Bringing home the hardware…

It’s great to win journalism awards — but I’m finding it’s sweeter still to see students and former students picking them up. It’s awards season, and I have been watching many of my former students getting lots of hardware.

Three reporters from the Point Park News Service picked up top prizes from the Pennsylvania Women’s Press Association — Emily Balser in first, Megan Guza in second and Brian Reed with an honorable mention. (It’s worth noting that a Penn State reporter came in third).

Megan Guza, Emily Balser and me.

The Trib did very well this season too. The Pennsylvania Society of Professional Journalists named the Trib the state’s top paper, gave us the top two prizes for spot news and awarded Luis Fabregas and me with the Spotlight Award, the top overall prize for journalists in the state. We had many other winners as well.

Because only a couple other Tribbers showed up in State College for the awards ceremony, I got to bring home all of the glory…

Organizers of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists handing over all of the hardware.

 

 

 

Why Pittsburgh?

For the second time in as many weeks, national reporters are asking: Why Pittsburgh? First it was U.S. Attorney Hickton indicting the Chinese military hackers. Now it’s Hickton and the FBI going after Russian criminal hackers.

Why Pittsburgh? The FBI’s top cyber investigator Keith Mularski told me that’s easy: “I just think it goes to the team we have here in Pittsburgh and the resources we have. … We have one of the best teams in the country, if not all of the world.”

Talking with experts who worked this latest case from the inside out, I was able to piece together a story you won’t read anywhere else. It tells about how the nation’s top cyber experts — in Pittsburgh — tracked down hackers all the way back to a Black Sea resort town in Russia.

This map shows the locations of computers in Pennsylvania infected with the Russian malware Gameover Zeus on a single day in May 2013.

FBI cyber agents in Pittsburgh helped bring down two Russian-based cybercrime schemes that infected more than