Pornographic website Pornhub is adding Florida to the list of states it will block starting next year. Gizmodo reported that Floridians who recently visited the porn website were given a warning saying “you will lose access to Pornhub in 14 days” because of the state’s new law that requires ID to access the website.
Pornhub has already blocked several states from accessing its sexually explicit content because of new state laws that require visitors to provide a valid government ID to verify their age for access. Florida’s legislature passed its Porn ID law and Governor Ron DeSantis signed it into law on March 25 as part of a number of regulations aimed at protecting minors from explicit content.
Adult entertainment trade association The Free Speech Coalition is fighting Florida’s law in federal court, according to The Florida Times-Union. Florida will become the 13th state to implement age verification laws for adult websites. Florida is second only to Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, Mississippi, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, and Nebraska, all states that have ID verification laws in place.
According to the official Pornhub blog, “not only does it trample on the rights of adults to access protected speech, but it fails strict scrutiny by using the least effective and yet most restrictive means to accomplish [the state’s] stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors.”
The Pornhub blog also states that the company is concerned about the safety and well-being of children, but the idea of using identities poses greater risks with users’ safety and privacy.
The Louisiana law in particular has no state regulator overseeing the implementation of the new laws “resulting in a flawed enforcement regime,” the Pornhub blog states. The US Treasury Department told lawmakers in a letter in December that its documents and workstations were accessed by an outside party in a security breach. It described the attack as “a major cybersecurity incident” and attributed it to a “China state-sponsored advanced persistent threat actor.”
Now, The Washington Post reports that the bad guys have infiltrated a “highly sensitive office” within the Treasury, which is responsible for deliberating on and implementing US government sanctions.
As the Post points out, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has some crucial information that could be very useful to another country’s government.
While the hackers were only able to steal unclassified data, they could still get their hands on the identities of potential sanctions targets. They could also steal evidence that the agency collected as part of its investigations on entities that the government is thinking of sanctioning.
Overall, the attackers could have gotten enough information to give them insight into how the US develops sanctions against foreign entities.
In addition to OFAC, the Office of the Treasury Secretary and the Office of Financial Research were also affected by the breach. The attackers infiltrated the Treasury’s systems by gaining access to a key used by BeyondTrust, a cloud-based service that provides technical support to the department.
The US government has blamed China-sponsored actors for several cyberattacks on its agencies and US companies in the past few years. Just last year, the FBI blamed “PRC-linked actors” for a massive hack on US telecommunications companies.
Reportedly, the actors, known as Salt Typhoon, targeted the mobile devices of diplomats, government officials, and others associated with both presidential campaigns.
According to The Post, Chinese officials called the claim that their country was involved in the attack on the Treasury Department “baseless” and insisted that their government has “always opposed all forms of hacker attacks.”