Short Takes – 12-24-22

Recent Attacks Underscore Need to Secure Utilities. TotalSecurityAdvisor.blr.com article. Scary pull quote: “When it comes to third-party vendors communicating with your server, you should “monitor it and determine whether it needs to stay on all the time. Lots of remote access can be shut off when it’s not being used. It’s a little bit more of a burden on IT staff but from a threat standpoint it is one of the better ways to go about this,” Walcutt continued.”

House Approves $1.65 Trillion Omnibus Spending Bill. WSJ.com article. Pull Quote: “The vote was largely along party lines, with only one Democrat, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, voting against the bill. Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan voted present. Both have aired concerns about sharp increases in military spending. Nine Republicans crossed party lines to back the measure.”

Putin, Isolated and Distrustful, Leans on Handful of Hard-Line Advisers. WSJ.com article. Lengthy article. Justifying quote: “This article is based on months of interviews with current and former Russian officials and people close to the Kremlin who broadly described an isolated leader who was unable, or unwilling, to believe that Ukraine would successfully resist. The president, these people said, spent 22 years constructing a system to flatter him by withholding or sugarcoating discouraging data points.”

In rural Georgia, an unlikely rebel against Trumpism. WashingtonPost.com article. Stereotypes frequently miss. Pull quote: “How Johnson became an unlikely part of an emerging voter revolt against Trumpism is not so much the story of some political strategy, or even the policies of the national Democratic Party, which has long been accused of ignoring places such as northwest Georgia.”