A Minnesota man has been charged with hacking into computer systems used by Major League Baseball and trying to extort the league for $150,000, the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York said Thursday.

In emails with an MLB executive, Joshua Streit, 30, threatened to publicize the vulnerability that he used to access the league's website for streaming live games before asking for $150,000 for finding the technology flaw, according to charging documents.

Streit allegedly renewed his extortion attempt in September, at a time of heightened scrutiny for the MLB as it was preparing for the playoffs. The news comes ahead of Game 3 of the World Series between the Houston Astros and Atlanta Braves.

A Twitter account listed in the criminal complaint as belonging to Streit did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. James Becker, an attorney listed for Streit in court records, did not respond to requests for comment.

The charges against Streit, who is also known as Josh Brody, include wire fraud, illegally hacking into a computer for the purposes of fraud and "sending interstate threats with the intent to extort." The maximum sentence for each individual charge ranges from two to 20 years in prison.

Streit is accused of illegally streaming copyrighted live games from the MLB, National Basketball Association, National Football League and the National Hockey League. To do that, prosecutors allege, Streit used stolen login credentials to access the sports' websites and stream live games to his own website for profit.

One of the sports leagues lost almost $3 million because of Streit's actions, the U.S. Attorney's office said in a press release.

A LinkedIn profile listed in the complaint as belonging to Streit describes him as a software engineer living in the Minneapolis area.

During an initial court appearance Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, a judge ordered "temporary detention" for Streit pending a Nov. 1 hearing, according to court documents.

A spokesperson for the MLB declined to comment. Neil Boland, the league's chief information security officer, did not respond to requests for comment.

The MLB is no stranger to cybersecurity-related scandals.

Christopher Correa, the former director of scouting for the St. Louis Cardinals, was sentenced to nearly four years in prison in 2016 for hacking into the Houston Astros' scouting records.

Major sports franchises had to invest in greater cybersecurity protections in recent years as cybercriminals have looked to extort sports teams as they do other big corporations.

Manchester United, one of the wealthiest soccer clubs in the world, blamed "organized cybercriminals" last year for a breach that hampered the club's computer systems for days.

WASHINGTON —

Federal officials say they will allow operators to fly small drones over people and at night, potentially giving a boost to commercial use of the machines.

Most drones will need to be equipped so they can be identified remotely by law enforcement officials.

The final rules announced Monday by the Federal Aviation Administration “get us closer to the day when we will more routinely see drone operations such as the delivery of packages,” said FAA Administrator Stephen Dickson.

Drones are the fastest-growing segment in all of transportation, with more than 1.7 million under registration, according to the Transportation Department.

However, the widespread commercial use of the machines has developed far more slowly than many advocates expected. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos once predicted that his company would use drones to deliver goods to customers’ doorsteps within five years, but that prediction is already off by two years.

There have been several tests and limited uses. United Parcel Service said last year that it received approval to operate a nationwide fleet of drones and has already made hundreds of deliveries on a hospital campus in North Carolina.

Also last year, Google sister company Wing Aviation won FAA approval for commercial drone flights in a corner of Virginia.

And this past August, Amazon got similar FAA approval to deliver packages by drones. The company is still testing the service and hasn’t said when shoppers will see deliveries.

For drone supporters impatient with the pace of adoption, regulatory hurdles are a leading complaint. Currently, operators who want to fly a drone over people or at night need a waiver from the FAA.

The new rules will require that drones used at night include flashing lights that can be seen up to three miles away. Operators will need special training. Small drones flying over people cannot have rotating parts capable of cutting skin.

The rules covering flights over people and at night will take effect in about two months. They finalize proposed rules issued last year.

Related video: 2 arrested after drone crashes into prison

All drones that must be registered with the FAA will be required to have equipment that broadcasts their identification, location and control station or be operated at FAA-recognized areas. So-called remote ID was a requirement impose by Congress at the urging of national security and law enforcement agencies.

Drone manufacturers will have 18 months to begin making drones with remote ID, and operators will have one year after that to start using drones with remote ID.

Americans are no stranger to shortages. During WWII, coffee, butter, and canned milk were in short supply. In the 70s, it was gasoline. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, we all faced a shortage of toilet paper.

Now, as life is slowly getting back to normal, we still face a few post-pandemic-related shortages. As if COVID-19 wasn’t bad enough, computer hackings and deep freezes hampered a rebound in the supply chain.

This summer, consumers can expect to pay more for gas, chicken wings, sausages, and bacon.

Washington University Professor Panos Kouvelis is an expert at supply chain management. He says many of these shortages will be short-lived.

“Because, I think, we understand where the shortage is coming from, and I don't think that the reasons that caused it in the first place are going to persist,” Kouvelis explained.

The short-term shortages are also a result of the Texas deep freeze and recent cyberattacks. None of these shortages are expected to last through the summer.

There’s a chicken wing and sausage shortage, but that’s due to increased demand. Kouvelis says there are only four or five companies that drive the whole industry, and there's not a lot of capacity.

Consumers can also expect to pay dearly for that summer vacation this year. Rental cars are still incredibly hard to come by, with some customers are paying hundreds of dollars a day.

“The car manufacturers, definitely, if they start producing cars, they're not going to make the cars for rental companies because that's not the high margins for them,” Kouvelis explained.

That shortage is predicted to last past the summer, potentially a year, thanks to a chip shortage.

Kouvelis adds chip manufacturers had plenty of inventory back in March of 2020. However, cars weren’t selling, so automakers lowered their chip orders.

“The computers and the consumer electronics were selling very well during the pandemic, so they absorbed most of the capacity of the chip manufacturers. When the car companies went back and tried to increase their orders when they started seeing the demand coming back by last summer.”

Kouvelis says by then, the chip companies had already distributed beyond capacity.

Are you looking for new appliances or furniture? How does six months sound? Experts say it has nothing to do with making the appliances. It has everything to do with shipping those appliances from China.

And you might not want to even consider remodeling right now. Lumber mills are dealing with labor issues and capacity constraints. In 2019, an 8-ft 2X4 would run you about $3. Now, you’ll pay $8.25.

So, how about goods like toilet paper, dog food, and diapers? They all have made recent shortage lists.

Kouvelis blames social media for those. He says freaking out doesn’t make it any easier and asks that everyone stop hoarding goods.

Kouvelis expects supply will be back to normal by 2022. However, he warns about any small disruption or virus surge could impact supply. His advice? Prepare yourself for what could be coming down the shortage supply train tracks. Right now, we’re on course, but it doesn’t take much for a derailment.

WASHINGTON —

The Biden administration is preparing to announce sanctions in response to a massive Russian hacking campaign that breached vital federal agencies, as well as for election interference, a senior administration official said Wednesday night.

The sanctions, foreshadowed for weeks by the administration, would represent the first retaliatory action announced against the Kremlin for last year's hack, familiarly known as the SolarWinds breach. In that intrusion, Russian hackers are believed to have infected widely used software with malicious code that enabled them to access the networks of at least nine agencies, part of what U.S. officials believe was an operation aimed at mining the secrets of the American government.

The measures are to be announced Thursday, according to the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

It was not immediately clear what, if any, other actions might be planned. Officials had previously said they expected to take actions both seen and unseen.

Related video: Suspected Russian Hackers Stole Thousands of State Department Emails

The measures are intended to send a clear retributive message to Russia and to deter similar acts in the future. They come amid an already tense relationship between the U.S. and Russia, with President Joe Biden telling Russian President Vladimir Putin this week that the U.S. would "act firmly in defense of its national interests" regarding Russian intrusions and election interference. But it remained unclear whether the actions would actually result in changed behavior, especially since past measures by the U.S. have failed to bring an end to Russian hacking.

U.S. officials are still grappling with the aftereffects of the SolarWinds intrusion, which affected agencies including the Treasury, Justice, Energy and Homeland Security departments, and are still assessing what information may have been stolen. The breach exposed vulnerabilities in the supply chain as well as weaknesses in the federal government's own cyber defenses.

The actions would represent the second major round of sanctions imposed by the Biden administration against Russia. Last month, the U.S. sanctioned seven mid-level and senior Russian officials, along with more than a dozen government entities, over a nearly fatal nerve-agent attack on opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his subsequent jailing.

Video above: Biden to confer with Europe allies, confront Putin

Set to embark on the first overseas trip of his term, President Joe Biden is eager to reassert the United States on the world stage, steadying European allies deeply shaken by his predecessor and pushing democracy as the only bulwark to rising forces of authoritarianism.

Biden has set the stakes for his eight-day trip in sweeping terms, believing that the West must publicly demonstrate it can compete economically with China as the world emerges from the coronavirus pandemic.

Building toward his trip-ending summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Biden will aim to reassure European capitals that the United States can once again be counted on as a dependable partner to thwart Moscow’s aggression both on their eastern front and their internet battlefields.

The trip will be far more about messaging than specific actions or deals. And the paramount priority for Biden, who leaves Wednesday for his first stop in the United Kingdom, is to convince the world that his administration is not just a fleeting deviation in the trajectory of an American foreign policy that many allies fear irrevocably drifted toward a more transactional outlook under former President Donald Trump.

“The trip, at its core, will advance the fundamental thrust of Joe Biden’s foreign policy,” said national security adviser Jake Sullivan, “to rally the world’s democracies to tackle the great challenges of our time.”

Biden’s to-do list is ambitious.

In their face-to-face sit-down in Geneva, Biden wants to privately pressure Putin to end myriad provocations, including cybersecurity attacks on American businesses by Russian-based hackers, the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and repeated overt and covert efforts by the Kremlin to interfere in U.S. elections.

Biden is also looking to rally allies on their COVID-19 response and to urge them to coalesce around a strategy to check emerging economic and national security competitor China even as the U.S. expresses concern about Europe's economic links to Moscow. Biden also wants to nudge outlying allies, including Australia, to make more aggressive commitments to the worldwide effort to curb global warming.

The week-plus journey is a big moment for Biden, who traveled the world for decades as vice president and as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and will now step off Air Force One on international soil as commander in chief. He will face world leaders still grappling with the virus and rattled by four years of Trump’s inward-looking foreign policy and moves that strained longtime alliances as the former president made overtures to strongmen.

“In this moment of global uncertainty, as the world still grapples with a once-in-a-century pandemic,” Biden wrote in a Washington Post op-ed previewing his diplomatic efforts, “this trip is about realizing America’s renewed commitment to our allies and partners, and demonstrating the capacity of democracies to both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age."

The president first travels to Britain for a summit of the Group of Seven leaders and then Brussels for a NATO summit and a meeting with the heads of the European Union. It comes at a moment when Europeans have diminished expectations for what they can expect of U.S. leadership on the foreign stage.

Central and Eastern Europeans are desperately hoping to bind the U.S. more tightly to their security. Germany is looking to see the U.S. troop presence maintained there so it doesn’t need to build up its own. France, meanwhile, has taken the tack that the U.S. can’t be trusted as it once was and that the European Union must pursue greater strategic autonomy going forward.

“I think the concern is real that the Trumpian tendencies in the U.S. could return full bore in the midterms or in the next presidential election,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. diplomat and once deputy secretary general of NATO.

The sequencing of the trip is deliberate: Biden consulting with Western European allies for much of a week as a show of unity before his summit with Putin.

His first stop late Wednesday will be an address to U.S. troops stationed in Britain, and the next day he sits down with British Prime Minster Boris Johnson. The two men will meet a day ahead of the G-7 summit to be held above the craggy cliffs of Cornwall overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

The most tactile of politicians, Biden has grown frustrated by the diplomacy-via-Zoom dynamics of the pandemic and has relished the ability to again have face-to-face meetings that allow him to size up and connect with world leaders. While Biden himself is a veteran statesman, many of the world leaders he will see in England, including Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron, took office after Biden left the vice presidency. Another, Germany’s Angela Merkel, will leave office later this year.

There are several potential areas of tension. On climate change, the U.S. is aiming to regain its credibility after Trump pulled the country back from the fight against global warming. Biden could also feel pressure on trade, an issue to which he's yet to give much attention. And with the United States well supplied with COVID-19 vaccines yet struggling to persuade some of its own citizens to use it, leaders whose inoculation campaigns have been slower will surely pressure Biden to share more surplus around the globe.

Another central focus will be China. Biden and the other G-7 leaders will announce an infrastructure financing program for developing countries that is meant to compete directly with Beijing’s Belt-and-Road Initiative. But not every European power has viewed China in as harsh a light as Biden, who has painted the rivalry with the techno-security state as the defining competition for the 21st century.

The European Union has avoided taking as strong a stance on Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s democracy movement or treatment of Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang province as the Biden administration may like. But there are signs that Europe is willing to put greater scrutiny on Beijing.

The EU in March announced sanctions targeting four Chinese officials involved with human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Beijing, in turn, responded by imposing sanctions on several members of the European Parliament and other Europeans critical of the Chinese Communist Party.

Biden is also scheduled to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan while in Brussels, a face-to-face meeting between two leaders who have had many fraught moments in their relationship over the years.

Biden waited until April to call Erdogan for the first time as president. In that call, he informed the Turkish leader that he would formally recognize that the systematic killings and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Empire forces in the early 20th century were “genocide” — using a term for the atrocities that his White House predecessors had avoided for decades over concerns of alienating Turkey.

The trip finale will be Biden's meeting with Putin.

Biden has taken a very different approach to Russia than Trump's friendly outreach. Their sole summit, held in July 2018 in Helsinki, was marked by Trump’s refusal to side with U.S. intelligence agencies over Putin’s denials of Russian interference in the election two years earlier.

Biden could well be challenged by unrest at home as Russia looks to exploit the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and the debate over voting rights to undermine the U.S. position as a global role model. The American president, in turn, is expected to push Russia to quell its global meddling.

“By and large, these are not meetings on outcomes, these are 'get to know you again' meetings for the U.S. and Europe,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “It's about delivering a message to Putin, to reviving old alliances and to demonstrate again that the U.S. is back on the right course.”

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.