Sibling rivalry brewing between SWFL Super Bowl championsFort Myers mother warns others after falling victim to ticket fraud
FORT MYERS Sibling rivalry brewing between SWFL Super Bowl champions Philadelphia may be known as the city of brotherly love, but here in southwest Florida, there’s a brotherly rivalry brewing between two of our own.
FORT MYERS Fort Myers mother warns others after falling victim to ticket fraud A mother’s intended surprise turned into a disappointment when she paid for Savannah Bananas tickets but never received them. The tickets were meant to be a special gift for her son.
Legal expert weighs in on 17-year-old found not guilty of murder of mom Collin Griffith, a 17-year-old, has been found not guilty in the death of his mother, Catherine Griffith, who was fatally stabbed in the neck.
FORT MYERS $150k worth of equipment stolen from Lee Health Fort Myers police arrested a hospital employee accused of stealing more than 150 thousand dollars worth of medical equipment from Lee Health.
NAPLES Award-winning stylist to host event during Naples Automotive Experience On Friday, an Emmy Award-winning Hollywood stylist will host Forever Fabulous, a charity event with the St. Matthew’s House.
FORT MYERS Colonial and I-75 diverging diamond to be completed by spring The diverging diamond at Colonial Boulevard and Interstate 75 in Fort Myers is diverting drivers.
NAPLES 20th Annual Spring Home & Garden show coming to Naples The 20th semi-annual Spring Home & Garden show is coming to Naples.
NAPLES Collier Publix worker spreads joy with kindness cards In Collier County, one person stands out for his daily acts of kindness, bringing smiles to those around him.
FGCU FGCU softball pitcher ranked among the best in the country FGCU softball pitcher Allison Sparkman enters her sophomore season ranked as one of the top pitchers in the country.
Congress steps in as Port Charlotte widow searches for husband’s ashes A Port Charlotte woman continues to fight to find her husband’s ashes, lost in the mail. Members of Congress are now backing her efforts.
FORT MYERS Fort Myers mom recounts dramatic chase to find kidnapped daughter A mother’s worst nightmare unfolded when her 2-year-old daughter was taken from her in Fort Myers on Monday.
ESTERO Copperleaf Community fights hunger through fundraising The Copperleaf Country Club community in Estero is making a significant impact in the fight against hunger.
NAPLES Collier County students explore trade careers at job fair Hundreds of Collier County students explored potential future careers at the Build My Future Job Fair.
NORTH NAPLES New orthopedic hospital nears completion in Collier County A new orthopedic hospital is nearing completion in Collier County, Florida, with an estimated cost of $140 million.
Real estate deals that shaped the SWFL landscape in 2024 The rise of online retail and continued regional population growth played a large role in a series of yin/yang real estate transactions that defined Southwest Florida’s top deals of 2024.
FORT MYERS Sibling rivalry brewing between SWFL Super Bowl champions Philadelphia may be known as the city of brotherly love, but here in southwest Florida, there’s a brotherly rivalry brewing between two of our own.
FORT MYERS Fort Myers mother warns others after falling victim to ticket fraud A mother’s intended surprise turned into a disappointment when she paid for Savannah Bananas tickets but never received them. The tickets were meant to be a special gift for her son.
Legal expert weighs in on 17-year-old found not guilty of murder of mom Collin Griffith, a 17-year-old, has been found not guilty in the death of his mother, Catherine Griffith, who was fatally stabbed in the neck.
FORT MYERS $150k worth of equipment stolen from Lee Health Fort Myers police arrested a hospital employee accused of stealing more than 150 thousand dollars worth of medical equipment from Lee Health.
NAPLES Award-winning stylist to host event during Naples Automotive Experience On Friday, an Emmy Award-winning Hollywood stylist will host Forever Fabulous, a charity event with the St. Matthew’s House.
FORT MYERS Colonial and I-75 diverging diamond to be completed by spring The diverging diamond at Colonial Boulevard and Interstate 75 in Fort Myers is diverting drivers.
NAPLES 20th Annual Spring Home & Garden show coming to Naples The 20th semi-annual Spring Home & Garden show is coming to Naples.
NAPLES Collier Publix worker spreads joy with kindness cards In Collier County, one person stands out for his daily acts of kindness, bringing smiles to those around him.
FGCU FGCU softball pitcher ranked among the best in the country FGCU softball pitcher Allison Sparkman enters her sophomore season ranked as one of the top pitchers in the country.
Congress steps in as Port Charlotte widow searches for husband’s ashes A Port Charlotte woman continues to fight to find her husband’s ashes, lost in the mail. Members of Congress are now backing her efforts.
FORT MYERS Fort Myers mom recounts dramatic chase to find kidnapped daughter A mother’s worst nightmare unfolded when her 2-year-old daughter was taken from her in Fort Myers on Monday.
ESTERO Copperleaf Community fights hunger through fundraising The Copperleaf Country Club community in Estero is making a significant impact in the fight against hunger.
NAPLES Collier County students explore trade careers at job fair Hundreds of Collier County students explored potential future careers at the Build My Future Job Fair.
NORTH NAPLES New orthopedic hospital nears completion in Collier County A new orthopedic hospital is nearing completion in Collier County, Florida, with an estimated cost of $140 million.
Real estate deals that shaped the SWFL landscape in 2024 The rise of online retail and continued regional population growth played a large role in a series of yin/yang real estate transactions that defined Southwest Florida’s top deals of 2024.
FILE – The sign outside the National Security Administration (NSA) campus where U.S. Cyber Command is located in Fort Meade, Md., June 6, 2013. Tensions are soaring over Ukraine with Western officials warning about the danger of Russia launching major cyberattacks against its NATO allies. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File) President Joe Biden couldn’t have been more blunt about the risks of cyberattacks spinning out of control. “If we end up in a war, a real shooting war with a major power, it’s going to be as a consequence of a cyber breach of great consequence,” he told his intelligence brain trust in July. Now tensions are soaring over Ukraine with Western officials warning about the danger of Russia launching damaging cyberattacks against Ukraine’s NATO allies. While no one is suggesting that could lead to a full-blown war between nuclear-armed rivals, the risk of escalation is serious. The danger is in the uncertainty about what crosses a digital red line. Cyberattacks, including those that cripple critical infrastructure with ransomware, have been on the rise for years and often go unpunished. It’s unclear how grave a malicious cyber operation by a state actor would have to be to cross the threshold to an act of war. “The rules are fuzzy,” said Max Smeets, director of the European Cyber Conflict Research Initiative. “It’s not clear what is allowed, what isn’t allowed.” The United States and other NATO members have threatened crippling sanctions against Russia if it sends troops into Ukraine. Less clear is whether such sanctions, whose secondary effects could also hurt Europe, would be imposed if Russia were to seriously damage Ukrainian critical infrastructure — power, telecommunications, finance, railways — with cyberattacks in lieu of invading. And if the West were to respond harshly to Russian aggression, Moscow could retaliate against NATO nations in cyberspace with an intensity and on a scale previously unseen. A major cyberattack on U.S. targets would almost certainly unleash a muscular response. But what of lesser cyberattacks? Or if Russian President Vladimir Putin restricted them to a NATO member in Europe? Under Article 5 of the organization’s treaty, an attack on any of its 30 members is considered an attack on all. But unclear is what it would take to unleash full-scale cyber retaliation. Or how bad an attack would have to be to trigger retaliation from NATO’s most potent cyber military forces, led by the U.S. and Britain. Cyberspace is exceptionally unruly. No arms control treaties exist to put guard rails on state-backed hacking, which is often shielded by plausible deniability as it’s often difficult to quickly attribute cyberattacks and intelligence-gathering intrusions. The technology is cheap and criminals can act as proxies, further muddying attribution. Freelancers and hacktivists compound the problem. In 2015, the major powers and others agreed on a set of 11 voluntary norms of international cyber behavior at the United Nations. But they are routinely ignored. Russia helped craft them only to knock Ukraine’s power grid offline that winter and set in motion its hack-and-leak operation to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Hacking is now a core component of great power conflict. In 2016, NATO formally designated cyberspace a “domain” of conflict, alongside land, sea and air. Nowhere has the militarization of cyberspace been more clear than in Putin’s bid to return Ukraine to Moscow’s orbit. To Serhii Demediuk, the No. 2 official on Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, a noisy cyberattack last month was “part of a full-scale Russian operation directed at destabilizing the situation in Ukraine, aimed at exploding our Euro-Atlantic integration and seizing power.” The attack damaged servers at the State Emergency Service and at the Motor Transport Insurance Bureau with a malicious “wiper” cloaked as ransomware. The damage proved minimal, but a message posted simultaneously on dozens of defaced government websites said: “Be afraid and expect the worst.” Such attacks are apt to continue as Putin tries to “degrade” and “delegitimize” trust in Ukrainian institutions, the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said in a blog on Russian military cyber wreckage in the former Soviet republic: Winter attacks on the power grid in 2015 and 2016 were followed by NotPetya, which exacted more than $10 billion in damage globally. Michele Markoff, the U.S. State Department’s deputy coordinator for cyber issues, thinks “muscular diplomacy” is the only way to end such “immoral, unethical and destabilizing behavior.” But how? Unlike nuclear arms, cyberweapons can’t easily be quantified, verified and limited in treaties. Nor are violators apt to be held accountable in the United Nations, not with Russia and China wielding veto power on its Security Council. “We’ve wallowed kind of in a quagmire for years now on making transgressors accountable,” said Duncan Hollis, a Temple Law professor and former State Department legal adviser. Members endorsed in May an update to the 2015 U.N. norms that further delineates what should be out of bounds: including hospitals, energy, water and sanitation, education and financial services. That has hardly deterred Russian-speaking ransomware crooks, who are at the very least tolerated by the Kremlin. Nor have U.S. indictments of Russian and Chinese state hackers and the blacklisting of tech companies accused of aiding them helped much. Under a new policy NATO adopted last year after U.S lobbying, an accumulation of lower-level cyberattacks — far below, say, blacking out the U.S. East Coast — could be enough to trigger Article 5. But NATO is vague on what a tipping point might be. NATO’s doctrinal shift followed a pair of seismic cyberespionage shocks — the highly targeted 2020 SolarWinds supply chain hack by Russia that badly rattled Washington and the reckless March 2021 Microsoft Exchange hack attributed to Chinese state security that set off a criminal hacking free-for-all. A cluster of wholesale data pilfering in the mid-2010s attributed to China — from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, United Airlines, Marriott hotels and the health insurer Anthem — inflicted a deep national security wound. And U.S. officials have worried for more than a decade about rivals — Russia especially — quietly “pre-positioning” enough malware in U.S. critical infrastructure including the energy sector to cause considerable chaos in an armed conflict. In response, U.S. Cyber Command developed a strategy in 2018 it calls “persistent engagement” to counter rivals who “operate continuously below the threshold of armed conflict to weaken institutions and gain strategic advantages.” The aim: deny foes the chance to breach U.S. systems by operating “across the interconnected battlespace, globally, as close as possible to adversaries,” Cybercom commander Gen. Paul Nakasone wrote. That has sometimes meant penetrating not just adversaries’ networks but also those of allies — without asking permission, said Smeets, the European cyber conflict analyst. Disinformation campaigns have also muddied the definition of a “cyber threat.” No longer do they merely encompass malware like NotPetya or the the Stuxnet virus that wrecked Iranian nuclear centrifuges, an operation widely attributed to the U.S. and Israel and discovered in 2010. During the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, Cybercom temporarily knocked offline a key Russian disinformation mill. Most major powers have the equivalent of a U.S. Cyber Command for both offense and defense. Also active are terrorists, criminals working as state proxies, begrudged freelancers and hacktivists like the Cyber Partisans of Belarus. Hollis compares the current messy cyber moment to the early 19th century when U.S. and European navies were so small they often relied on privateers — we know them now as pirates— for high-seas dirty work. The U.S. and other NATO partners are, meantime, helping Ukraine stand up a separate cyber military unit, said Demediuk, the Ukrainian security official. Since Russia seized Crimea in 2014, NATO has closely and systematically coordinating cyber actions with Ukraine, including joint missions, he said. In November, Ukraine exposed an eight-year espionage operation by agents of Russia’s FSB in Crimea involving more than 5,000 attempted hacks. The main goal: to gain control over critical infrastructure, including power plants, heating and water supply systems, Ukraine’s state news agency said. This month, Microsoft said the operation, dubbed Armageddon, persists with attempts to penetrate Ukraine’s military, judiciary and law enforcement. Microsoft detected no damage, but that doesn’t mean Russian cyber operators haven’t gained undetected footholds. That’s where hackers hide until they are ready to pounce. ___ Associated Press writer Yuras Karmanau in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed to this report.