m in the popular vote, but lost the electoral collage.  Biden has nearly doubled his popular vote win to that of Clinton, with a lead over Trump now nearing 6 million votes.

On Sunday morning, Donald Trump tweeted about Joe Biden: “He won” … “He won because the election was rigged,” Trump wrote, before recycling baseless claims of voter fraud he continues to push and which his lawyers are attempting to prove in court in battleground states – with little to no chance of success, according to most observers.

Trump went to tweet …“He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”

The 2020 Biden presidential election victory is a victory for American democracy.  Biden is a true centrist and just what a nation in desperate need of healing needs at this time.  President Biden must navigate a narrow channel of rapids with hazards on both the right and the left, only come out the other side to face a McConnell-led Senate firewall — one guaranteed to place minority party priorities ahead of doing the people’s business of governing.

The Republican party of Eisenhower, Regan, and Bush has been hijacked by extreme right wing populism embodied in the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Problems for the party faithful were apparent during the 2016 primary when mainstream GOP candidates, most with some history of capable governance, were knocked-off one-by-one by the Trump mob, replaced by the party’s new self-appointed leader and godfather, Donald J. Trump.

Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election was seen by many right-wing populists in Europe as a momentous turning point. In their view, the threat began to the totalitarian state goes back to 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall made liberalism appear unstoppable and triumphant.  Right-wing populists from Hungary to Britain believed that if Mr. Trump could become president of the United States, the future belonged to them. President Trump’s 2020 defeat may trigger the rise of a much darker vision.

By refusing to concede to overwhelming election results, Trump the loser, has sent a message to his fellow strongmen around the world — that this is a fight for survival.

In trying to make sense of Mr. Trump’s defiance, most analysts have looked at the president’s personality: Mr. Trump never concedes defeat and this entire act of defiance is a way to soothe his ego, but Trump’s legitimate fear runs much deeper in giving up his seat of power.

Trumps problems range from legal prosecution for his crimes before and during his presidency, to the matter of Trump’s highly-leveraged family empire, with more than a billion dollars in personal guaranteed debt coming due in 2020 and NO foreseeable means to pay.  As long as Trump holds the reins of power, he has the means to further leverage the office of the presidency and to serve his personal power and wealth objectives, which he handily demonstrated come at a high cost to the United States — and the American people he has sworn to serve.

Nobody has articulated the fear of being outvoted as a result of demographic change better than Mr. Trump.    During the 2016 presidential campaign, he told his supporters: “I think this will be the last election that the Republicans have a chance of winning, because you’re going to have people flowing across the border, you’re going to have illegal immigrants coming in, and they’re going to be legalized … and be able to vote. Once all that happens you can forget it.”   

All European populists have echoed Trump’s demographic anxiety.  Trump understands all too clearly that the reason his supporters both inside and outside the United States stand by him run much deeper. They reflect the apocalyptic mind-set of the right-wing populist voters in the West.

Democratic politics serves as a nationwide therapy session. It allows voters to express their fears about the future while at the same time reassuring them that when the elections are over, everything will go back to normal.

Of course normal these days is a very fluid definition, as the Country struggles with a bungled Federal response to COVID-19, post-election misinformation in the wacky echo chamber of conspiracy-driven social media, amplified by Trump’s alt-right media outlets, and mix it up with a few bad foreign actors, and altogether, American democracy has never been so challenged as it has been for the past four years.

The one sane voice above all the noise has been president-elect Joe Biden.

President Biden deserves the support, respect, and hopes of all Americans for a future marked by the best ideals of democracy and selfless governance, and which will arrive on January 20, 2021, with or without Donald Trump.

There are two camps in the world of COVID-19, believers and non-believers.

Believers tend to follow the science and medical community recommendations, while the non-believers generally don’t.

Some believers have had first hand experience with COVID-19 inflections; others haven’t, but most share a common respect for a novel Virus that continues to teach humans about the thin line between life and death.

For the non-believers COVID-19 is more nuanced, characterized not by facts and growing daily public death tolls, but by a belief COVID-19 won’t kill me, that only happens to seniors already knocking on death’s door, and to other people they don’t know.  If they do contract the virus, it will likely be little more than a bad case of the flu. It’s a belief system more a kin to a religion than scientific fact and empirical evidence.

Come Together

As Americans, we have a history of coming together in time of national crisis, be it the threat or reality of war and other catastrophic events.  Historically, we have looked to our leaders in a time of crisis and expect them to call for unity in a common public purpose – a norm which has vanished under the present divisive and absentee leadership and which is guilty of national malpractice.

President Trump, who self-describes himself as a “victim” because the media keep talking about “Covid, Covid, Covid”, while claiming unmasked at packed supporter rally this week that,  “… coronavirus fatalities are being exaggerated because doctors get more money and hospitals get more money if they say that Covid-19 was the cause of death.”  Not exactly a message of unity or national leadership during a global crisis affecting all Americans.

Leana Wen of the Washington Post, adeptly described the current administration’s response to nation’s immediate and life threating challenge of this new century this way: “For eight months, Americans have been asking what the Trump administration’s national strategy is to combat the coronavirus pandemic. We finally have our answer: capitulation.”

For weeks, the White House has been advancing a “herd immunity” approach of essentially letting the coronavirus infect (burn-through) the majority of the population. President Trump insists that the United States is “rounding the corner” despite record-breaking infection rates and rising hospitalizations.

Nearing a year into the COVID-19 pandemic the White House finally revealed its plan

On Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows stated bluntly: “We’re not going to control the pandemic.”   When pressed on why not, Meadows said the novel coronavirus “is a contagious virus just like the flu,” and that “what we need to do is make sure that we have the proper mitigation factors, whether it’s therapies or vaccines or treatments to make sure that people don’t die from this.”   

No, this is not January 2020, and no, it’s not a national pandemic plan or response.  But that’s Trump’s plan, October 2020 — to accept our fate and surrender to the virus. Cross our fingers and place all of our hopes on undeveloped vaccines and unproven therapies, while ignoring a rising national death count, and letting the virus rip through our communities — music to the ears of “non-believers”.

A Pandemic, Closer to Home

Lt. Gov. Green is now advocating a statewide mask mandate after learning on Sunday that Hawaii Island suffered its highest single-day jump in new COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic …and the tourists are only just beginning to return to the islands.

As a physician and a “believer” in the health threat COVID-19 represents to residents of Hawaii, Green knows masks are the first line of protection against the virus, wearing them will save lives, limit and contain spread, and manage a pandemic in line with the state’s limited medical response resources.

Yet managing a pandemic can get in the away of normal business operations and the state’s economy (pain and all) is surviving and will survive, despite an absence of national  leadership in establishing pandemic response standards, or provide the resources to fight the fight against COVID-19 and protect the public well-being. Instead, we have a national policy of neglect, denial, obstruction, and incompetency.

As for this president’s claims of a vaccine available in two weeks and counting, and still counting, the global scientific and medical community project 2021 before any meaningful vaccine response will become available to the general public. In the meantime, we need to do what humans do best, adjust and adapt with an united national response and purpose.

Now you can play a game of denial, throw caution to the wind, believe in herd immunity (which is an oxymoron) or scream about freedom infringement without any consideration to responsibility to community and country — or face the facts. We are still in the middle of a global pandemic, which locally, has found it way to every island community through out the state creating unwanted economic and social adjustments.

This highly contagious and deadly global pandemic will not last forever. In the meantime, throwing caution to the wind, will only further enable the consequences of surrendering to a pandemic marked by over 1 million deaths globally, and 230,000 deaths within the United States.

A 100 year old history lesson  

History is a powerful teacher.  In 1918, a novel strand of influenza (Spanish Flu) killed more people than the 14th century’s Black Plague which ravaged Europe. At that time, the pandemic deaths spiked in 1918, and then slowly dropped off the following year, however, it wasn’t until well into 1921 before the deadly virus was no longer a threat to the general population, and by then more than 2,300 people in Hawaii had died from the virus.

Hawaii’s health officials at the time learned from cause and effect that social distancing and shutting down events and gathering places were effective measures to battle a dangerous airborne virus.

In the absence of an effective vaccine, the science tell us there’s a natural progression which a virus follows — but not always — it becomes less lethal as time wears on.

The natural order of an influenza virus is to change, and in the case of the 1918 flu and pandemic, the science told us the virus simply mutated in the direction of other influenza viruses, which is to become considerably milder over time, coupled to a developing immunity within the general population, and this process took several years.

COVID-19 Is More than a Question of Life or Death

The long term effects of COVID-19 infections are just beginning to be understood.

COVID-19 symptoms can sometimes persist for months. The virus can damage the lungs, heart and brain, which increases the risk of long-term health problems.

The Mayor Clinic recently reported that most people who have coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) recover completely within a few weeks.  But some people — even those who had mild versions of the disease — continue to experience symptoms after their initial recovery.

For example, older patients and people with many serious medical conditions are the most likely to experience lingering COVID-19 symptoms — the most common signs and symptoms that linger over time include:

• Fatigue
• Cough
• Shortness of breath
• Headache
• Joint pain

Although COVID-19 is seen as a disease that primarily affects the lungs, it can damage many other organs as well. This organ damage may increase the risk of long-term health problems.

The Legacy of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) is much more than Catch and Release

Organ damage caused by COVID-19 includes:

• Imaging tests taken months after recovery from COVID-19 which show lasting damage to the heart muscle, even in people who experienced only mild COVID-19 symptoms. This may increase the risk of heart failure or other heart complications in the future.
• The type of pneumonia often associated with COVID-19 can cause long-standing damage to the tiny air sacs (alveoli) in the lungs. The resulting scar tissue can lead to long-term breathing problems.
• Even in young people, COVID-19 can cause strokes, seizures and Guillain-Barre syndrome — a condition that causes temporary paralysis. COVID-19 may also increase the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

 Blood clots and blood vessel problems

COVID-19 can make blood cells more likely to clump up and form clots. While large clots can cause heart attacks and strokes, much of the heart damage caused by COVID-19 is believed to stem from very small clots that block tiny blood vessels (capillaries) in the heart muscle.

Other organs affected by blood clots include the lungs, legs, liver and kidneys. COVID-19 can also weaken blood vessels, which contributes to potentially long-lasting problems with the liver and kidneys.

Problems with mood and fatigue

People who have severe symptoms of COVID-19 often have to be treated in a hospital’s intensive care unit, with mechanical assistance such as ventilators to breathe. Simply surviving this experience can make a person more likely to later develop post-traumatic stress syndrome, depression and anxiety.

Because it’s difficult to predict long-term outcomes from the new COVID-19 virus, scientists are looking at the long-term effects seen in related viruses, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

Many people who have recovered from SARS have gone on to develop chronic fatigue syndrome, a complex disorder characterized by extreme fatigue that worsens with physical or mental activity, but doesn’t improve with rest. The same may be true for people who have had COVID-19.

Many long-term COVID-19 effects still unknown

Much is still unknown about how COVID-19 will affect people over time. However, researchers recommend that doctors closely monitor people who have had COVID-19 to see how their organs are functioning after recovery.