AP: Russian military behind spread of Coronavirus disinformation.

hanimmal said:

God I hate Jim Jordan's propaganda rants.

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DIY-HP-LED said:

This is what gerrymandering gives you, slime balls and a base that not even the republicans can control. Character does not just count, it is everything in a politician, intention is everything and that is determined by one's character.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Tuesday set a new vaccination goal to deliver at least one shot to 70% of adult Americans by July Fourth as he tackles the vexing problem of winning over the “doubters” and those unmotivated to get inoculated.

Demand for vaccines has dropped off markedly nationwide, with some states leaving more than half their available doses unordered. Biden called for states to make vaccines available on a walk-in basis and he will direct many pharmacies to do likewise.

His administration for the first time also is moving to shift doses from states with weaker demand to areas with stronger interest in the shots.

“You do need to get vaccinated,” Biden said from the White House. “Even if your chance of getting seriously ill is low, why take the risk? It could save your life or the lives of somebody you love.”

Biden’s goal equates to delivering at least the first shot to 181 million adults and fully vaccinating 160 million. It’s a tacit acknowledgment of the declining interest in shots.

Already more than 56% of American adults have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and nearly 105 million are fully vaccinated. The U.S. is currently administering first doses at a rate of about 965,000 per day — half the rate of three weeks ago, but almost twice as fast as needed to meet Biden’s target.

“I’d like to get it 100%, but I think realistically we can get to that place between now and July Fourth,” Biden said.

He said the administration would focus on three areas as it tries to ramp up the pace of vaccinations:

—Adults who need more convincing to take the vaccine.

—Those who have struggled or are in no hurry to obtain a shot.

—Adolescents aged 12-15 once federal authorities approve vaccination for that age group.

Acknowledging that “the pace of vaccination is slowing,” Biden predicted the inoculation effort is “going to be harder” when it comes to convincing “doubters” of the need to get their shots.

He said the most effective argument to those people would be to protect those they love. “This is your choice: It’s life and death.”

Biden’s push comes as his administration has shifted away from setting a target for the U.S. to reach “herd immunity,” instead focusing on delivering as many shots into arms as possible. Officials said Biden’s vaccination target would result in a significant reduction in COVID-19 cases heading into the summer.

To that end, the Biden administration is shifting the government’s focus toward expanding smaller and mobile vaccination clinics to deliver doses to harder-to-reach communities. It is also spending hundreds of millions of dollars to try to boost interest in vaccines through education campaigns and greater access to shots through community organizations that can help bring people to clinics.

Biden touted creative efforts to make it “easier and more fun” to get vaccinated, such as grocery stores offering discounts to shoppers who come to get shots and sports leagues that hold promotions to gets shots for their fans.

Ahead of the Food and Drug Administration’s expected authorization of the Pfizer vaccine for kids aged 12-15, the White House is developing plans to speed vaccinations for that age group. Biden urged states to administer at least one dose to adolescents by July Fourth and work to deliver doses to pediatricians’ offices and other trusted locations, with the aim of getting many of them fully vaccinated by the start of the next school year.

While younger people are at dramatically lower risk of serious complications from COVID-19, they have made up a larger share of new virus cases as a majority of U.S. adults have been at least partially vaccinated and as higher-risk activities like indoor dining and contact sports have resumed in most of the country.

Officials hope that extending vaccinations to teens — who could get the first dose in one location and the second elsewhere, if necessary — will further accelerate the nation’s reduced virus caseload and allow schools to reopen with minimal disruptions this fall.

The urgency to expand the pool of those getting the shots is rooted in hopes of stamping out the development of new variants that could emerge from unchecked outbreaks and helping the country further reopen by the symbolic moment of Independence Day, exactly two months away. Though White House officials privately acknowledge the steep challenge, Biden sounded an optimistic note.

“The light at the end of the tunnel is actually growing brighter and brighter,” Biden said.

Biden’s speech comes as the White House announced a shift away from a strict allocation of vaccines by state population. The administration says that when states decline to take all the vaccine they have been allocated, that surplus will shift to states still awaiting doses to meet demand.

Governors were informed of the change by the White House on Tuesday morning.

This week, Iowa turned down nearly three quarters of the vaccine doses available to the state for next week from the federal government because demand for the shots remains weak. Louisiana, meanwhile, hasn’t drawn down its full vaccine allocation from the federal government for the last few weeks.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows Louisiana’s coronavirus vaccination rate is well behind most states. About 27% of state residents are fully vaccinated while 32% have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the state health department.

The White House previously resisted efforts to distribute vaccine by metrics other than population. Biden rebuffed Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last month when she requested more doses as her state was experiencing a surge in virus cases. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at the time nearly all states were ordering at or near their population allocations, which is no longer the case.

Individual states have made similar shifts internally to account for changing demand. Last week, Washington state changed the way it allocates coronavirus vaccine to its counties. Previously the state doled out supplies to counties proportionate to their populations. But now amounts will be based on requests from health care providers.

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RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The police department in the nation’s capital has suffered a massive leak of internal information after refusing to meet the blackmail demands of Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate. Experts say it’s the worst known ransomware attack ever to hit a U.S. police department.

The gang, known as the Babuk group, released thousands of the Metropolitan Police Department’s sensitive documents on the dark web Thursday. A review by The Associated Press found hundreds of police officer disciplinary files and intelligence reports that include feeds from other agencies, including the FBI and Secret Service.

Ransomware attacks have reached epidemic levels as foreign criminal gangs paralyze computer networks at state and local governments, police departments, hospitals and private companies. They demand large payments to decrypt stolen data or to prevent it from being leaked online.

A cyberattack last week shut down the Colonial Pipeline, the nation’s largest fuel pipeline, prompting gas-hoardingand panic-buying in parts of the Southeast.

Brett Callow, a threat analyst and ransomware expert at the security firm Emsisoft, said the police leak ranks as “possibly the most significant ransomware incident to date” because of the risks it presents for officers and civilians.

Some of the documents include security information from other law enforcement agencies related to President Joe Biden’s inauguration, including a reference to a “source embedded” with a militia group.

One document details the steps the FBI has taken in its investigation of two pipe bombs left at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee before the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. That includes “big data pulls” of cell towers, and plans to “analyze purchases” of Nike shoes worn by a person of interest, the document said.

The police department did not immediately return a request for comment, but has previously said some officers’ personal information was stolen.

Some of that information was previously leaked, revealing personal information of some officers taken from background checks, including details of their past drug use, finances and — in at least one incident — of past sexual abuse.

The newly released files include details of disciplinary proceedings of hundreds of officers dating back to 2004. The files often contain sensitive and embarrassing private details.

“This is going to send a shock through the law enforcement community throughout the country,” said Ted Williams, a former officer at the department who is now an attorney. He’s representing a retired officer whose background file was included in an earlier leak.

Williams said said having background checks and disciplinary files made public makes it difficult for officers to do their jobs.

“The more the crooks know about a law enforcement officer the more the crooks try to use that for their advantage,” he said.

The Babuk group indicated this week that it wanted $4 million not to release the files, but was only offered $100,000.

The department has not said whether it made the offer. Any negotiations would reflect the complexity of the ransomware problem, with police finding themselves forced to consider making payments to criminal gangs. The FBI, which is assisting in this case, discourages ransomware payments.

The group revealed the attack last month, threatening then to leak the identities of confidential informants. The data release revealed Thursday is massive and it was not immediately clear if it included informants’ names.

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hanimmal said:

Is it just me or do the virus trolls seem pretty desperate lately?

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DIY-HP-LED said:

Former FBI Special Agent: ‘Russia Has A Very Firm Grip On Our Cyberspace’

In an hour-long phone call yesterday, President Biden put Vladimir Putin on notice, warning the Russian leader that the United States will respond to any more cyber or ransomware attacks by Russian-based hackers. However, former FBI special agent and distinguished fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute Clint Watts tells Ali Velshi “They are in no way scared of violating our cyber sovereignty.”

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hanimmal said:

They seem pretty desperate this morning.

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hanimmal said:

They seem pretty desperate this morning.

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DIY-HP-LED said:

The internet has become a battle space and needs to be treated as such, treaties, funding, weapons, tactics and strategy, the whole nine yards. Maybe get rid of the space force (useless) and replace it with the cyberspace force. I'm no expert, but cutting psychical cables will slow them down too and force them through a firewall filter. Joe has many friends in this realm, and since Vlad has attacked everybody else, he has few friends. They are even doing the ransomware thing against businesses in China, which I don't imagine is going over too well.

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DIY-HP-LED said:

Perhaps the Russian hackers sense what's coming and are trying to get their licks in early and while they still can. The internet as a whole is gonna be a more regulated place in the future and is gonna change fundamentally in response to recent events.

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At the very moment that Russia and China are facing more pressure from Western governments to stop malicious cyberattacks, they’ve announced a pact to work together for new rules to control cyberspace.

In the annals of diplomatic hypocrisy, this new accord is a stunner, even by Russian and Chinese standards. It promotes a new Russian plan for international governance of the global Internet, even as it stresses the right of Russia, China and other authoritarian states “to regulate the national segment of the Internet” to edit and censor what their people can see.

The June 28 Russia-China accord was revealed in a little-noticed posting the next day by the Chinese embassy in Moscow, which was sent to me by a European Internet activist. It amounts to a manifesto for joint Internet control through capture of existing United Nations-sponsored organizations, such as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

“The parties emphasize the unity of positions on the management of the Internet,” says a translated version of the pact, explaining that “Russia and China note the need to strengthen the role of the International Telecommunication Union and the representation of the two countries in its governing bodies.”

This expansion to cyberspace of an existing treaty on “good neighborliness, friendship and cooperation” is a sign of what Biden administration officials tell me is a deepening strategic alignment between Moscow and Beijing. To formalize the agreement, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping held a joint teleconference last month, according to a story by the Russian news agency Novosti.

Russia’s alignment with China on cyber issues dampens whatever hope the Biden administration might have had that it could split the two countries. Such a wedge developed in the 1970s, because of Chinese resentment of diktats from the old Soviet Union. But the Novosti commentary noted that this old “ideological quarrel” has been replaced by “a new model of Russian-Chinese relations.”

The Moscow-Beijing Internet alliance should raise eyebrows because it comes at a time when U.S. intelligence agencies are discovering new evidence that Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies are either directing or condoning use of ransomware and other malicious cyberattacks against Western companies.

The latest revelation of such meddling was Monday’s disclosure by the Biden administration that China’s spy agency, the Ministry of State Security, “uses criminal contract hackers to conduct unsanctioned cyber operations globally,” including a hack of Microsoft’s Exchange suite used by “tens of thousands of systems around the world,” a senior administration official said. The official said these Chinese operations exceed even Russian “moonlighting” between its intelligence services and criminal hackers.

Even as Russian and Chinese intelligence operatives escalate their attacks on the West, the two governments are trying to claim the high road as Internet cops — and denouncing Western technology companies as dangerous monopolists.

The Russians and Chinese are also working to topple the existing Internet governance structure, in which a nonprofit group called ICANN coordinates the domain name system. The Russians and Chinese want to replace it with an ITU-run system that they can dominate.

The Russian-Chinese strategy for Internet control was outlined in unusual detail in a July 12 article by Russian official Olga Melnikova, a director of the Department of International Information Security of the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry. It appeared in the Russian journal International Affairs.

“Currently, the Internet is virtually a monopoly controlled by the U.S. administration,” Melnikova argued, in an English translation of the article. She attacked ICANN, the panel of engineers and technologists established in 1998. Melnikova argued that ICANN “is accountable to the global multi-stakeholder community, that is, to no one, and is in fact still controlled by the U.S. administration.”

ICANN has disputed this claim, insisting that since it ended a contract with the Commerce Department in 2016, the organization has been entirely independent of any government.

Melnikova argued that to replace U.S. control, “the best option would be to delegate Internet governance prerogatives to the ITU.” But she complained that by supporting their own candidate, ITU department director Doreen Bogdan-Martin, against a Russian nominee, “the Americans are striving to take control over the activities of the ITU.”
Washington strives “to retain the possibility of technological dominance and a de facto monopoly in Internet governance,” she wrote.

The Internet is the high ground of the 21st century, in terms of economic, political and even military power. But however advanced the technology, the battle for control is trench warfare, fought in obscure meetings and forums and standard-setting bodies.

“We’re very, very actively engaged on this front,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told me in an email in May.

The Russians and Chinese have now formed an alliance for control. It’s encouraging that after four years of deference under President Donald Trump, the United States and its allies in the world’s techno-democracies are fighting back.

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MCLEAN, Va. (AP) — President Joe Biden used his first visit with rank-and-file members of the U.S. intelligence community — a part of government that was frequently criticized by his predecessor Donald Trump — to make a promise that he will “never politicize” their work.

Biden waited more than six months to make the short drive across the Potomac River on Tuesday to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, giving analysts and national security leaders — often derided by Trump as the “deep state” — some breathing room.

The president in his remarks to about 120 ODNI employees and senior leadership officials sought to make clear that he understood the complexity and critical nature of their work. The agency oversees the 17 other U.S. intelligence organizations.

“You have my full confidence,” he said. “I know there’s no such thing as 100% certainty in the intelligence world. Occasionally that happens. Rarely, rarely, rarely.”

Biden told the audience that his administration would be “getting us back to the basics.”

“I’ll never politicize the work you do. You have my word on that,” he said. “It’s too important for our country.”

Biden also mentioned Russia and China as growing threats to American national security and noted the growing wave of cyberattacks, including ransomware attacks, against government agencies and private industry that U.S. officials have linked to agents in both countries.

“I think it’s more likely ... if we end up in a war, a real shooting war with a major power, it’s going to be as a consequence of a cyber breach of great consequence,” Biden said.

Biden toured the National Counterterrorism Center Watch Floor, where analysts work to collect information and intelligence from various sources to ascertain potential threats. He was accompanied on the tour by Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, and Christy Abizaid, director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Trump visited the Central Intelligence Agency on his first full day in office, praising the agency but also airing personal grievances. Standing in front of CIA’s memorial wall with stars marking each of the officers who have died while serving, Trump settled scores with the media and repeated false claims about the size of his inauguration crowd.

The relationship between the intelligence community and the president “went downhill from that very day,” said Glenn Gerstell, who then served as general counsel of the National Security Agency and stepped down last year.

Trump would go through four permanent or acting directors of national intelligence in four years and engaged in near-constant fights with the intelligence community.

In particular, he was angry about its assessment that Russia had interfered on his behalf in the 2016 presidential campaign and its role in revealing that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Biden, an action that ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment. Trump eventually fired the inspector general at the national intelligence office — the internal watchdog who brought that pressure to light.
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By contrast, Biden has repeatedly insisted that he would not exert political pressure on intelligence agencies, a message repeated by his top appointees. He also came to office with a long history of working with intelligence officials as vice president and while serving in the Senate.

The president has already called on Haines with several politically sensitive requests. Perhaps the most prominent is an enhanced review of the origins of COVID-19 as concerns increase among scientists that the novel coronavirus could have originated in a Chinese lab. Biden set a 90-day timeframe and pledged to make the results of the review public.

Haines and CIA Director Bill Burns are also investigating a growing number of reported injuries and illnesses possibly linked to directed energy attacks in what’s known as the “Havana syndrome.” The CIA recently appointed a new director of its task force investigating Havana syndrome cases, an undercover official who participated in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. And intelligence agencies are having to adapt to the military withdrawal from Afghanistan, with growing concerns that the Taliban may topple the U.S.-backed central government.

Haines and Burns have also said that their review of COVID-19 origins may be inconclusive, probably disappointing lawmakers and observers who have pushed for more aggressive action against China.

Former officials said Biden’s choice of visiting the national intelligence director before the CIA was significant because it makes clear he wants Haines to be considered his principal intelligence adviser. When her office was created in 2005 to better coordinate intelligence sharing following the 9/11 attacks, it subsumed a leadership role once held by the CIA director. Since then, agencies and leaders have periodically fought for preeminence, causing concerns that some agencies’ views are more strongly heard than others.

“I think we’ve had a couple of presidents in a row where the supremacy of the DNI was put in some question either through the selection of people they chose in the job or how they engaged with the community,” said Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior official at both the CIA and the intelligence office who now leads the Hayden Center at George Mason University.

Pfeiffer said he strongly supported Biden’s visit and also hoped the president would eventually visit the memorial wall where Trump spoke in January 2017.

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DALLAS (AP) — It was the start of a steamy Friday two Augusts ago when Jason Whisler settled in for a working breakfast at the Coffee Ranch restaurant in the Texas Panhandle city of Borger. The most pressing agenda item for city officials that morning: planning for a country music concert and anniversary event.

Then Whisler’s phone rang. Borger’s computer system had been hacked.

Workers were frozen out of files. Printers spewed out demands for money. Over the next several days, residents couldn’t pay water bills, the government couldn’t process payroll, police officers couldn’t retrieve certain records. Across Texas, similar scenes played out in nearly two dozen communities hit by a cyberattack officials ultimately tied to a Russia-based criminal syndicate.

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In 2019, ransomware had yet to emerge as one of the top national security concerns confronting the United States, an issue that would become the focus of a presidential summit between Washington and Moscow this year. But the attacks in Texas were a harbinger of the now-exploding threat and offer a vivid case study in what happens behind the scenes when small-town America comes under attack.


Texas communities struggled for days with disruptions to core government services as workers in small cities and towns endured a cascade of frustrations brought on by the sophisticated cyberattack, according to thousands of pages of documents reviewed by The Associated Press and interviews with people involved in the response. The AP also learned new details about the attack’s scope and victims, including an Air Force base where access to a law enforcement database was interrupted, and a city forced to operate its water-supply system manually.

In recent months, a ransomware attack led to gasoline shortages. Another, tied to the same hacking gang that attacked the Texas communities, threatened meat supplies. But the Texas attacks — which, unlike these prominent cases, were resolved without a ransom payment — make clear that ransomware need not hit vital infrastructure or major corporations to interrupt daily life.

“It was just a scary feeling,” Whisler, Borger’s emergency management coordinator, recounted in an interview.

_____

In the early morning of Aug. 16, as most Texans were still asleep, hackers half a world away were burrowing into networks. They encrypted files and left ransom notes.

That afternoon, with the attack’s impact becoming apparent, the city manager of Vernon emailed colleagues about a “ransom type” virus affecting the police department. The city near the Oklahoma state line could get back online by paying the $2.5 million the hackers were demanding, he wrote, but that was “obviously” not the plan.

“Holy moly!!!!!” replied city commissioner Pam Gosline, now the mayor.

The culprits were affiliated with REvil, the Russia-linked syndicate that last spring extorted $11 million from meat-processor JBS and more recently was behind a Fourth of July weekend attack that crippled businesses around the globe. In the Texas case, however, communities were ultimately able to recover most of their data and rebuild their systems without anyone paying ransom.

The hackers gained their foothold through an attack on a Texas firm that provides technology services to local governments, branching through screen-sharing software and remote administration to seize control of the networks of some of the company’s clients.

An early hint of trouble came with a 2 a.m. phone call to the firm’s president, Richard Myers. His company, TSM Consulting Services Inc., provides data communications service for Texas communities, linking police agencies to a statewide law enforcement database.

One of his client’s servers was unresponsive, he was told. Upon inspection, Myers noticed that someone who wasn’t supposed to be in the computer system was trying to install something remotely. He rebooted the server. Things initially seemed fixed until the department called back: One of its laptops had a ransom note on it.

It soon became clear the problem wasn’t isolated to a single client.

“I don’t think you can begin to express the terror that goes through your mind when something like that starts to unfold,” he said.

Within hours, state officials were hunkered inside an underground operations center normally used for calamities like hurricanes and floods. Gov. Greg Abbott declared it a cyber disaster. Texas National Guard cyber specialists were activated.

“If you needed to build something — you needed an inspection, something like that — out of luck for a week,” said Andy Bennett, the state’s then-deputy chief information security officer. “Records look-ups? Couldn’t go look up records. Basically, if there’s a municipal function that you would go down to a city hall for, or that you would rely on the police department for, it wasn’t available.”

_____

In Borger, a city of fewer than 13,000, early indications were worrisome as the city raced to shut down its computers.

Gibberish ransom demands spat out of printers and displayed on some computer screens. Government files were encrypted, with titles like “Budget Document” replaced by nonsensical combinations of letters and symbols, said current city manager Garrett Spradling.

Vital records, like birth and death certificates, were offline. Payments couldn’t be processed, checks couldn’t be issued — though, blessedly for Borger, it was an off-week for payroll. Signs posted on a drive-up window outside City Hall told residents the city couldn’t process water bill payments but cutoffs would be delayed.

One update shared with city officials soon after the attack described how every server was infected, as were about 60% of the 85 computers inspected by that point. A city government email told council members that agendas for a meeting would be in paper format, “since your tablets won’t be able to connect.” An official told a judge it was unclear if computer systems would be operational in time for trials two days away.

Because the city had paid for offsite remote backup, Borger had the capability to reformat servers, reinstall the operating system and bring data back over. A newly purchased server that had yet to be installed came in handy. The police department, however, retained its data locally and the attack hampered officers’ access to previous incident reports, Spradling said.

As they worked to resolve the problem, officials shared draft press releases that offered reassurances that critical emergency operations would continue and that the attacks weren’t a reflection of any misstep by the city.

One councilmember, a military veteran named Milton Ooley, cautioned against publicity for the hackers’ “form of terrorism.”

“This is consistent with my firsthand experience with how the U.S. handled terrorism in Europe when I was there in the late ’70s, some of which was directed at U.S. units including missile units I worked with/in during those days,” he wrote colleagues. In an interview, he said he believed the public was entitled to information but hackers didn’t deserve notoriety.

The day of the attack, Jeremy Sereno was working his civilian job at Dell when he was contacted by the state about the attack. A lieutenant colonel and senior cybersecurity officer with the Texas Military Department, Sereno began helping deploy Texas National Guard troops to hacked cities, where specialists over the next two weeks helped assess the damage, restore data from backed-up files and retake control of locked systems.

One of the first areas of concern was a small North Texas city where the attack locked the “human-machine interface” that workers used to control the water supply, forcing them to operate the system manually, Sereno said. Water purity was not endangered.

“That was probably our biggest number one,” Sereno said. “That’s what’s considered critical infrastructure, when you talk about water.”

AP is not identifying the city at the urging of state officials, who said doing so could draw new attacks on its water system.

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MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian space official on Friday blamed a software problem on a newly docked science lab for briefly knocking the International Space Station out of position.

The space station lost control of its orientation for 47 minutes on Thursday, when Russia’s Nauka science lab accidentally fired its thrusters a few hours after docking, pushing the orbiting complex from its normal configuration. The station’s position is key for getting power from solar panels and for communications with space support teams back on Earth. The space station’s communications with ground controllers also blipped out twice for a few minutes on Thursday.

Vladimir Solovyov, flight director of the space station’s Russian segment, blamed the incident on a “short-term software failure.” In a statement released Friday by the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Solovyov said because of the failure, a direct command to turn on the lab’s engines was mistakenly implemented.

He added the incident was “quickly countered by the propulsion system” of another Russian component at the station and “at the moment, the station is in its normal orientation” and all its systems “are operating normally.”

Roscosmos director Dmitry Rogozin later Friday suggested that “human factor” may have been at play.

“There was such euphoria (after Nauka successfully docked with the space station), people relaxed to some extent,” Rogozin said in a radio interview. “Perhaps one of the operators didn’t take into account that the control system of the block will continue to adjust itself in space. And it determined a moment three hours after (the docking) and turned on the engines.”

NASA said Thursday that the incident moved the station 45 degrees out of attitude, about one-eighth of a complete circle, but the complex was never spinning, there was no immediate damage or danger to the crew.

The incident caused NASA to postpone a repeat test flight for Boeing’s crew capsule that had been set for Friday afternoon from Florida. It will be Boeing’s second attempt to reach the 250-mile-high (400-kilometer-high) station before putting astronauts on board. Software problems botched the first test.

Russia’s long-delayed 22-ton (20-metric-ton) lab called Nauka arrived earlier Thursday, eight days after it launched from the Russian launch facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

The launch of Nauka, which will provide more room for scientific experiments and space for the crew, had been repeatedly delayed because of technical problems. It was initially scheduled to go up in 2007.

In 2013, experts found contamination in its fuel system, resulting in a long and costly replacement. Other Nauka systems also underwent modernization or repairs.

Stretching 43 feet (13 meters) long, Nauka became the first new compartment for the Russian segment of the outpost since 2010. On Monday, one of the older Russian units, the Pirs spacewalking compartment, undocked from the station to free up room for the new lab.

Nauka will require many maneuvers, including up to 11 spacewalks beginning in early September, to prepare it for operation.

According to Solovyov, on Friday the crew was busy equalizing the pressure in Nauka and planned to open the hatch to the lab later in the day.

The space station is currently operated by NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur; Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov of Russia’s Roscosmos space corporation; Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet.

In 1998, Russia launched the station’s first compartment, Zarya, which was followed in 2000 by another big piece, Zvezda, and three smaller modules in the following years. The last of them, Rassvet, arrived at the station in 2010.

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