Beijing Capital International Airport is operating normally on Friday despite a global IT outage, a Sputnik correspondent reports

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❗️ Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) lost up to 13,075 militants over the past week.

🇷🇺🪖 More statements from the Russian Defense Ministry’s weekly briefing on the progress of the special military operation in Ukraine:

◻️ The Russian air defense system shot down three Ukrainian MiG-29 aircraft and 305 drones.

◻️ Since the beginning of the SMO, Kiev has lost 630 aircraft.

◻️ The Russian Battlegroup Dnepr hit seven Ukrainian brigades, resulting in up to 715 militant casualties.

◻️ The Russian Battlegroup Sever repelled 23 counterattacks, with UAF losses amounting to up to 1,370 militants and five tanks.

◻️ The Russian Battlegroup Yug destroyed ten electronic warfare stations and 24 field ammunition depots of the UAF.

◻️ Ten Ukrainian unmanned boats were destroyed.

◻️ Russian forces carried out 11 strikes and drone attacks on Ukrainian airbases, air defense systems, and energy facilities.

◻️ The Russian Battlegroup Vostok liberated Urozhaynoye and repelled five UAF counterattacks, with enemy losses reaching up to 925 militants.

◻️ The Russian Battlegroup Zapad hit nine enemy brigades, resulting in UAF losses of up to 3,920 militants.

◻️ UAF lost up to 2,215 militants, 11 combat armored vehicles including Bradley and MaxxPro, in the Russian Battlegroup Tsentr's combat zone.

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Independent war correspondent and Chinese blogger Zhu Haozheng went to the front lines of Donbass, where he visited a training camp and spoke with volunteers from the international brigade "Pyatnashka."

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‘PR Nightmare’: CrowdStrike IT outage exposes risks of putting all cybersecurity eggs in one basket

"The PR aspect is, of course, a nightmare for CrowdStrike. Their stock tanked over 10% after the incident made global headlines," veteran independent cybersecurity expert Lars Hilse told Sputnik, commenting on the global IT infrastructure mess created by a faulty update to the US cybersecurity giant’s software. 

How will today's attack affect the company's revenues?

◻️ CrowdStrike continued its slide in shares throughout the day, falling as much as 20 percent in pre-market trading, and settling at $286 a share, or about 17% down, before the start of trading on Friday. 

◻️ Microsoft saw its own stock price tank slightly, from about $440 a share late Thursday, to about $435 a share, down 1.8% in pre-market trading on Friday.  

◻️ As CrowdStrike saw its stock tumble, other cybersecurity vendors benefited, likely on the back of investors betting that businesses may turn away from CrowdStrike and flock to competing firms: Fortinet cybersecurity company’s shares climbed 1.6%, shares of Palo Alto rose 1.3%, while those of Zscaler and Cloudflare were both up around 1% in pre-market trading. 

◻️ Analysts have also raised questions over CrowdStrike’s value — the company was worth $83.5 billion as of Thursday’s close. Nina Marques, an analyst at Redburn Atlantic, said that the firm faces challenges in competing with other cyber firms in the market, CNBC reported.

The main 'lesson' from the mess, will be heightening testing requirements for cybersecurity firms, prior to their update roll-outs, Hilse concluded.

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The UN Court considers Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories as de facto annexation, stated a judge.

The court also declared that Israel's settlement activities violate international law.

The UN Court believes that Israel must end its unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory as soon as possible and pay reparations for the damages.

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Meet Astra, the Russian airline booking system that proved immune to global IT outage

Russia’s critical infrastructure hasn’t been affected by the global IT collapse triggered by a critical flaw in an update to CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software. Russia’s resilience has been attributed to the fact that the country uses homegrown cybersecurity tools, and Russian-made software for critical infrastructure applications.

Among the latter is Astra – the Russian automated system for processing passengers and baggage at airports. Here’s what we know about it.

◻️ Used by major Russian airports including Moscow’s Domodedovo and Sheremetyevo, and airports abroad in countries including Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, Astra is a widespread registration system developed by Russian technology provider Sirena-Travel.

◻️ The system is used to register up to six million passengers monthly. The ‘Departure Control System’ (DCS) provides for passenger and baggage check-in, schedule maintenance, the monitoring of the implementation of daily flight plans, interaction between passport and border control services, and dynamic monitoring of the weight loads of commercial flights.

◻️ Astra is compliant with the standards and requirements of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), a trade association representing over 80% of global air traffic, and supports all types of standard messages between other registration and booking systems. The system is bilingual (Russian and English), and training to use it can be completed in two days.

◻️ The software comes with standard support for various peripherals, including printers, scanners and weighing machines, and is compatible with the Russian security services’ ‘Magistral’ online passport and control service tool.

In the wake of Friday’s global airline booking system collapse, a representative from Domodedovo Airport said the airport was prepared to provide Astra to other airports as a backup registration system.

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When they told you that you don't need to run for president

Biden may announce his exit from the race this weekend, according to media reports.

Come up with your own caption for this video! Let's go!

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🇷🇺🇻🇳 Russian President Vladimir Putin offered condolences to his Vietnamese counterpart, To Lam, over the death of Nguyen Phu Trong, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam’s Central Committee, the Kremlin said.

Last month, Vladimir Putin and Nguyen Phu Trong met during the Russian President's visit to Vietnam.

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Elon Musk announced that the social network X has removed Crowdstrike software from all its systems. This decision comes after a recent update of the software caused a global Windows outage.

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A backup Air India flight has picked up the passengers of the flight that made an emergency landing in Krasnoyarsk a day ago and has now departed for San Francisco, airport officials told Sputnik.

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Former Ukrainian MP Iryna Farion, known for her controversial anti-Russian remarks, has sustained a gunshot wound in Lvov. Her condition is reported to be serious, according to Ukrainian media.

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CrowdStrike’s history of hijinks: the cybersecurity firm’s shady connections

A massive IT outage resulting from a faulty code update to CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software has afflicted infrastructure worldwide. Here are a few cases from CrowdStrike’s controversial and politicized past:

1️⃣ During the 2016 US election, the Clinton campaign asked none other than CrowdStrike for help investigating the hack attack against the Democratic National Committee – which had revealed embarrassing info about the party’s effort to rig the nomination process in Clinton’s favor.

◻️ CrowdStrike’s probe gave rise to the claim that Russia was behind the DNC hack, and the company provided its “forensic evidence and analysis” to the FBI, starting the ball rolling on the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

◻️ CrowdStrike executive Shawn Henry admitted under oath in 2017 that the company had no “concrete evidence” to back up its “Russian hackers” story.

2️⃣ CrowdStrike’s name also came up in the infamous 2019 phone call between then-President Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, with Trump asking him to “do us a favor” and “find out what happened” with CrowdStrike’s server, which Trump said was in Ukraine.

◻️ The Trump team was convinced CrowdStrike planted evidence on the DNC server to frame Russia while covering up Ukraine’s own efforts to “weaken the Trump bandwagon” during the 2016 election.

◻️ The Trump-Zelensky phone call, in which he also asked Kiev to look into Joe Biden’s role in firing of a prosecutor probing his son’s alleged corruption, sparked the first Trump impeachment.

3️⃣CrowdStrike was one a handful of firms tapped by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2021 to work out a ‘whole-of-nation’ cyber defense plan.

◻️ The same year, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz blamed Russian hackers for the 2020 SolarWinds hack attack on the US Federal Government, but admitted the company had no information of its own “to corroborate that finding.”

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Houthis’ long arm: what we know about militia’s drone fleet

The Houthis dramatically expanded their campaign against Israel Friday morning, flying a large explosive-laden drone into downtown Tel Aviv and slamming it into a building 100 m from the US Consulate. Here’s what we know about the Yemeni militia’s drone potential:

◻️ The Houthis say the Yafa, a mysterious new ultra long-range airplane-style drone with radar-evading capabilities, carried out Friday’s attack.

◻️ Analysts studying footage of the drone’s approach say it looks similar to the Samad-3 – a Houthi drone that’s 2.8 m long, has a 4.5 m wingspan, a 1,500-1,800 km range and a 250 km/h top speed.

◻️ The Samad series is actually a whole lineup of UAVs, from the Samad-1 – a surveillance drone with a 3.5 m wingspan and 500 km range, to the Samad-4 – which can carry twin unguided bombs on hard points under its wings. The latter is about 3 m long, has a 5 m wingspan, a 2,000 km+ range, and a 50 kg payload.

◻️ The Houthis also operate Qasef-1 and Qasef-2K kamikaze drones – simple, low-cost UAVs thought to have taken design cues from the HESA Ababil and featuring a 30 kg warhead. Qasef series drones are roughly 3 m long, have a 3.25 m wingspan, and a 100 km+ range. They’re complemented by the Wa’aed, another Houthi loitering munition with characteristics similar to those of the Shahed 136 drone (3.5 m long, 2.5 m wingspan, 200 kg mass, 50 kg warhead and top speed up to 185 km/h).

◻️ The militia rolled out the Khatif-1, a small tele-guided strike drone with an estimated 10 kg payload and a range of a few dozen km in 2021. An upgrade featuring an x-shaped tail instead of the normal ‘v’ was spotted in 2022, but its characteristics are unknown.

◻️ The Houthis also operate the Mersad-1 and Mersad-2 series of surveillance drones – thought to be based on a reverse-engineered Boeing RQ-21s Blackjack –a 2.5 m long, 37-61 kg UAV with a 4.9 m wingspan, 93 km range and top speed of 170 km/h.

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🇩🇪 Adidas apologizes for sneaker ad featuring Palestinian model Bella Hadid

The brand released sneakers to commemorate the 1972 Olympics held in Munich. During those games, the Palestinian terrorist group "Black September" carried out an attack, killing 11 members of the Israeli team and a local police officer.

"We apologize for the distress and concern caused. In light of this, we are reviewing the remainder of the campaign. We believe in the unifying power of sports worldwide and will continue our efforts to support diversity and equality in everything we do," the company stated.

According to media reports, all promotional photos featuring Hadid with the retro sneakers have been removed from social media. Bella Hadid has yet to comment on the statement.

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Scott Ritter: deployment of US missiles in Germany is an ‘extraordinarily destabilizing development’, ‘Russia will respond’

The decision do deploy surface-to-air, surface-to-surface, cruise, and hypersonic-capable US missiles in Germany is an irresponsible escalation that, unless it's reversed, can only lead to very tragic conclusions, former US marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter told Sputnik.

“This is an extraordinarily destabilizing development, and Russia has said it will respond. The specifics of a Russian response aren't known, but Russia did stop development or stop deployment of an intermediate-capable system, the RS-26, back in 2017. And it's believed that Russia could bring this system back into operation and deploy it in short order,” he said.

The three systems in question are the SM-6 Typhoon missile, a variation of the Tomahawk Sea Launched Cruise missile, and the hypersonic-capable Dark Eagle missile system.

“One mistake, one miscalculation, one misjudgment could lead to a situation where these missiles are fired in anger, and this would lead to the potential of a general nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia,” Ritter pointed out.

The move to deploy such systems in Europe is one of the most dangerous decisions made by the US and NATO in “a season of dangerous decisions”, he noted.

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Russian missiles off Alaska? How Moscow can respond to US long-range weapons’ deployment in Europe

Moscow has an array of options at its disposal when it comes to responding to US plans to place offensive Tomahawk and hypersonic missiles in Germany, says Swedish Armed Forces veteran and political and military observer Mikael Valtersson.

“This move by the US and Germany will of course be met by a Russian response,” Valtersson told Sputnik, saying he believes Russia may start off by deploying “new dual-use missiles in the Kaliningrad region and maybe also in Belarus.”

This may be followed up by the placement of Russian strategic missiles in the recently reestablished Moscow and Leningrad military districts, according to the observer. “By doing this, Russia lessens the time NATO has to detect and respond to a Russian launch of medium-range missiles,” Valtersson said of this aspect of the potential tit-for-tat response.

“Other options would be to deploy new missiles in the Far East and make Alaska and maybe the western coast of the US a target for Russian [intermediate-range] missiles,” Valtersson said. Another possibility still includes “deploy[ing] medium-range missiles south of Europe...and near the US,” if an agreement could be reached with one or more countries in North Africa or the Caribbean.

One more “obvious” potential step for Moscow would be to “make Germany a much more important target for Russian missiles in the future,” the Swedish defense observer believes, pointing out that this was “a fact several German parties raised” when they stepped out in opposition to the scheduled US missile deployment.

Whatever Russia ends up doing, “a big risk” stemming from the American move, and the consequent Russian response, arises from reduced reaction time, which increases stress and tension and increases the risks of either side making a “hasty decision,” Valtersson warned.

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