Treasury Department hit in cyberbreach by China-sponsored actor, officials say
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(WASHINGTON) — The Treasury Department was breached by a China-sponsored actor earlier this month, officials told Congress in a letter on Monday.
The “major” breach was achieved by gaining access to a third-party cybersecurity service Treasury used, called BeyondTrust, they said.
The actor then accessed Treasury workstations and “certain unclassified documents” on them, department officials said in a letter to the Senate Banking Committee.
The threat actor was able to “override the service’s security, remotely access certain Treasury DO user workstations, and access certain unclassified documents maintained by those users,” the letter said.
Treasury has ceased use of BeyondTrust since discovering the incident.
“The compromised BeyondTrust service has been taken offline and there is no evidence indicating the threat actor has continued access to Treasury systems or information,” according to a Treasury Department spokesperson.
The department has been working with the FBI and THE Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) as well as the intelligence community to “fully characterize the incident and determine its overall impact,” the official said.
More information will be available on the hack in a supplemental notice to Congress within 30 days, according to the Treasury Department.
Treasury is mandated by policy to notify Congress of such breaches.
China is one of America’s most pernicious cyberactors, experts and officials say. Last month, officials said a Chinese-backed group hacked into nine telecommunications companies and was able to gain access to certain high-profile individuals cellphones as a result of the hack.
It is unclear if this breach is related to those actions.
(NEW YORK) — When convicted Delphi, Indiana, killer Richard Allen returns to court for sentencing on Friday, he’s expected to come face-to-face with the victims’ families.
Last month, a jury found Allen guilty on all charges in the double homicide: felony murder for the killing of 13-year-old Abigail “Abby” Williams while attempting to commit kidnapping; felony murder for the killing of 14-year-old Liberty “Libby” German while attempting to commit kidnapping; murder for knowingly killing Abby; and murder for knowingly killing Libby.
Allen faces a sentence of 90 to 130 years in prison.
A gag order has prevented the families of Abby and Libby from commenting during or after Allen’s trial. But at sentencing, they’ll get their chance to address Allen through victim impact statements.
When Allen was arrested in 2022 — five years after the 2017 murders — Libby’s grandparents and guardians, Becky and Mike Patty, told ABC News they were grappling with the news that the suspect was living among them in their small town.
“How can somebody do that and then just go on living life like nothing happened?” Mike Patty said.
Law enforcement, prosecutors and defense attorneys have also been under the gag order and have not yet commented on the verdict.
Abby and Libby were walking along a Delphi hiking trail when they were attacked on Feb. 13, 2017. Their throats were slit and their bodies were dumped in the nearby woods.
Moments before the murders, Libby posted a photo of Abby on Snapchat showing her on the Monon High Bridge. After crossing the bridge, the girls saw a man behind them — who became known as “bridge guy” — and Libby started a recording on her phone, according to prosecutors.
As police looked for the suspect, they released footage from Libby’s phone to the public: a grainy image of “bridge guy” and an audio clip of him telling the girls to go “down the hill.”
Allen, a husband and father who worked at the local CVS, was arrested in 2022. He admitted to police he was on the trail that day, but he denied being involved in the crime.
The prosecution’s key physical evidence was a .40-caliber unspent round discovered by the girls’ bodies. Police analysis determined that unspent round was cycled through Allen’s Sig Sauer Model P226, prosecutors said.
Another major focus of the trial was Allen’s multiple confessions in jail and his mental health at the time. The defense argued Allen was in a psychotic state when he confessed numerous times to his psychologist, corrections officers and his wife.
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(NEW YORK) — During the final Mass at the All Saints Parish in Buffalo, New York, on a warm Sunday in July, the priests encouraged the few parishioners who came to take comfort in holy scripture.
“For everything, there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven,” the passage read.
On Earth, many parishes are accepting that it’s time to sell their properties. As the person leading renewal and development for the Diocese of Buffalo, Father Bryan Zielenieski is one of many religious leaders across America who have closed houses of worship in recent years.
“We essentially went to half of what we used to back in the early 2000s,” he told ABC News. “We lost about 100 parishes.”
Zielenieski expects he’ll need to shut down another 70 churches in what the Diocese is calling its “road to renewal.” It’s a very biblical name for the challenge facing churches: People just aren’t going as much as they used to.
On average, more than half of the diocese’s churches today are baptizing fewer than one person a month, and 59% of them are spending more than they take in, Zielenieski noted.
“It’s my job and role to not just pray about the situation, but to then look at the hard data and say, where does the church need to move?” he told ABC News.
In the late 1940s, nearly 80% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue, mosque or temple, according to Gallup. Today, just 45% say the same, the analytics company noted, and only 32% say that they worship God in a house of prayer once a week.
In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, America was losing as many as 1,000 churches a year.
Some former churches are being converted for businesses or residential use. One old Methodist church in Atlanta, which was down to about 60 members when it closed, was sold to a luxury real estate developer seven years ago. Now, it’s become a series of 3,000-square-foot condos.
Some of the oldest churches in the world have even turned into bars and nightclubs.
However, another Atlanta church is taking a different route. Pastor Jasmine Smothers is saving the city’s First United Methodist church from closing with what she says is a “God-sized” plan.
The most profitable thing they own is their land, and she’s using it to build more than 300 apartments in the high-rent city — most of which will become affordable housing.
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Pastor Jasmine Smothers says developing residential property on the church’s land will help them stay open. Via ABC News
“It’s literally going to change the landscape of Atlanta in more ways than one,” she told ABC News.
Smothers said the project will give the church the resources to help people and to continue its ministries.
“In the words of one of my friends, this ain’t your great grandma’s church,” she said.
At Calcium Church outside Syracuse, New York, Pastor Milton LaSalle recently acknowledged to his small-town church that, after 171 years, they’re in financial trouble. On a good Sunday, LaSalle has 35 regular members — most of them are in the sunset of their lives. The church hasn’t been forced to close or sell it’s land, the pastor says.
“The aging of the church here, of course, is seen all over America. That makes it harder in a lot of ways. For instance, we lost five of our members last year to death,” he told ABC News.
LaSalle said he’s confident Calcium Church will be able to stay open, but noted that they’ve had to make cutbacks.
They still hold clothing and school supply giveaways, parishioners told ABC News. Parishioner Jeannetta LaSalle expressed the importance of the church in her life, saying that her fellow churchgoers are like family.
“It gives me purpose to get up in the morning,” she told ABC News.
In Buffalo, Father Zielenieski also noted how people turn to the church for comfort in times of crisis, like in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
“There’s a sociological principle or idea out there that when times are good, people forget God,” he said. “When times are challenging, they go to God first.”
However, Zielenieski highlights the danger of taking the church for granted.
“We’ve never asked the question, how is it going to be there and how is that going to stay?” he said.
The sale of the All Saints Church in Buffalo will close in the coming weeks. The priests told ABC News they have language in the deal that prevents the new owners from turning it into a place that encourages people to sin.
(NEW YORK) — Thousands of Amazon workers at the company’s first-ever unionized warehouse voted to authorize a strike on Friday, claiming the tech giant has refused to recognize the union and negotiate a contract at the New York City facility.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union representing roughly 5,500 workers at the warehouse, said Amazon risks a strike if it does not begin negotiations by Sunday.
“Amazon is pushing its workers closer to the picket line by failing to show them the respect they have earned,” Teamsters President Sean O’Brien told ABC News in a statement. “If these white-collar criminals want to keep breaking the law, they better get ready for a fight.”
A strike authorization vote affords union leadership the ability to declare a work stoppage if deemed appropriate. But the vote does not guarantee that a strike will take place.
The headline-grabbing union victory at the Amazon facility in Staten Island, New York, in 2022, accelerated an upsurge of labor organizing that took hold nationwide during the pandemic.
After the union victory, however, Amazon filed objections with the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, seeking to overturn the outcome, including allegations that NLRB officials showed a favorable bias toward the workers and that union leaders bribed colleagues in an effort to win their support.
So far, those legal challenges by Amazon have failed to overturn the union win. Months after the victory, a hearing officer for the NLRB recommended that the vote should stand. Soon afterward, the NLRB officially certified the union representing workers at the facility, putting Amazon under a legal obligation to bargain in good faith. Amazon appealed the ruling.
Workers have alleged that the company’s legal challenge amounts to an illegal effort to delay contract negotiations.
Amazon did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment. In a previous statement to ABC News, Amazon Spokesperson Eileen Hards said the company respects workers’ right to unionize but it contests the results of the election at the Staten Island warehouse, also known as JFK8.
“Our employees have the choice of whether or not to join a union,” Hards said. “They always have.”
“We strongly disagree with the outcome, and as we showed throughout the JFK8 Objections Hearing with dozens of witnesses and hundreds of pages of documents, both the NLRB and the ALU improperly influenced the outcome of the election and we don’t believe it represents what the majority of our team wants,” she added.
Workers at the facility previously said a union contract should include minimum pay of $30 per hour and bolstered safety protections.
A delay is typical for a first union contract, but the passage of time in this case has extended beyond the norm.
The average length of time before a new union signs its first contract is 465 days, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis in 2022. Nearly 990 days have passed since Amazon workers in New York City voted to unionize the facility.
On Friday, the Teamsters said workers at a second facility in Queens had also voted to authorize a strike.
“Driving for Amazon is tough,” Luc Rene, a worker at the Queens facility, said in a statement. “What’s even tougher is fighting a mega-corporation that constantly breaks the law and games the system. But we won’t give up.”
