A Maryland teenager wants to inspire more girls to study computer science.Grace Brehm, 17, has had a knack for technology and computer science from a young age. She even wrote a book that was released in early July to educate more teens about the field."I think it was just mostly my dad being an engineer, and he was always talking to us about, like, circuits and I was always wondering how things work," Brehm said.She took that interest with her to Notre Dame Preparatory School and joined the cybersecurity club in her freshman and sophomore years, but she was disappointed in the turnout."Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of interest in the club at my school even though there are, like, 600 students that can join the club — only about 10 or 15 students are actually in the club," Brehm said.Just down the road at the all-boys Loyola Blakefield, Brehm said the cybersecurity club is one of the biggest of its kind in the area."It has more than 100 students involved, which was really a big change from NDP's only 10 students," Brehm said.So, in junior year, Brehm joined Loyola's club and became the only girl on the team. She made it her mission to find out why more girls weren't interested in computer science."There just aren't a lot of resources that are aimed towards women. Like, textbooks usually use more stereotypical males, colors are black and red and black and blue, and there are just not a lot of female role models in the field, which is really unfortunate," Brehm said. So, she set out to change that. The teen wrote and published the book "An Introduction to Computer Science for Young People," which shares some basics about the field."On the cover of the book, I chose colors that are both stereotypically male and female -- so, red, blue, purple — and things to try to get everyone involved. I also chose to include the stories of some really important female leaders," Brehm said. "I hope it is definitely going to inspire a lot of people, and hopefully girls, to join the field, and hopefully, they will see me and think that they can do something and that they can make a change." Watch the video above for the full story.

The publisher of the Wall Street Journal said Friday it believes it was hacked by Chinese intelligence.

The breach was discovered on January 20.

News Corp said data was stolen from journalists and other employees.

It is not known when hackers breached the network or how much data they stole.

The breach affected a limited number of email accounts and documents from News Corp headquarters, News Technology Services, Dow Jones, News UK and New York Post.

News Corp told employees in an email to staff that it believed the “threat activity is contained.”

Other newsrooms, including The New York Times have previously been hacked.

Journalists in Mexico, El Salvador and Qatar have also been hacked with spyware.

News Corp also owns HarperCollins, News Corp Australia and Storyful.

It does not appear employees at those companies were affected by the hack.

BOSTON —

The single biggest global ransomware attack yet continued to bite Monday as details emerged on how the Russia-linked gang responsible breached the company whose software was the conduit. In essence, the criminals used a tool that helps protect against malware to spread it widely.

An affiliate of the notorious REvil gang, best known for extorting $11 million from the meat-processor JBS after a Memorial Day attack, infected thousands of victims in at least 17 countries on Friday, largely through firms that remotely manage IT infrastructure for multiple customers, cybersecurity researchers said.

REvil was demanding ransoms of up to $5 million. But late Sunday it offered in a posting on its dark web site a universal decryptor software key that would unscramble all affected machines in exchange for $70 million in cryptocurrency. It wasn't clear who they expected might pay that amount.

Sweden may have been hardest hit by the attack — or at least most transparent about it. Its defense minister, Peter Hultqvist, bemoaned on Monday "a serious attack on basic functions in Swedish society."

"It shows how fragile the system is when it comes to IT security and that you must constantly work to develop your ability to defend yourself," he said in a TV interview. Most of the Swedish grocery chain Coop's 800 stores were closed all weekend because their cash register software supplier was crippled. They remained closed Monday. A Swedish pharmacy chain, gas station chain, the state railway and public broadcaster SVT were also hit.

A broad array of businesses and public agencies were affected, including in financial services, travel and leisure and the public sector — though few large companies, the cybersecurity firm Sophos reported. The cybersecurity firm ESET identified victims in countries including the United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia, New Zealand and Kenya.

Ransomware criminals infiltrate networks and sow malware that cripples them by scrambling all their data. Victims get a decoder key when they pay up.

In Germany, an unnamed IT services company told authorities several thousand of its customers were compromised, the news agency dpa reported. Also among reported victims were two big Dutch IT services companies — VelzArt and Hoppenbrouwer Techniek. Most ransomware victims don't publicly report attacks or disclose if they've paid ransoms.

On Sunday, the FBI said in a statement that while it was investigating the attack, its scale "may make it so that we are unable to respond to each victim individually." Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger later issued a statement saying President Joe Biden had "directed the full resources of the government to investigate this incident" and urged all who believed they were compromised to alert the FBI.

Biden suggested Saturday the U.S. would respond if it was determined that the Kremlin is at all involved. Less than a month ago, Biden pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop giving safe haven to REvil and other ransomware gangs whose unrelenting extortionary attacks the U.S. deems a national security threat.

On Monday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked if Russia was aware of the attack or had looked into it. He said no, but suggested it could be discussed by the U.S. and Russia in consultations on cybersecurity issues for which no timeline has been specified.

Experts say it was no coincidence that REvil launched the attack at the start of the Fourth of July holiday weekend, knowing U.S. offices would be lightly staffed and many victims might not learn of it until back at work Monday or Tuesday.

Most end users of managed service providers "have no idea" whose software keep their networks humming, said CEO Fred Voccola of the breached software company, Kaseya.

He estimated the victim number in the low thousands, mostly small businesses like "dental practices, architecture firms, plastic surgery centers, libraries, things like that."

Voccola said only between 50-60 of the company's 37,000 customers were compromised. But 70% were managed service providers who use the company's hacked VSA software to manage multiple customers. It automates the installation of software and malware-detection updates and manages backups and other vital tasks.

Kaseya said it sent a detection tool to nearly 900 customers on Saturday night.

The REvil offer to offer blanket decryption for all victims of the Kaseya attack in exchange for $70 million suggested its inability to cope with the sheer quantity of infected networks, said Allan Liska, an analyst with the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

But Kevin Reed of Acronis said the offer of a universal decryptor could be a PR stunt because no human involvement would be needed to pay a $45,000 base ransom demand apparently sent to the vast majority of targets. Analysts reported seeing demands of $5 million and $500,000 for bigger targets, which would require negotiation.

Analyst Brett Callow of Emsisoft said he suspects REvil is hoping insurers might crunch the numbers and determine the $70 million will be cheaper for them than extended downtime.

Sophisticated ransomware gangs on REvil's level usually examine a victim's financial records — and insurance policies if they can find them — from files they steal before activating the ransomware. The criminals then threaten to dump the stolen data online unless paid, although that does not appear to have happened in this case. But this attack was apparently bare-bones. REvil seems only to have scrambled victims' data.

Dutch researchers said they alerted Miami-based Kaseya to the breach and said the criminals used a "zero day," the industry term for a previous unknown security hole in software. Voccola would not confirm that or offer details of the breach — except to say that it was not phishing.

"The level of sophistication here was extraordinary," he said.

It was not the first ransomware attack to leverage managed services providers. In 2019, criminals hobbled the networks of 22 Texas municipalities through one. That same year, 400 U.S. dental practices were crippled in a separate attack.

Active since April 2019, REvil provides ransomware-as-a-service, meaning it develops the network-paralyzing software and leases it to so-called affiliates who infect targets and earn the lion's share of ransoms. U.S. officials say the most potent ransomware gangs are based in Russia and allied states and operate with Kremlin tolerance and sometimes collude with Russian security services.

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AP reporters Jim Heintz in Moscow, Jan Olsen in Stockholm, Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin, Jari Tanner in Helsinki and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.

The world's largest meat processing company has resumed most production after a weekend cyberattack, but experts say the vulnerabilities exposed by this attack and others are far from resolved.

In a statement late Wednesday, the FBI attributed the attack on Brazil-based meat processor JBS SA to REvil, also known as Sodinokibi, a Russian-speaking gang that has made some of the largest ransomware demands on record in recent months. The FBI said it will work to bring the group to justice and it urged anyone who is the victim of a cyberattack to contact the bureau immediately.

President Joe Biden will talk with Russia's president about the cyberattack.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday the JBS hack was expected to be discussed at a mid-June summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

She was also asked how the U.S. could respond to this attack.

"We are not taking any options off the table in terms of how we may respond," Psaki said. "But, of course, there is an internal policy review process to consider that. We are in direct touch with the Russians as well to convey our concerns about these reports."

REvil has not posted anything related to the hack on its dark web site. But that's not unusual. Ransomware syndicates as a rule don't post about attacks when they are in initial negotiations with victims — or if the victims have paid a ransom.

In October, a REvil representative who goes by the handle "UNKN" said in an interview published online that the agriculture sector would now be a main target for the syndicate. REvil also threatened to auction off sensitive stolen data from victims who refused to pay it.

The attack targeted servers supporting JBS's operations in North America and Australia. Backup servers weren't affected and the company said it was not aware of any customer, supplier or employee data being compromised.

JBS said late Tuesday that it had made "significant progress" and expected the "vast majority" of its plants to be operating Wednesday.

It is not known if JBS paid a ransom. The company hasn't discussed it in public statements, and did not respond to phone and email messages Wednesday seeking comment.

The FBI and the White House declined to comment on the ransom. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday the U.S. is considering all options in dealing with the attack.

"I can assure you that we are raising this through the highest levels of the U.S. government," she said.

Ransomware expert Allan Liska of the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future said JBS was the largest food manufacturer yet to be attacked. But he said at least 40 food companies have been targeted by hackers over the last year, including brewer Molson Coors and E & J Gallo Winery.

Food companies, Liska said, are at "about the same level of security as manufacturing and shipping. Which is to say, not very."

The attack was the second in a month on critical U.S. infrastructure. Earlier in May, hackers shut down operation of the Colonial Pipeline, the largest U.S. fuel pipeline, for nearly a week. The closure sparked long lines and panic buying at gas stations across the Southeast. Colonial Pipeline confirmed it paid $4.4 million to the hackers.

Cybersecurity experts said the attacks targeting critical sectors of the U.S. economy are evidence that industry hasn't been taking years of repeated warnings seriously.

Cybercriminals previously active in online ID theft and bank fraud moved into ransomware in the mid-2010s as programmers developed sophisticated programs that permitted the software's more efficient dissemination.

The ransomware scourge reached epidemic dimensions last year. The firm CrowdStrike observed over 1,400 ransomware and data extortion incidents in 2020. Most targeted manufacturing, industrials, engineering and technology companies, said Adam Meyers, the company's vice president of intelligence.

"The problem has been spiraling out of control," said John Hultquist, who heads intelligence analysis at FireEye. "We're already deep into a vicious cycle."

Hultquist said ransomware syndicates are going after more critical and visible targets because they've invested heavily in identifying "whales" - companies they think will yield big ransoms.

JBS is the second-largest producer of beef, pork and chicken in the U.S. If it were to shut down for even one day, the U.S. would lose almost a quarter of its beef-processing capacity, or the equivalent of 20,000 beef cows, according to Trey Malone, an assistant professor of agriculture at Michigan State University.

Mark Jordan, who follows the meat industry as the executive director of Leap Market Analytics, said the disruption to the food supply will likely be minimal in this case. Meat has around a 14-day window to move through the market, he said. If a plant is closed for a day or two, companies can usually make up for lost production with extra shifts.

"Several plants owned by a major meatpacker going offline for a couple of days is a major headache, but it is manageable assuming it doesn't extend much beyond that," he said.

Jordan said a closure that runs closer to a week would be more serious, especially for a company like JBS, which controls around one-fifth of the country's beef, pork and chicken supply.

Critical U.S. infrastructure might be better hardened against ransomware attacks were it not for the 2012 defeat of legislation that would have set cybersecurity standards for critical industries.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups lobbied hard against the bill, condemning it as government interference in the free market. Even a watered-down version that would have made the standards voluntary was blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

Right now, the U.S. has no cybersecurity requirements for companies outside of the electric, nuclear and banking systems, said David White, president of the cyber risk management company Axio.

White said regulations would help, particularly for companies with inadequate or immature cybersecurity programs. Those rules should be sector-specific and should consider the national economic risks of outages, he said.

But he said regulations can also have an unintentional negative effect. Some companies might consider them the ceiling — not the starting point — for how they need to manage risk, he said.

"Bottom line: regulation can help, but it is not the panacea,"' White said.

JBS plants in Australia resumed limited operations Wednesday in New South Wales and Victoria states, Agriculture Minister David Littleproud said. The company hoped to resume work in Queensland state on Thursday, he said.

JBS, which is a majority shareholder of Pilgrim's Pride, didn't say which of its 84 U.S. facilities were closed Monday and Tuesday because of the attack. It said JBS USA and Pilgrim's were able to ship meat from nearly all facilities Tuesday. Several of the company's pork, poultry and prepared foods plants were operational Tuesday and its Canada beef facility resumed production, it said.

The plant closures reflect the reality that modern meat processing is heavily automated, for both food- and worker-safety reasons. Computers collect data at multiple stages of the production process; orders, billing, shipping and other functions are all electronic.

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Bajak reported from Boston. AP Writers Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia; Alan Suderman in Richmond, Virginia; and Nancy Benac, Eric Tucker and Alexandra Jaffe in Washington contributed to this report.