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More Chinese cities including Urumqi in the far west announced easing of coronavirus curbs on Sunday, as China tries to make its zero-COVID policy more targeted and less onerous after extraordinary protests against restrictions last weekend.

Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region and where the protests first broke out, will reopen shopping malls, markets, restaurants and other venues from Monday, authorities said, after strict lockdowns that had lasted months.

There was little sign of significant unrest this weekend, although police were out in force in the Liangmaqiao area of Beijing and in Shanghai around Wulumuqi Road, which is named after Urumqi. Both sites saw protests a week ago.

A deadly apartment fire last month in Urumqi had sparked dozens of protests against COVID curbs in over 20 cities, a show of civil disobediance unprecedented in mainland China since President Xi Jinping took power in 2012.

In recent days, numerous cities have announced easings of lockdowns, testing requirements, and quarantine rules.

China is set to further announce a nationwide easing of testing requirements as well as allowing positive cases and close contacts to isolate at home under certain conditions, people familiar with the matter told Reuters last week.

Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, who oversees COVID efforts, said last week the ability of the virus to cause disease was weakening – a change in messaging that aligns with what health authorities around the world have said for more than a year.

Easing measures have varied across the country.

On Sunday, the city of Nanning, capital of the southern region of Guangxi, cancelled the requirement for a negative COVID test within 72 hours to take the subway.

On Saturday in Beijing, local authorities said purchasing fever, cough and sore throat medicines no longer requires real name registration. That followed on from local-level announcements in recent days in the capital that those who test positive for the virus could quarantine at home.

In Beijing and Wuhan, people expressed frustration over the weekend because recent negative tests were still required for entry into a number of venues, despite the mass closing of COVID testing booths, causing lengthy queues at those few still open.

“Are they stupid or just plain mean?” a Weibo user posted on Sunday. “We shouldn’t shut down COVID testing stations until we get rid of the COVID test pass.”

New daily case numbers dropped nationwide to 31,824, authorities said on Sunday, which may be due in part to fewer people being tested due to loosening curbs. China on Sunday reported two new deaths from the virus.

Xi’s zero-COVID policy has made China a global outlier nearly three years into the pandemic, which started in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. In addition to sparking rising frustration, the policy has had a devastating impact on the world’s second-largest economy and roiled global supply chains.

China argues the policy, which has all-but-shut its borders to travel, is necessary to save lives and prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed.

Despite recent easings, many experts said China is unlikely to begin significant reopening before March at the earliest, given the need to ramp up vaccinations, especially among its vast elderly population.

“Although there have been quite a few local changes to COVID policies lately, we do not interpret them as China abandoning zero-COVID policy (ZCP) just yet,” Goldman Sachs said in a note on Sunday.

“Rather, we see them as clear evidence of the Chinese government preparing for an exit, and trying to minimize the economic and social cost of COVID control in the meantime. The preparations may last a few months and there are likely to be challenges along the way.”

Estimates for how many deaths China could see if it pivots to a full reopening have ranged from 1.3 million to over 2 million, though some researchers said the death toll could be reduced sharply if there was a focus on vaccination.

Earlier this week, China announced it would speed up COVID-19 vaccinations for elderly people, but many remain reluctant about getting the jab.”Some people have doubts about the safety and effectiveness of the country’s new coronavirus vaccine, believing that vaccination of the elderly may be dangerous,” an article in the ruling Communist Party’s official People’s Daily said on Sunday.

“Experts say this perception is wrong,” the article added, before emphasising that domestically made vaccines are “safe”.

Foreign COVID vaccines are not approved in China and Xi is unwilling to change that, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on Saturday.

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Meritocracy is one of society’s most powerful myths. It is comforting to believe we live in a fair world where people are rewarded for a mixture of talent and effort. But Britain remains an elitist country in which a socially stratified education system funnels those born to privilege into the highest-status jobs, while holding back children born to parents who have never benefited from such opportunities.

So Keir Starmer’s pledge to remove the charitable status of private schools, and requiring them to charge VAT on fees, is a welcome move. Just 7% of children attend private schools. Yet privately educated young people make up almost one in three undergraduates at the country’s most selective universities. In the jobs market, the figures are even worse: seven out of 10 members of the judiciary were privately educated as were six out of 10 civil service permanent secretaries, more than half of diplomats and more than four in 10 senior media editors. This is not a product simply of their raw ability, but also of the vast resources that go into their education, the social connections and favours it opens up and the other forms of cultural capital it endows.

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Many large businesses run SAP to manage their business operations and their customer relations. Security has become an increasingly critical priority due to the ongoing digitalization of society and the new opportunities that attackers exploit to achieve a system breach. Recent attacks related to corrupt data, stealing personal information and escalating privileges for remote code execution all highlight the new and varied entry points threat actors have taken advantage of. Attackers with the appropriate skills could be able to exploit specific SAP vulnerabilities to take full control of the SAP system and expose the critical information and processes of the company.

Among new SAP users and non-technical experts, there are multiple myths when it comes to SAP, like “SAP is a commercial product that delivers security by default.” The reality is that even after implementing the standard functionalities of an SAP solution, it is not secured by default.

Traditionally, companies were predominantly focused on the roles and profiles assigned to different users in the SAP system as the main control to improve the security in the SAP systems. However, this focus has been expanded beyond merely access control, and there are plenty of elements that need security factored in:

• Access Management: In the SAP solutions, there are multiple ways to provide high privileges to users and to perform critical actions on the business processes, such as changing already created invoices, modifying existing purchase orders or trying to change the system configuration
• Custom Code: According to best practices, it is better to build security in your code during the design process than waiting to have a breach.
• Configuration: An SAP system has hundreds of different parameters that influence the configuration of the system and therefore its security. As such, most customers have included security as a key part in their SAP implementation projects.
• Interface/integration with other systems: Interconnecting systems can be a dangerous activity if the security of both systems is not adequate and the connector is not configured properly.

IBM Security has defined a security framework featuring 13 layers that focus on the critical elements of the SAP stack. This framework uses a top-down approach, going from regulatory and compliance to the most technical details related to cybersecurity.

Figure 1: The 13 layers of SAP Security

Some years ago, the main activities on an SAP security project were focused on defining the appropriate roles and authorizations according to the Segregation of Duties matrix established by the customer or the best practices. However, those activities have been expanded to include the security of the DevOps and in the interfaces, consideration of encryption (at rest or in motion), performance vulnerability assessments, penetration testing and more.

A good starting point is to identify all the security aspects that could impact the SAP systems that are either running in a cloud environment or will be moved to a cloud environment. This activity evaluates the security considering the aforementioned 13 layers framework and combining the utilization of different assets to speed up the analysis.

These are some examples of the questions that will be answered during this analysis:

• Are the integrations between the SAP ERP system and other internal and external systems secure?
• Is the company monitoring the vulnerabilities in the SAP landscape? If so, is the company appropriately managing the vulnerabilities identified?
• Is the company correctly assigning the users’ roles in the SAP landscape?
• Is the configuration of the application layers of those SAP systems secure enough?

The final deliverable should be a detailed report including the security weaknesses and an action plan to mitigate the found risks.

This type of project is used to justify the security value behind the transformation program defined by the company and is utilized as a first step to start the security transformation in the SAP environment. After this activity, IBM offers different solutions to accelerate the security transformation and to manage the applications in a secure manner.

The key difference that sets IBM apart is that we analyze the client security posture from two different perspectives; we consider compliance and cybersecurity with the main objective of identifying all the weak flanks that could compromise the customer’s business.

Is your IT strategy considering the security of its SAP solutions? Is your company performing frequent reviews to assure that the SAP solutions have not been attacked or suffered a breach? How is your company managing the vulnerabilities identified in the internal or external audits? Learn how to best secure your SAP environments and get in touch with an expert to help you through your SAP security transformation today by accessing here.

The post Securing Your SAP Environments: Going Beyond Access Control appeared first on Security Intelligence.

Ukraine’s military said Russia had pulled some troops from towns on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River from Kherson city, the first official Ukrainian report of a Russian withdrawal on what is now the main front line in the south..

* Spain has stepped up security at public and diplomatic buildings after a spate of letter bombs, including one sent to Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and another to the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid, where an official suffered minor injuries.

* Air raid alerts were issued across all of Ukraine following warnings by Ukrainian officials that Russia was preparing a new wave of missile and drone strikes. “An overall air raid alert is in place in Ukraine. Go to shelters,” country’s border service wrote on Telegram messaging app.

* Ukraine’s military said it had found fragments of Russian-fired nuclear-capable missiles with dud warheads in west Ukraine, and that their apparent purpose was to distract air defences.

* The recently liberated Ukrainian city of Kherson has lost its power supply after heavy shelling by Russian forces, the regional governor said.

* European Union governments tentatively agreed on a $60 a barrel price cap on Russian seaborne oil, with an adjustment mechanism to keep the cap at 5% below the market price, an EU diplomat said.

* Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on that big problems had accumulated in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), accusing the West of spurning the chance to make it a real bridge with Russia after the Cold War.

* Lavrov said that discussions with Washington about potential prisoner exchanges were being conducted by the two countries’ intelligence services, and that he hoped they would be successful.

* The European Union needs patience as it sanctions Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, as most measures will only have an impact in the medium and long term, Lithuania’s prime minister said in an interview at  the  Reuters NEXT conference.

* Switzerland has frozen financial assets worth 7.5 billion Swiss francs ($7.94 billion) as of Nov. 25 under sanctions against Russians to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) said.

* Russia said the German parliament’s move to recognise the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine as a Soviet-imposed genocide was an anti-Russian provocation and an attempt by Germany to whitewash its Nazi past.

* Ukraine sacked a top engineer at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, accusing him of collaborating with Russian forces, and urged other Ukrainian staff at the plant to remain loyal to Kyiv.

* Russia must withdraw its heavy weapons and military personnel from the Zaporizhzhia plant if the U.N. atomic watchdog’s efforts to create a protection zone are to succeed, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said.

* In a grim sign of the energy crisis caused by Russian attacks on Ukraine’s electricity grid, nine people have been killed in fires over the past 24 hours as Ukrainians resorted to emergency generators, candles and gas cylinders in violation of safety rules to try to heat their homes after power outages.

* “Remember one thing – the Russians are afraid. And they are very cold and no one will help them, because they do not have popular support,” – Andriy Yermak, chief of Ukrainian presidential staff.

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It’s now completely over for Donald Trump. If you don’t want to take our word for it, just check with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which just cleared the way for Trump to be indicted for stealing classified documents. Or check with the other federal criminal case against Trump, where Pat Cipollone and others have just testified to a DOJ grand jury after the courts ruled that executive privilege didn’t apply.

But if you really want proof that it’s over for Trump, just ask Trump. After all of these things went horribly wrong for him, he called for the “termination” of the Constitution so he could be reinstated as President. It’s not just that Trump is saying something this infinitely deranged. It’s that he has to know that this kind of talk will merely help ensure that he really does spend the rest of his life in prison.

Good luck to Trump’s lawyers when he’s on trial for trying to overthrow the government and they have to convince the jury that he didn’t really mean it when he called for the “termination” of the Constitution. This is the kind of thing that proves intent and delivers convictions.

Donald Trump is clearly at a point where he sees no hope of escaping indictment and conviction, and is throwing it all away with a statement like this because he has nothing to lose anyway. If you’re a lock to spend the rest of your life in prison, what else is there to lose? Trump knows his life is over. He’s knows he’s done. And he’s yelling the kind of desperate gibberish a villain only yells when he knows there’s no hope of escape anyway.

The post Donald Trump just gave away that he knows it’s completely over for him appeared first on Palmer Report.