Seattle, June 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- WatchGuard Technologies, a global leader in network security and intelligence, secure Wi-Fi, multi-factor authentication and advanced endpoint protection, today announced the release of its Internet Security Report for Q1 2020. For the first time ever, this report includes data on the percentage of malware in the wild delivered via encrypted HTTPS connections. WatchGuards threat intelligence shows that 67% of all malware in Q1 was delivered via HTTPS, so organizations without security solutions capable of inspecting encrypted traffic will miss two-thirds of incoming threats. Additionally, 72% of encrypted malware was classified as zero day (meaning no antivirus signature exists for it, and it will evade signature-based protections). These findings show that HTTPS inspection and advanced behavior-based threat detection and response solutions are now requirements for every security-conscious organization. The report also includes a special section detailing the impact of COVID-19 on the threat landscape.

Some organizations are reluctant to set up HTTPS inspection due to the extra work involved, but our threat data clearly shows that a majority of malware is delivered through encrypted connections and that letting traffic go uninspected is simply no longer an option, said Corey Nachreiner, chief technology officer at WatchGuard. As malware continues to become more advanced and evasive, the only reliable approach to defense is implementing a set of layered security services, including advanced threat detection methods and HTTPS inspection.

WatchGuards Internet Security Report prepares midmarket businesses, the service providers that support them, and the end users that work for them with data on the trends, research and best practices they need to defend against modern security threats. Here are the key findings from the Q1 2020 report:

Third-party testing has found that WatchGuard products consistently maintain high throughput when inspecting HTTPS traffic. Many competitive products show a significant degradation in performance in this scenario. For example, an independent test performed by Miercom found that the Firebox M370 outperformed competitive products while inspecting HTTPS traffic with full security services enabled.

The findings in WatchGuardsInternet Security Reportsare drawn from anonymized Firebox Feed data from active WatchGuard appliances whose owners have opted in to share data to support the Threat Labs research efforts. Today, over 44,000 appliances worldwide contribute threat intelligence data to the report. In Q1 2020, they blocked over 32,148,519 malware variants in total (730 samples per device) and more than 1,660,000 network attacks (38 attacks per device).

The complete report includes key defensive best practices that organizations of all sizes can use to protect themselves in todays threat landscape and a detailed analysis of how the COVID-19 pandemic and associated shift to working from home affected the cyber security landscape.

About WatchGuard Technologies, Inc.

WatchGuard Technologies, Inc. is a global leader in network security, secure Wi-Fi, multi-factor authentication, advanced endpoint protection, and network intelligence. The companys award-winning products and services are trusted around the world by nearly 10,000 security resellers and service providers to protect more than 80,000 customers. WatchGuards mission is to make enterprise-grade security accessible to companies of all types and sizes through simplicity, making WatchGuard an ideal solution for midmarket businesses and distributed enterprises. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, with offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. To learn more, visit WatchGuard.com.

For additional information, promotions and updates, follow WatchGuard on Twitter@WatchGuardonFacebook or on theLinkedIn Companypage. Also, visit our InfoSec blog, Secplicity, for real-time information about the latest threats and how to cope with them atwww.secplicity.org.Subscribe to The 443 Security Simplified podcastatSecplicity.org, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

WatchGuard is a registered trademark of WatchGuard Technologies, Inc. All other marks are property of their respective owners.

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WatchGuard Technologies Report Finds Two-Thirds of Malware is Encrypted, Invisible Without HTTPS Inspection - GlobeNewswire

Microsoft has announced the acquisition of IoT security specialist CyberX to beef up Azure IoTs capabilities and help customers assess their risk profile across industrial environments.

CyberX, which will complement existing Azure IoT security offerings, aims to solve two specific challenges, according to a blog post from Microsoft announcing the news. Customers need greater visibility into the IoT devices already connected to their networks, as well as manage security on brownfield devices which have been difficult to secure due to legacy protocols.

With CyberX, customers can discover their existing IoT assets, and both manage and improve the security posture of those devices, wrote Michal Bravermen-Blumenstyk, CVP and CTO of cloud and AI security and Sam George, CVP of cloud and AI Azure IoT in a blog. Customers can see a digital map of thousands of devices across a factory floor or within a building and gather information about their asset profile and vulnerabilities.

Gaining this visibility is not only critical for understanding where security risks may exist and then mitigating those risks, but it is also a fundamental step to securely enable smart manufacturing, smart grid, and other digitisation use cases across production facilities and the supply chain, they added.

From the CyberX perspective, Omer Schneider, co-founder and CEO, said he was thankful to the companys customers and investors, and assessed the next steps. By joining forces with Microsoft, we will rapidly scale our business and technology to securely enable digital transformation for many more organisations, said Schneider.

The seeds of Microsofts $5 billion investment in IoT, announced two years ago, continue to bear fruit, as Braverman-Blumenstyk and George explained. While the benefits of IoT are well established and significant, one of the biggest hubrldes for customers is securing IoT devices both for new digitisation initiatives as well as for legacy operational technology and industrial control system environments, they wrote.

Research from Counterpoint at the start of this month found Microsoft to be the leader in IoT platforms. The Redmond company came top or joint top in almost all areas of analysis, including integration and scalability, ecosystem growth, and application enablement.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this?Attend the co-located5G Expo,IoT Tech Expo,Blockchain Expo,AI & Big Data Expo, andCyber Security & Cloud Expo World Serieswith upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam.

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Microsoft acquires CyberX to bolster Azure IoT security - Internet of Things News - IoT Tech News

Passwords are one of the worst things on the internet, Mark Risher, Googles senior director for account security, identity, and abuse told The Verge. Though theyre essential for security and to help people log in to many apps and websites, theyre one of the primary, if not the primary, ways that people actually end up getting compromised.

Its a strange thing for a Google security executive to say because the last time you logged into Gmail, you probably typed in a password. But the company has been trying to nudge users away from the model for years, or at least minimize the damage. And in the coming weeks, one of Googles quietest tools in that fight the Password Checkup feature will be getting a higher profile, as it joins the Security Checkup dashboard built into every Google account.

Risher is right to be concerned. Though you can use a tool like a password manager to help keep track of your logins, a lot of people just end up reusing passwords for many accounts. Fifty-two percent of people reuse the same password for multiple accounts, according to the results of a poll published in February 2019 by Google and polling firm Harris. Thirteen percent of people reuse that password for all of their accounts, that poll found. And Microsoft said in 2019 that 44 million Microsoft accounts used logins that had been leaked online.

While reusing passwords can be one way to remember a complex word, phrase, or combination of letters, numbers, and symbols that you think no one will ever be able to guess, the practice can put your personal information in danger. If that reused password gets leaked as part of a data breach, hackers could then have the key to many of your other online accounts no matter how complex the phrase is.

We know from other research weve done in the past that people whove had their data exposed by a data breach are 10 times more likely to be hijacked than a person thats not exposed by one of these breaches, said Kurt Thomas, a member of Googles anti-abuse and security research team.

Google has been trying to help users build better password habits for some time, slowly but surely. For years, the company has offered a built-in password manager in Google Accounts on Chrome and Android that can save your passwords and autofill them on websites and apps, for example.

But over the past year or so, Google has also been working to help people proactively make better passwords with Password Checkup. The tool checks logins against a database of 4 billion leaked credentials, seeing if the password youre typing in matches one thats already leaked. It launched first as a Chrome extension in February 2019, and Google baked it into Google Accounts in October and into Chrome in December.

Its not a new idea, but Google is uniquely well-positioned to offer something like Password Checkup. The company has access to billions of passwords and the scale to roll out Password Checkup to billions of users in a way that integrates with account security tools on which many people already rely.

Figuring out how to let Password Checkup flag compromised credentials in a privacy-respecting way was a tough technical problem that required a combined effort from both Google and Stanford. The challenge was finding a way to automatically check a users credentials against a database of breached logins without revealing that information to Google or giving the user access to the whole database, all while scaling that solution to Googles huge user base, researchers from both organizations told me.

To do so, Google stores a hashed and encrypted version of every known username and password exposed by a data breach. Whenever you log into an account, Google will send a hashed and encrypted version of your login info against that database. That way, Google cant see your password, and you cant see Googles list of known-compromised logins. If Google detects a match, Google will show an alert recommending that you change your password for that site.

Google gets compromised logins from multiple different sources and trusted partners, Thomas said, including underground forums where password dumps are openly shared. We have an ethical policy that we will never pay criminals for stolen data, he continued. But just by virtue of how these markets work, very often, [stolen data] will bubble up and become available. Using personas Google has in those marketplaces, the company can acquire the data, he said.

Password Checkup took about two to three years from inception to having it appear in many Google products, according to Thomas. Down the line, Google wants to have Security Checkup email you when it detects that a stored login has been compromised in a data breach, which the company plans to launch in the coming months. And later this year, Google aims to let people use Password Checkup in Chrome even if they arent logged into a Google account.

Google isnt the only company to offer some kind of password-checking functionality. Paid password manager 1Password recommends changing weak or duplicated passwords and also offers Watchtower, which checks your logins against Troy Hunts Have I Been Pwned database of more than 9 billion compromised accounts and flags any matches. And Apple announced yesterday that its next version of Safari will have a password-monitoring tool that appears to work similarly to Password Checkup.

But Google has an advantage in helping people with their passwords thanks to its massive scale. And tools like Password Checkup and the built-in password manager ladder up to a broader goal to make online security easier for users.

What I like security to be and what I think [Password Checkup] is a good example of is, how do you make it easier for regular people to do the right thing? Googles VP of security engineering Royal Hansen told The Verge. Its not about alerting you with more and more problems, he said. Its about making it easier for you to do, frankly, the most basic step.

Update June 23rd, 4:06PM ET: Added context about where Password Checkup is already available.

Originally posted here:
Google is on a mission to stop you from reusing passwords - The Verge

Richard E. Butler and the author in the secretariat workroom of the Old Melbourne City Hall writing the cybersecurity treaty provisions, December 1988. Photo courtesy of the author's legal assistant, Laina Raveendran-Greene.

Next week, July 1, 2020 marks the 30th anniversary of one of the most significant treaty instruments in modern times. On 1 July 1990, the Melbourne Treaty came into force as the first and only global treaty that enabled worldwide internets and mobile networks to exist, together with the cybersecurity provisions designed to protect those infrastructures. The achievement remains as an enduring tribute to Richard Edmund Butler of Australia who was one of the most influential, and best-loved Secretaries-General of the ITU.

Dick Butler as he was known by everyone had an almost encyclopedic familiarity with public international telecommunications law, technology, and the long arc of history. He was also universally admired as a dedicated international civil servant which, combined with his friendly Aussie persistence and considerable height, made him the ideal, formidable man for the task.

After he was elected Secretary-General in 1982, Dick decided that he would begin pulling together a team of trusted colleagues to embark on the preparation of a new treaty instrument for enabling global internets and mobile networks. At that time, it was unlawful for international leased circuits to be used for creating internets for data or mobile services available to the public. At the time, all internets were, by definition, private networks and only implemented within enterprises or governments. Like all the many internets, the DARPA Internet only existed internationally as a government network.

As my job in the FCC and across multiple Federal agencies significantly involved the ITU, Dick and I traded ideas about the conference for several years. As his team of compatriots floated concepts in published articles and at conferences, they were merged into the planning process. The model ultimately pursued was that for radio internets developed by the U.S. 60 years earlier by Herbert Hoover and William F. Friedman. At the FCC, I also reported to the former Director of DARPA who had previously authorized and oversaw internet development there, as well as headed up U.S. intelligence community advisory and coordination activities. Deciding the associated internet policies, regulations, and shaping international law were key components of the FCC work during those renaissance years, and supported by CIA and NSA experts. The significantly increased interest in the mid-80s in global internet and mobile networks resulted in Dick picking his hometown of Melbourne and Nov-Dec 1988 for the treaty conference.

In late 1987, things were sufficiently far along that Dick asked me to move from Boston to Geneva to join him as his counselor and Chief of Telecommunication Regulations to further develop the treaty provisions and help negotiate them at the Melbourne treaty conference the next year. In Boston, my job involved collaborating with multiple internet related entities that included the prime contractor for NSA's key cybersecurity platform SDNS (Secure Data Network System).

Standing with Peter Stephen Wilenski (right) who Dick asked to take over as Conference chair on the second day to help save it from disaster along with the changes described. Peter was a really unusual and incredibly talented Australian civil servant like Dick, who escaped from Poland to Australia in 1943. He died rather young in 1994. Photo courtesy of the author's legal assistant, Laina Raveendran-Greene.

As 1988 got underway, things became even more complicated and hectic when GATT (now the WTO) located near the ITU decided it also would develop treaty provisions entwined with the envisioned ITU internet treaty. One of the fortunate assets to assist the effort literally came walking in the door in the form of an energetic young lawyer from Singapore named Laina Raveendran who was doing graduate studies in Geneva and focused on harmonizing the two treaty developments in play. We hired her.

During 1988, all manner of legal and technical research, including historical precedents going back to 1850, was done to ensure the success of the first treaty for global internets and mobile networks. Countless hours were spent attending external meetings, presenting papers and writing articles worldwide. Dick spent day and night traveling and talking by phone to get senior officials from every country in the world, as well as the major industry user organizations, to agree on the provisions that were continually refined and redistributed every week using what the first network-based information system supporting a treaty conference was.

As the representatives from 133 nations were getting ready to head off to Melbourne in November 1988 to ink the first internet treaty, everything appeared good to go. The stated objective in the ITU press release was at hand an enduring treaty to "provide the basic foundation of norms and administrative mechanisms required not only for implementing the 'Networks of the 90's' and beyond but also for assuring the continued availability of traditional existing telecommunications services among the public throughout the world."

However, one of the worst possible events occurred in early November that spelled disaster. A Cornell University graduate student named Robert Tappen Morris created a worm that took down the entire DARPA internet infrastructure. To make this disaster even worse, the legendary New York Times investigative technology journalist John Gregory Markoff took an interest in the incident, and his articles were carried throughout the world almost every day by the International Herald Tribune. It didn't take John long to discover that the identity of Morris' equally legendary but publicly unknown father was NSA's Chief Scientist.

Shortly after Dick's team arrived in Melbourne, the delegates from the USSR several of whom were very knowledgeable KGB and GRU engineers - made it plain they were prepared to call for an end of the conference as a result of the Morris incident. Over several long days, Dick's team developed key provisions for what is the first and to this day the only, global cybersecurity treaty.

It was clever. The same NSA group that Morris' father led at NSA, had the previous year made public the solutions necessary for internet security the SDNS initiative. Furthermore, these solutions were being brought into the CCITT (now ITU-T). The quid pro quo for allowing global public internets to come into existence was adherence to the SDNS provisions being moved into ITU international standards. Dick approached the USSR delegation, who agreed, and it saved the treaty. The photo here is a historical one Dick and I writing the cybersecurity provisions into the draft treaty text.

The conference was extended for several days. All 131 nations signed the treaty at Melbourne, and almost every country in the world subsequently ratified it. It remains an unparalleled achievement.

Dick decided to leave on a high note. He penned an article marking what had been achieved that was published in the Telecommunication Journal in 1989 with its last paragraph noting:

"The CCITT [now ITU-T] Plenary Assembly has helped to provide a concrete technological and operational foundation for the orderly development of the network while the World Administrative Telegraph and Telephone Conference (WATTC88) provided a regulatory framework appropriate for the diverse technological, operational and national policy environments which are so rapidly evolving today."

With the treaty initiative accomplished and yearning to return to his native Australia with his beloved wife Pat after spending decades in Geneva, he announced shortly after the Melbourne conference he would be stepping down as Secretary-General and privately championed Pekka Tarjanne from Finland as his successor. Dick waved good-bye to his team at the ITU in December 1989. He passed away at 86 in 2012 but in the years between helped leverage his incredible knowledge and negotiating skills to bring about many new satellites and high-altitude radio systems for the poor and underserved areas of the world.

Conference Secretariat team, December 1988. Photo courtesy of the author's legal assistant, Laina Raveendran-Greene.

On 1 July 1990 30 years ago the Melbourne Treaty came into force. As my position at the ITU also included being the Chief of International Telecommunication Regulations, under the new Secretary-General who carried on Dick's mission, I issued advisories to signatory nations to implement the internet and cybersecurity treaty provisions. Private leased lines began to be made available pursuant to the treaty, and new dynamic network globalization ensued. NSA's SDNS cybersecurity platform moved into CCITT standards and was implemented in demonstration networks.

Unfortunately, the ground-breaking, historic Melbourne internet and cybersecurity treaty did not fare well in the following years. The Clinton-Gore Administration subsequently decided it would simply ignore the treaty provisions, and halted the NSA SDNS initiative and implementations, along with all government domestic oversight and regulations of internets. Everything was left to the "Information Superhighway" and constant anarchy of an unfettered marketplace. It indeed brought about almost 30 years of cyber chaos to produce what exists today.

Subsequent U.S. Administrations and lobbyists took up the Clinton-Gore gambit of disparaging and ignoring the Melbourne Treaty conveniently sweeping it under the carpet of ignorance, jingoism, and xenophobia that pervades Washington. However, Russia and many other countries have not forgotten what happened. They occasionally exploit the resulting international legal vacuum to remind the U.S. But then, combined with the international disgraces of the current U.S. Administration, trust in the U.S. honoring its international agreements has evaporated anyway. International stature, integrity and trust - once destroyed are not easily acquired again. Reconstruction after the Trump Plague will be difficult.

The Melbourne Treaty's enduring value proposition is increasingly underscored by the emergence of extraterritorial network architectures and services in a 5G world and the occasional pleas of transnational corporate general counsels for a multilateral treaty instrument. The answer is as Dick would say in his emails until his passing - go see U.S. Treaty Document 102-13. The supreme irony is that the model for the Melbourne Treaty was that devised by the U.S. itself a hundred years ago.

Perhaps on the 1 July 2020, some reflection might occur on what was a finer hour in public international law led by a humble visionary man from Australia with enormous integrity and facilitated by the U.S. national security community.

See more here:
Marking the 30th Anniversary of the Internet and Cybersecurity Treaty - CircleID

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is currently being held on remand in a London maximum-security prison, solely on the basis of a U.S. extradition request. Assange has been charged with 17 counts of espionage related to WikiLeaks 2010 to 2011 publications concerning the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, embarrassing U.S. diplomatic communications and evidence of torture in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

Assanges U.S. extradition case is recognized by free speech groups as the most important press freedom case of the 21st century. As the aggressive judicial overreach of this U.S. government is already creating a chilling effect on reporters and media organizations, some recognize consequences far beyond the future of journalism.

Julian Assanges father, John Shipton, who regularly attends cryptocurrency conferences, has warned those who are involved in the development of new technologies that they are not immune to suffering the same fate as his son.

How does the prosecution of Assange threaten the crypto movement? And why does the Bitcoin community need to be concerned about his plight for freedom?

At its heart, WikiLeaks is an innovative endeavor. Started as a project of Sunshine Press, it was an invention of a new form of journalism built on the platform of the internet. On its websites About page, WikiLeaks described how it started with an online dialogue between activists around the world, who shared their aspiration to eliminate injustice and human suffering caused by the abuses of power of corporations and governments, especially oppressive regimes.

WikiLeaks also acknowledges the efforts of Philip Zimmerman, the creator of an encryption software program known as Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, and how the vision of this lone computer programmer in Colorado instigated a global revolution for mass distribution of privacy technologies.

Inspired by this pioneer of private and secure online communication, the founding members of WikiLeaks sought for a way to deploy information technologies to create a robust system of publishing that protects the anonymity of sources and enables transparency of the powerful. This new journalistic organization aimed to make document leaking technology available at a global scale in order to better bring accountability to governments and other institutions.

History has shown how new ideas and inventions are often met with opposition and fierce condemnation by the state. At the start of the 1990s, when Zimmermann released PGP, the U.S. government considered what he had done the equivalent of exporting munitions. It launched a three-year criminal investigation against him, creating a battle over encryption that became known to some as The Crypto Wars. The case was eventually dropped when U.S. courts ruled that software source code qualifies as speech protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Two decades later, WikiLeaks efforts to amplify information technologies to tackle the problem of government secrecy created another global revolution, this time disrupting the media landscape. Like its forerunner, this new free press of the digital age soon became a target of political retaliation.

After WikiLeaks released classified documents that revealed U.S. war crimes, the U.S. government decided that its editor-in-chief had damaged national security, though it produced no shred of evidence that the published documents caused any harm. It effectively declared war on the First Amendment, charging an Australian journalist under the Espionage Act in the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Just as in the first Crypto War, where it tried to ban encryption, it was now trying to shut down WikiLeaks.

What is this new Crypto War now being waged against the whistleblowing site all about? This battle is not just about Assange as an individual. While mainstream media fixates on Assange and his character, WikiLeaks is not driven solely by one charismatic man. Behind the organization, there are thousands of ordinary people worldwide who are dedicated to the principle of freedom of speech.

At the end of 2010, when WikiLeaks began publishing troves of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables, its website came under heavy pressure by the U.S. government and its allies. Insurgency swiftly emerged from deep inside the web to help WikiLeaks counteract distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. By keeping multiple copies of its website, and setting up mirror sites, anonymous networks allowed information to continue to flow.

Inspiring those collective acts of resistance in an underground subculture of the internet are shared values and ideals, embodied in the cypherpunk philosophy. Emerging in the late 1980s, the cypherpunk movement is a loosely tied group of mathematicians, computer scientists and online activists who advocate privacy through the use of strong cryptography.

Assange is known to have joined the cypherpunk mailing list in late 1993 or early 1994. His engagement with those on the edges on the internet had a large influence on his intellectual development. The native Australian software programmer and expert in cryptography once summed up the core values behind WikiLeaks by saying, capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.

He acknowledged this is something that he learned from his own father and other capable, generous men in his life. This moral value, installed at an early age, found practical application in the cypherpunks core belief: Cryptography can be a key tool for protecting individual autonomy threatened by power.

In his 2006 essay Conspiracy as Governance, a kind of manifesto from which WikiLeaks was conceived, Assange analyzed the structure of power and means to shift the balance of power between the individual and the state. By using cryptography as a non-violent democratic weapon that gives claws to the weak, Assange found a way to provide information to the public, to hold the powerful accountable, and to help ordinary people empower themselves with knowledge.

Cypherpunks saw the political implications of their work and strove for proper use of the power inherent in cryptography. This attitude has shaped the ethics of cryptographers and defined cypherpunk cryptography as crypto with values.

Eric Hughes who, in 1992, co-founded the influential cypherpunk mailing list, together with Timothy C. May and John Gilmore, described those values as openness, the free flow of information and decentralization. In A Cypherpunks Manifesto, published in 1993, he declared that code is free for all to use, worldwide. Assange also articulated the moral values of cypherpunks, noting the whole point of free software is to liberate it in all senses. He added that, Its part of the intellectual heritage of man. True intellectual heritage cant be bound up in intellectual property.

Instead of claiming ownership of their knowledge, cypherpunks aimed to build software on a ground of free sharing and open platforms, in which everyone can participate and make contributions to the development and utilization.

Zimmermann gave PGP away online, making the source code free and freely available. Through people all over the world simply downloading and using it, the decentralization of that technology helped to secure the right to privacy at a large scale. By deploying an anonymous, secure drop box, WikiLeaks made it possible for people around the globe to speak out against their governments wrongdoing without fear of their identity being revealed. Courage of whistleblowers became contagious, creating waves of disclosures. WikiLeaks, powered by free software, began to liberate information that had been captured under the proprietary ownership of corporations and governments.

It is with this cypherpunk vision of ethics that Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, also published its white paper online. The invention of Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, unleashed the revolutionary power of cryptography. This community-driven, free software project set in motion a decentralized movement to liberate money from the monopoly of central banks. By people across the world simply choosing to run full nodes, each containing a complete record of all Bitcoin transactions, a network secures this stateless digital cash as a form of free speech that belongs to everyone.

Years before the U.S. governments assault on free speech escalated into the indictment against the WikiLeaks founder, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin recognized the potential fate that would befall the worlds first global Fourth Estate.

In December 2010, WikiLeaks faced the unlawful financial blockade imposed by private payment processing companies, and the organization was considering using Bitcoin to circumvent it. Satoshi, who was concerned about the risk of drawing unwanted government attention to his then infant currency, appealed to WikiLeaks not to take such action.

In an online post, Satoshi noted that, WikiLeaks has kicked the hornets nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.

WikiLeaks eventually did turn to Bitcoin to achieve financial sovereignty. And now the swarm is now getting larger, bringing a new war on cryptography.

The citizens of the internet have been longing for another world, independent from the old world of exploitation, violence and control. Dreams for freenet, for the internet to become an emancipatory tool for building peer-to-peer systems, have united people around the world together in the frontier of cyberspace.

Meanwhile, the U.S. governments prosecution of Assange is a direct attack on freedom of expression; peoples ability to form and exchange ideas and collaborate creatively. What is now being threatened is our shared values and a vision for the future of the internet at the heart of Bitcoins decentralized consensus.

Bitcoin, from its inception, was a political act. This is shown in the highly politicized message in the genesis block, referring to a banking bailout. In the lively discussion of public cryptography in 1992 on the cypherpunk mailing list, the late Hal Finney, a noted cryptographer who is considered to be one of the earliest Bitcoin pioneers, reminded us of the ethical responsibility of cryptographers:

The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them, Finney, who received the very first bitcoin transaction sent by Satoshi, wrote, urging Bitcoin early adopters to put their unearned wealth to good use.

Now, as Assanges U.S. extradition battle intensifies, the internet is calling for the rise of cypherpunks Assanges fellow capable generous men, who exercise their power for social good to unite once again and take up their moral duty. The future of the internet believes in Bitcoin, the potential of this crypto with values to become the currency of resistance to defend its freedom.

Authors Note: WikiLeaks has launched the official campaign page, Dont Extradite Assange. You can get information on how you can help stop Assanges extradition. Please consider donating to the WikiLeaks official Defense Fund and take action.

This is a guest post by Nozomi Hayase. Opinions expressed are entirely her own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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Julian Assange Extradition and the Freedom of Bitcoin Bitcoin... - Bitcoin Magazine