Donald Trump has spoken out following the killing of Qassem Soleimani (pictured above), who was the head of the elite Quds Force and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy-leader of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces at Baghdad International Airport.  

The US president taunted Iran following calls for "Jihad" from their supreme leader in retaliation for the drone strike ordered by Trump.

The burning remains of a car that was among a convoy the men had been travelling in

Trump said the Iranian general killed thousands of Americans and should have been "taken out many years ago."

Trump tweeted on Friday morning: "General Qassem Soleimani has killed or badly wounded thousands of Americans over an extended period of time, and was plotting to kill many more...but got caught! He was directly and indirectly responsible for the death of millions of people, including the recent large number of PROTESTERS killed in Iran itself."

He added: "While Iran will never be able to properly admit it, Soleimani was both hated and feared within the country. They are not nearly as saddened as the leaders will let the outside world believe. He should have been taken out many years ago!"

Meanwhile, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei proclaimed his country would avenge the bitter loss of his highest ranking general, while Lebanon's Tehran-backed Hezbollah said it would ramp up its terror "with the blessing of his pure blood."

Reacting to this earlier on Twitter, Trump, who is in Mar-a-Lago for the holiday season, taunted Iran, writing: "Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation!"

It’s unclear what the president meant in his tweet about Iran winning a negotiation.

Trump was critical of President Barack Obama’s policy in the region. The Obama administration pushed for the 2015 agreement that froze Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief as a way to avoid escalating tensions in the region.

President Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, claiming Obama’s agreement had emboldened Iran to invest in a campaign of violence in the region. He began a series of punishing new economic sanctions that accumulated into Friday’s military action, Dailymail reports.

But his tweet could be seen as an offer to open negotiations with Tehran.

The Pentagon said Trump had ordered the "decisive action to protect U.S. personnel abroad by killing Soleimani" who was "actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region."

Militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who helped besiege the US embassy Tuesday, was among those who died in the US drone strike.

Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis

Photos and videos shared online shows thousands of mourners on the streets of Soleimani's hometown in Kerman, while tens of thousands poured onto the streets of Tehran, chanting "Death to America" and burning the flag of the United States.

Mourners

Meanwhile, World War 3 is still trending on Twitter as web users fear this could lead to a war (read here).

Richard Frank, Simon Fraser University

LifeLabs — Canada’s major provider of lab diagnostics and testing services — announced on Dec. 17 that hackers had potentially accessed computer systems with data from “approximately 15 million customers” that “could include name, address, email, login, passwords, date of birth, health card number and lab test results.”

As a Canadian citizen whose data and whose family’s data is probably among the 15 million records stolen, my first thought is about the implications of this breach.

Data marketplaces

At the International CyberCrime Research Centre in the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, we’ve been studying online hacker communities for about seven years and the Dark Web for the past four years. The Dark Web, with its large number of marketplaces called cryptomarkets (think eBay for drugs and stolen data), is a fascinating place where all sorts of products, data and services are made available for purchase. Payments are made using anonymous (mostly) untraceable digital currencies. I would expect parts of LifeLab’s database to eventually end up in a marketplace like that.

So how did this happen? Details of the hack have not been revealed due to the ongoing investigation, but hopefully we will eventually learn the specifics. According to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario (IPC) and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia (OIPC), “cyber criminals penetrated the company’s systems, extracting data and demanding a ransom,” which LifeLabs paid.

This points to a likely ransomware attack, where the attacker encrypts the data on a computer system and makes it inaccessible. Unless a backup of the data exists, the only way to recover the data is by paying the attacker a ransom, who sends the victim the decryption keys to unlock the data. Most of these ransomware attacks use encryption so strong that even security firms cannot unlock the files, which has led to a new type of business where consultants help ransomware victims negotiate and pay the ransom.

Read more: Cybersecurity: high costs for companies

In most ransomware cases the data remains on the victim’s computer, but its access is revoked through strong encryption. This implies that the attackers do not actually have a copy of the data and thus the chances for future revictimization remain low. However, the language of the OIPC indicates that in this case, the data were “extracted.” This puts a new twist on the story.

Holding data hostage

Ransomware attackers sometimes do use ransomware — software that threatens to block access or publish data — that not only locks files, preventing the victim from doing anything, but also leaks the files back to the attackers. This allows the attackers to potentially extort more money from the victim, as happened a few weeks ago to Allied Universal, a security firm in California. That seems to be the case with LifeLabs.

If this is true, then our data is out there, in the hands of cybercriminals, and will remain out there. LifeLabs has stated that they have “retrieved the data by making a payment,” but if the cybercriminals already have a copy, then retrieving it will not suddenly disallow the attackers from further using that data.

Did LifeLabs not have a proper backup and recovery procedures in place so it could recover from this failure without having to resort to paying a ransom?

Customer protection

The likely scenario is that LifeLabs fell victim to a ransomware attack, possibly sparked by a phishing email with a malicious link or attachment, which resulted in up to 15 million customers’ information (our information, not LifeLabs’) being extracted to the attackers. LifeLabs paid the ransom to regain access to the data and continue business.

What can we, as customers, do? Unfortunately, not much.

The data theft is beyond our control. Periodically we must do business with third-parties that require our personal information and we have no choice but to hand it over. Implicit in this transaction is that the other party (LifeLabs, for example) will protect that data. The only available option we have as customers is to be vigilant of our personal information, including financial and health details; but this is after the data theft.

We must check our credit card statements, our credit histories, our insurance claims. We must not use the same password in multiple places and should use two-factor authentication whenever possible.

Read more: It's time we demanded the protection of our personal data

Potentially the best way to prevent future breaches would be to incentivize organizations that collect our personal details to secure them properly. This could be done by changes to the legislation, like in the European Union and its new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduced in 2018.

In August 2018, the British Airways website was breached and 500,000 customer details stolen. The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office handed down a fine of £183 million (approximately $321 million), based on a new U.K. law designed to mirror the EU’s GDPR. With penalties like that, third-party organizations would have no choice but to take data security seriously, rather than as an operational cost.

[ Expertise in your inbox. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter and get a digest of academic takes on today’s news, every day. ]

Richard Frank, Assistant Professor, Criminology, Simon Fraser University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The siege is over at US embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. On Wednesday, supporters of Iranian-backed Iraqi paramilitary groups who stormed the U.S. Embassy’s perimeter and hurled rocks in two days of protests withdrew.

The withdrawal came as Washington dispatched extra troops and threatened reprisals against Tehran.

The demonstrators, angry at U.S. air strikes against the Tehran-backed Kataib Hezbollah group in which at least 25 people were killed, threw stones at the building while U.S. forces stationed on the rooftops fired tear gas to disperse them.

By mid-afternoon, most appeared to have obeyed a call to withdraw, issued by the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) umbrella group of mainly Shi’ite militia, which said the demonstrators’ message had been heard.

Young men used palm tree branches to sweep the street in front of the embassy compound. Others packed up equipment and vans arrived to take people away. Some left to set up a protest camp in front of a nearby hotel.

Iraq’s military said all protesters had left by the evening.

The protests marked a new turn in the shadow war between Washington and Tehran playing out across the Middle East.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who faces a re-election campaign in 2020, threatened on Tuesday to retaliate against Iran but said later he did not want war.

The unrest followed U.S. air raids on Sunday against Kataib Hezbollah bases in retaliation for missile attacks that killed a U.S. contractor in northern Iraq last week.

On Tuesday, crowds chanted: ‘Death to America!’, lit fires, and smashed surveillance cameras. They breached an outer perimeter of the embassy but did not enter the main compound.

BIGGEST U.S. EMBASSY
The huge embassy, built along the banks of the Tigris River in central Baghdad’s fortified “green zone” during the American occupation following the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, is the biggest U.S. diplomatic mission in the world.

Washington said its diplomats were safe and it was rushing hundreds of extra troops to the region.

The State Department said on Wednesday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decided to postpone his upcoming trip to Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Cyprus to remain in Washington and monitor the situation in Iraq.