At a glance.
- President Trump fires DHS advisory committee members and pardons Silk Road founder.
- BreachForums founder to be resentenced.
- Conduent confirms outage was caused by a cyberattack.
President Trump fires DHS advisory committee members and pardons Silk Road founder.
President Trump yesterday fired all advisory committee members within the Department of Homeland Security, including the members of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA's) Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), Dark Reading reports. Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Benjamine C. Huffman said in a brief letter to advisory committee members, "Future committee activities will be focused solely on advancing our critical mission to protect the homeland and support DHS's strategic priorities." The letter added that the dismissed committee members are welcome to reapply to the DHS in the future.
The president also issued a full and unconditional pardon for Ross Ulbricht, founder of the dark web marketplace Silk Road, the BBC reports. Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for charges including conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, money laundering, and computer hacking. Between 2011 and 2013, Silk Road was used by more than 100,000 people to buy and sell over $200 million worth of drugs and other illegal services, Reuters notes. The Libertarian Party in the US maintains that Ulbricht's imprisonment was an example of government overreach, and Trump announced plans to commute his sentence at the Libertarian National Convention last year.