U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh, who is the deputy chief of Cyber Command and President Joe Biden's nominee to lead both Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, has been noted by former officials to mostly continue the work done by outgoing Cyber Command and NSA Head Gen. Paul Nakasone, reports The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.
"I won't be surprised if you see some of those things deal with bringing CYBERCOM and the National Security Agency even closer together in terms of how they work more effectively and efficiently," said former Cyber Command Deputy Chief Ret. Lt. Gen. Charles Moore.
Assigned as a military intelligence officer more than three decades ago, Haugh later became the Cyber Command's Director of Intelligence before being sought to lead the Cyber National Mission Force in 2018.
"Who else had the intelligence background, and now was building the CYBERCOM background and experience and understanding other than Tim Haugh? I didn't see anybody like that," Moore said.
Haugh was also noted by former NSA Director of Operations Jon Darby to have helped combat election security operations alongside now-Deputy National Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technology Anne Neuberger.
New attacks with the updated SysUpdate toolkit have been deployed by Chinese advanced persistent threat operation Budworm, also known as APT27, Emissary Panda, Bronze Union, Lucky Mouse, Iron Tiger, and Red Phoenix, against an Asian government and a Middle East-based telecommunications provider, reports The Hacker News.
Forty-five malicious NPM and PyPI packages have been deployed by threat actors to facilitate extensive data theft operations as part of a campaign that commenced on Sept. 12, according to BleepingComputer.
Sixty thousand emails from U.S. State Department accounts were noted by a staffer working for Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., to have been exfiltrated by Chinese threat actors during the widespread compromise of Microsoft email accounts that commenced in May, according to Reuters.