( May 2nd, 2016) “Swift, the global financial network that banks use to transfer billions of dollars every day, has warned its customers it is aware of ‘a number of recent cyber incidents,’ in which attackers sent fraudulent messages over its system.’’
The Boston Global Forum will hold a conference in May 9 in Cambridge, Mass., to discuss “Building Ethics Norms for Cyberbehavior.’’ It will include international financial cybercrime.
The Guardian added: “The disclosure came as law-enforcement authorities in Bangladesh and elsewhere investigated the theft of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank account at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Swift said the scheme involved altering Swift software on the Bangladesh Bank’s computers to hide evidence of fraudulent transfers.’’
The network’s news about the attack on the Bengladesh Bank “marked the first acknowledgement that the Bangladesh Bank attack was not an isolated incident but one of several recent criminal schemes that aimed to take advantage of the global messaging platform used by some 11,000 financial institutions.’’
( May 2nd, 2016) On May 9, The Boston Global Forum (BostonGlobalForum.org) will host a major conference on the theme of “Building Ethics Norms for Cybersecurity’’. It is part of its BGF-G7 Summit Initiative, in which internationally known experts have been participating since the start of this year. Please see below the list of moderators and other speakers for May 9, along with other information about the meeting.
A key part of the BGF’s work this year has been the Initiative, which has been convening leading scholars and business, government, technology and other leaders from around the world to seek solutions to pressing global issues involving peace, security and development. The BGF has worked with Japanese officials to craft proposals to be considered by the leaders of the G7 nations at their summit, on May 26-27 in Japan.
The BGF’s biggest push this year has been developing “Strategies for Combating Cyberterrorism’’. In pursuing this, most of the Initiative’s online dialogues so far this year, a major feature of the Initiative, have dealt primarily with cybersecurity. The most promising ideas from these dialogues and other BGF work have been summarized and will be reported to the national leaders meeting in Japan.
Online speakers have included David Sanger, chief Washington Correspondent of The New York Times; Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of Resilient Systems; John Savage, the An Wang professor of computer science at Brown University and a BGF member; Allan Cytryn, international business cybersecurity expert, a principal of Risk Masters International and a BGF member; Carlos Alberto Torres, the UNESCO Chair on Global Learning and Global Citizenship Education at the University of California at Los Angeles and a BGF member; Yasuhisa Kawamura, the chief spokesman for the Japanese government; Prof. J.D. Bindenagel, the Henry Kissinger Professor for Governance and International Security, at the University of Bonn; Prof. Matthew Smith, professor of computer science at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn, and Ezra Vogel, the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard, a world-renown expert on East Asia and a BGF member.
The cybersecurity project began last year, as BGF experts started to develop the BGF’s “Ethics Code for Cyber Peace and Security.’’
Ryan Maness, Visiting Fellow for Security and Resilience Studies in the Department of political science at Northeastern University, will present a report on the BGF-G7 Summit Initiative’s cybersecurity proposals at the May 9 meeting.
Practical details of theevent:
Time: 7 p.m. (EDT) May 9
Venue:Room 2,Harvard Faculty Club, 20 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA 02138
The conference will be directly linked with participants in Tokyo and Bonn.
It will be moderated by:
Gov. Michael Dukakis, Co-Founder, Chairman, Boston Global Forum.
Speakers:
Prof. Jose Barroso, former President of the European Union.
President VairaVike-Freiberga, former President of Latvia, President of Club de Madrid.
Prof. Thomas E. Patterson, Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Member of Editorial Board, Boston Global Forum; Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, Harvard Kennedy School, and acting director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School.
Prof. Joseph Nye, Member of the BGF Board of Thinkers; University Distinguished Service Professor, Harvard Kennedy School.
Prof. Koichi Hamada, Special Adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the G7 Summit’s host.
Nguyen Anh Tuan, Co-Founder and CEO, Boston Global Forum; Chair, International Advisory Committee, the UNESCO-UCLA program on Global Citizenship Education.
Prof. John Savage, An Wang Professor of Computer Science, Brown University and BGF member.
Ryan Maness, Visiting Fellow of Security and Resilience Studies, Department of Political Science, Northeastern University.
Tomomi Inada, Chairman of Policy Research Council of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party and a Member of the Japanese House of Representatives.
Prof. NazliChoucri, Professor of Political Science, MIT; Director of the Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD).
Prof. Derek Reveron, Professor of National Security Affairs and the EMC Informationist Chair at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I
Prof. Chris Demchak, RADM Grace M. Hopper Chair of Cybersecurity and Co-Director of the Center for Cyber Conflict Studies, at the U.S. Naval War College
For more information on the meeting, including about attending it, please send queries to: [email protected]
( May 2nd, 2016) The Guardian reports that the Russian creator of a computer program that let cybercriminals infect millions of computers and drain bank accounts in several countries has been sentenced to serve nine and half years in a U.S. prison.
Aleksandr Andreevich Panin, 27, the inventor of the malicious SpyEye, pleaded guilty to a count of conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud in January 2014 after reaching a deal with prosecutors.
SpyEye infected more than 50 million computers, causing nearly $1 billion in damage to individuals and financial institutions.
A second man, Hamza Bendelladj, a 27-year-old Algerian was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Prosecutors said he sold versions of SpyEye online and used the malware to steal financial information.
The Guardian reported that “SpyEye was a type of Trojan virus that secretly implanted itself on victims’ computers to steal sensitive information, including bank account credentials, credit card information, passwords and PINs. Once it took over a computer, it allowed hackers to trick victims into surrendering personal information — including data-grabbing and fake bank account pages. The information was relayed to a command and control server to be used to access victim accounts.’’
( May 2nd, 2016) As concerns grow about Russian revanchism, three NATO members — Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania — may help expand NATO’s presence in and around the Black Sea. Russia has major forces there, including in Ukraine’s Crimea, which Russian President President Vladimir Putin ordered his forces to occupy as part of his ongoing but undeclared war with Ukraine.
The Black Sea is strategically very important for East and West given its energy reserves and closeness to the Middle East.
“There are some very valuable discussions under way among the allies who live on the Black Sea … of more closely integrating their naval forces and operations,” NATO’s Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow said in a visit to Sofia, mentioning the three NATO allies.
NATO worries about a Russian strategy to try to block NATO from moving its military forces by positioning Russian surface-to-air missile batteries and anti-ship missiles in Kaliningrad (its enclave on the Baltic), the Black Sea and in Syria.
( May 2nd, 2016) The Pentagon’s Cyber Command has started a new online campaign against ISIS to disrupt its operations by sowing mistrust and confusion among the leaders of the Islamic terrorist group and in so doing disrupt their military operations.
Technewsworld reports that among other things, the plan is to disrupt the ability of ISIS leaders “to pay their soldiers, execute operational orders, recruit new fighters and communicate with each other.’’
The plan amounts to dropping cyberbombs on the enemy, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work told The New York Times, which the U.S. has never done before in such a large-scale battlefield environment.
( May 2nd, 2016) A U.S. Defense Department report says that the U.S. military conducted “freedom of navigation” operations against 13 countries last year, including several to challenge China’s claims in the South and East China seas. Chinese expansion in those seas poses the most threatening challenge to international freedom of navigation. Some 30 percent of world trade runs through the South China Sea, over which China seeks hegemony.
The operations involve sending U.S. Navy ships and military aircraft where other nations have tried to limit access. The aim is to show that the international community does not accept such restrictions.
( May 2nd, 2016) Interior Minister Jan Jambon arrived for a meeting between the prime minister, a delegation of the victims of the Brussels attacks and the organizers of a march against terrorism and hate in the Brussels city center Sunday.
“A significant part of the Muslim community danced in response to the attacks.”
That statement, made by Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon in an interview with Flemish daily De Standaard published Saturday, may sound familiar to American readers. It closely echoes a claim made repeatedly by Republican frontrunner Donald Trump that “thousands of people were cheering” in Jersey City, N.J., when the World Trade Center towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001.
And just like Mr. Trump’s claim – which has been denied vehemently by U.S. authorities — Mr. Jambon’s comments, which refer to the deadly bombings at Brussels Airport and a subway station on March 22, have prompted political pushback, as well as an examination of whether they are true.
So what did Mr. Jambon, a member of the right-wing Flemish nationalist N-VA party, actually say?
In the interview, Mr. Jambon was asked whether Belgium, as a society, had to take responsibility for the attacks. After explaining that there were some oversights in the years leading up to the attacks, the minister launched into the following:
“A significant part of the Muslim community danced in response to the attacks. They threw stones and bottles at police and the press during the arrest of Salah Abdeslam (a suspected participant in the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris). That’s the real problem. We can apprehend terrorists, extract them from society. But they are merely a pimple. Underneath, there is a cancer that is much harder to treat. We can do it. But not overnight. And those involved in politics will have to transcend themselves.”
A few bottles and some other objects were indeed thrown at police in the hours after Mr. Abdeslam’s arrest on March 18 in the Brussels district of Molenbeek, as witnessed by this reporter. But those incidents appeared to be mostly spontaneous and random — following an hourslong siege of several residential blocks by riot police a neighborhood that has long had difficult relations with law enforcement — rather than part of a unified reaction to the arrest.
Was the reaction to the March 22 bombings, which killed at least 32 people, including a Muslim mother of three from Molenbeek, any broader?
Charles Michel, Belgium’s prime minister, said Sunday that “there were expressions of support for the authors of the attacks.” Mr. Michel told state-run news agency Belga that those incidents had been reported to the national security council, which includes key ministers including Mr. Jambon as well as OCAM, Belgium’s coordination agency for threat analysis.
However, the prime minister also played down their significance. “These were acts coming from people who were in the minority and it isn’t appropriate to make generalizations,” he said.
The Brussels’ prosecutor’s office, under whose jurisdiction any post-attack dance parties would fall, said it is aware of just one incident, in which no one was charged. Six people were arrested on Avenue de Versailles, a street that has been linked to one of the alleged Paris attackers, following reports of a support demonstration.
However, the six people were later released, since “we don’t have enough elements to prove that they were involved in such an incident,” said spokeswoman Ine Van Wymersch.
In comments to Belgian media Monday, Mr. Jambon stood by his statement. Belgium’s opposition Green party has now asked the minister to explain himself to lawmakers on Wednesday afternoon, group leader Jean-Marc Nollet said on Twitter.
( April 25th, 2016) In what seems at least in part preparation for the G7 Summit coming up May 26-27 in Japan, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a G7 nation, hosted a meeting April 25 of leaders from G7 members Italy, France, the United States and Britain. The other G7 members are Japan and Canada.
Ms. Merkel’s agenda included the war in Syria, the relationship between Russia and Ukraine; the possible challenge of a mass migration from Libya to Europe in the coming months, which, of course, would worsen Europe’s woes in trying to deal with the flood of refugees from Syria, and the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
Ms. Merkel’s guests at the meeting April 25, besides Mr. Obama: French President François Hollande, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renz
(April 18th, 2016) Yasuhisa Kawamura, Director-General for Press and Public Diplomacy of the Japanese government, a job that includes being chief spokesman for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, will be the featured speaker in a Boston Global Forum (BGF) live online dialogue titled “The Role of Japan in Peace, Security and Development in the World Today.’’ Such a dialogue takes on particular importance now because Japan will host this year’s G7 Summit, to be held on May 26-27.
The online session starts at 7:30 EDT, Thursday, April 18 and can be seen and heard on www.bostonglobalforum.org. Joining Mr. Kawamura in the discussion will be Michael Dukakis, Chairman of the Boston Global Forum’s Board of Directors and Board of Thinkers, and Prof. Thomas Patterson, a member of the BGF Board of Directors and Board of Thinkers; Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Acting Director of the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. The session is one in the series of online dialogues in the Boston Global Forum’s BGF-G7 Summit Initiative, in which BGF experts have been working with Japanese officials to craft proposals to be considered by the national leaders at the summit.
The Boston Global Forum encourages its members and friends to send questions for the discussants to [email protected]. Members of the Boston Global Forum’s Special Editorial Board will gather your questions and insights and send them to the speakers. The talk and listeners’ responses to it will be live-streamed at www.bostonglobalforum.orgAbout Mr Yasuhisa Kawamura:
Press Secretary Director-General for Press and Public Diplomacy 1956 Born in Nagoya, Japan 1981 Graduated from Hitotsubashi University (BA of Law) Joined Ministry of Foreign Affairs(MOFA) 1984 Graduated from Amherst College, MA, USA Second Secretary, Embassy of Japan to U.S.A. 1988 Deputy Director, Second North America Division, MOFA 1993 Principal Deputy Director, Second Southeast Asia Division, MOFA 1993 First Secretary, Permanent Mission to Int’l Organization in Geneva 1995 Counselor, Embassy of Japan in Indonesia 1998 Director, International Press Division, MOFA 2000 Director, Second International Organization Division, Economic Affairs Bureau, MOFA 2002 Counselor, Permanent Mission of Japan to European Union 2004 Representative in Tokyo, Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation 2008 Deputy Press Secretary (Deputy Director General) for Foreign Minister 2010 Deputy Consul General, Consulate General of Japan in New York 2012 Deputy Chief of Mission, Consulate General of Japan in New York 2013 Minister & Deputy Chief of Mission, Embassy of Japan in India 2015 Press Secretary, Director-General for Press and Public Diplomacy Married, One Daughter
The online session starts at 7:30 EDT, Thursday, April 18 and can be seen and heard on 
The Boston Global Forum encourages its members and friends to send questions for the discussants to 