08/11/21
Critical Infrastructure Daily Brief
Statewide Terrorism & Intelligence Center
Critical Infrastructure Daily Brief
**UNCLASSIFIED **
(U) STIC is providing this information to our partner agencies for situational awareness. This document contains information obtained from open source information. While STIC has gone to great lengths to verify the information found in open source documents on the internet, this information may not be accurate.
Situational Awareness
Ten people were killed and 50 others were wounded in shootings across Chicago this weekend, according to authorities. There were 41 shootings reported throughout Chicago from 6 p.m. Friday to 11:59 a.m. Sunday, Chicago Police said Monday morning. The shooting victims included a 16-year-old boy, who was fatally shot in the head and left foot, and two 17-year-old males who were wounded in separate incidents.
The crowd at a Houston music festival suddenly surged toward the stage during a performance by rapper Travis Scott, squeezing fans so tightly together that they could not breathe or move their arms and killing eight people in the chaos. The pandemonium unfolded Friday evening at Astroworld, a sold-out, two-day event in NRG Park with an estimated 50,000 people in attendance. As a timer clicked down to the start of the performance, the crowd pushed forward. “As soon as he jumped out on the stage, it was like an energy took over and everything went haywire,” concertgoer Niaara Goods said. “All of a sudden, your ribs are being crushed. You have someone’s arm in your neck. You’re trying to breathe, but you can’t.” Goods said she was so desperate to get out that she bit a man on the shoulder to get him to move. The dead ranged in age from 14 to 27, and 13 people were still hospitalized Saturday, Mayor Sylvester Turner said. He called the disaster “a tragedy on many different levels” and said it was too early to draw conclusions about what went wrong. “It may well be that this tragedy is the result of unpredictable events, of circumstances coming together that couldn’t possibly have been avoided,” said Judge Lina Hidalgo, Harris County’s top elected official. “But until we determine that, I will ask the tough questions.” Experts who have studied deaths caused by crowd surges say they are often a result of density — too many people packed into a small space. The crowd is often running either away from a perceived threat or toward something they want, such as a performer, before hitting a barrier.
Cornell, Columbia and Brown universities had alerted students to threats Sunday and deemed campuses safe a few hours later. Evacuations were ordered in some buildings on the campuses. Two days earlier, a bomb threat at Yale forced the evacuation of several buildings as well as nearby businesses in New Haven, Connecticut. The university resumed normal operations Friday evening.
A U.S. federal appeals court issued a stay Saturday freezing the Biden administration's efforts to require workers at U.S. companies with at least 100 employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 or be tested weekly, citing "grave statutory and constitutional" issues with the rule. The ruling from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit comes after numerous Republican-led states filed legal challenges against the new rule, which is set to take effect on Jan 4. In a statement, Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda said the Labor Department was "confident in its legal authority" to issue the rule, which will be enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). "The Occupational Safety and Health Act explicitly gives OSHA the authority to act quickly in an emergency where the agency finds that workers are subjected to a grave danger and a new standard is necessary to protect them," she said. "We are fully prepared to defend this standard in court.” An average of about 1,100 Americans are dying daily from COVID-19, most of them unvaccinated. COVID-19 has killed roughly 750,000 people in the United States. The stay comes two days after the Biden administration unveiled the rule, which was immediately met with vows of legal action from Republican governors and others, who argued it overstepped the administration's legal authority. The action on the private-sector vaccinations was taken under OSHA's emergency authority over workplace safety, officials said. The rule applies to 84.2 million workers at 1.9 million private-sector employers, according to OSHA. The administration's various vaccine rules cover 100 million employees, about two-thirds of the U.S. workforce, according to the White House. Saturday's court order came in response to a joint petition from several businesses, advocacy groups, and the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Utah. The rule is also facing separate legal challenges before other courts. The two-page order directs the Biden administration to respond to the request for a permanent injunction against the rule by 5 p.m. Monday.
The House passed a more than $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill late Friday, sending it to President Joe Biden’s desk in a critical step toward enacting sprawling Democratic economic plans. The Senate approved the revamp of transportation, utilities and broadband in August. The legislation’s passage is perhaps the unified Democratic government’s most concrete achievement since it approved a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package in the spring. The measure passed in a 228-206 vote. Thirteen Republicans supported it, while six Democrats voted against it. Biden could sign the bill within days. Washington has tried and failed for years to pass a major bill to upgrade critical transportation and utility infrastructure, which has come under more pressure from extreme weather. The White House has also contended passage of the bill can help to get goods moving as supply-chain obstacles contribute to higher prices for American consumers. The vote Friday followed a day of wrangling over how enact the two planks of the party’s agenda. The push-and-pull exemplified party leaders’ months long struggle to get progressives and centrists — who have differing visions of the government’s role in the economy — behind the same bills.
- U.S. Democrats Pass $1 Trillion Infrastructure Bill, Ending Daylong Standoff
- Illinois to Get at Least $17 Billion from the Biden Infrastructure Bill
For a month, FBI agents listened in as two members of a white supremacist group discussed their sinister plans: a plot to use a pro-gun rights rally in Richmond, Virginia, to engage in mass murder and attacks on critical infrastructure, which they believed would mark the start of a racial civil war. Patrik Mathews, a former Canadian Army reservist illegally in the U.S., and Brian Lemley, a Maryland resident and self-described white nationalist, fantasized about the brutal murders they'd soon carry out against law enforcement and Black people, all with the goal of bringing about the "Boogaloo," or the collapse of the U.S. government in order to prop up a white ethno-state, according to recordings of the pair's discussions.
policeman survived a knife attack in the French Riviera city of Cannes on Monday, with media quoting a police source as saying the assailant had said he was acting "in the name of the Prophet". The policeman emerged from the attack unscathed, saved from serious injury or worse by his bulletproof vest, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said. The assailant suffered life-threatening injuries after he was shot by other officers. The Algerian national held an Italian residency permit, was in France legally and was not on a French watchlist of individuals thought to have Islamist sympathies, the minister said. "I think that we can today sigh with relief that, although they have been hit hard psychologically, no police officer has been injured," Darmanin told reporters in Cannes. The attack comes as President Emmanuel Macron tries to persuade voters that his government is in control of security and violent crime, six months before elections in which the far right and conservatives pose the biggest threat to his re-election hopes. Eric Ciotti, a conservative lawmaker from southeastern France, who is challenging for the mainstream centre-right presidential ticket, called the incident a terrorist attack though he did not offer any evidence for that. The investigation is in the hands of the local prosecutor for now and not the national anti-terrorism prosecutor.
Cybersecurity
- Hackers Have Breached Organizations in Defense and Other Sensitive Sectors, Security Firm Says
Suspected foreign hackers have breached nine organizations in the defense, energy, health care, technology and education sectors -- and at least one of those organizations is in the US, according to findings that security firm Palo Alto Networks shared exclusively with CNN. With the help of the National Security Agency, cybersecurity researchers are exposing an ongoing effort by these unidentified hackers to steal key data from US defense contractors and other sensitive targets. It's the type of cyber espionage that security agencies in both the Biden and Trump administrations have aggressively sought to expose before it does too much damage. The goal in going public with the information is to warn other corporations that might be targeted and to burn the hackers' tools in the process. Officials from the NSA and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are tracking the threat. A division of the NSA responsible for mitigating foreign cyber threats to the US defense industrial base contributed analysis to the Palo Alto Networks report. In this case, the hackers have stolen passwords from some targeted organizations with a goal of maintaining long-term access to those networks, Ryan Olson, a senior Palo Alto Networks executive, told CNN. The intruders could then be well placed to intercept sensitive data sent over email or stored on computer systems until they are kicked out of the network. Olson said that the nine confirmed victims are the "tip of the spear" of the apparent spying campaign, and that he expects more victims to emerge. It's unclear who is responsible for the activity, but Palo Alto Networks said some of the attackers' tactics and tools overlap with those used by a suspected Chinese hacking group.
Google will end support for the Chrome sync feature for all users still running Google Chrome 48 and earlier after Chrome 96 reaches the stable channel. When enabled, Chrome sync will keep the users' bookmarks, passwords, history, open tabs, settings, preferences, and, in some cases, Google Pay payment info. It also automatically signs them into Gmail, YouTube, Search, and other Google services. The move was previously announced on the company's enterprise blog, with the release notes for Chrome 94 published last month, on October 19. "Chrome sync no longer supports Chrome 48 and earlier. You need to upgrade to a more recent version of Chrome if you want to continue using Chrome sync," Google said at the time. "As previously shared in the Chrome Enterprise release notes for M94, we'd like to inform anyone using Chrome Browser version M48 or lower that Chrome sync will be deprecated on these versions, and will no longer work once M96 launches on the stable channel," the company announced on Friday.
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