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A Second Term? Blinken Plans to Be with Kids 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a press conference at the end of his one day visit to Haiti at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port Au Prince on September 05, 2024. (AFP)
Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a press conference at the end of his one day visit to Haiti at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port Au Prince on September 05, 2024. (AFP)
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A Second Term? Blinken Plans to Be with Kids 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a press conference at the end of his one day visit to Haiti at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port Au Prince on September 05, 2024. (AFP)
Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a press conference at the end of his one day visit to Haiti at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port Au Prince on September 05, 2024. (AFP)

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday he hoped to spend more time with his children next year, hinting he would not pursue another term as the top US diplomat.

Blinken, who has two young kids, has pressed on with a punishing travel schedule that has only increased over the past year, with nine tours of the Middle East since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

"As to my own future, all I'm looking at right now is the balance of this administration in January," Blinken told reporters in Haiti, where he was the first secretary of state to visit in nearly a decade.

"I can tell you from having spent some time over the last week on a bit of a break with my kids, I will relish having a lot more time with them," he said.

It is highly unusual for a secretary of state to stay on past an election. The last to do so was George Shulz, who joined in 1982, halfway through Ronald Reagan's first term, and remained after the Republican's reelection.

Blinken is known as a highly trusted aide to Joe Biden, advising him as a senator, vice president and president.

But speculation that Blinken, 62, might consider staying dissipated when Biden in July decided to give up his campaign for a second term after a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump revived questions about the 81-year-old president's age.

Blinken, a lifelong Democrat, has praised the record of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is running against Trump, but he is not known to be as close with her as he is with Biden.

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Iran Pays Millions in Ransom to End Cyberattack on Banks

Iranians at a bank branch in Tehran (IRNA)
Iranians at a bank branch in Tehran (IRNA)
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Iran Pays Millions in Ransom to End Cyberattack on Banks

Iranians at a bank branch in Tehran (IRNA)
Iranians at a bank branch in Tehran (IRNA)

A massive cyberattack that hit Iran last month threatened the stability of its banking system and forced the country's regime to agree to a ransom deal of millions of dollars, POLITICO reported on Thursday.

The newspaper said an Iranian firm paid at least $3 million in ransom last month to stop an anonymous group of hackers from releasing individual account data from as many as 20 domestic banks in what appears to be the worst cyberattack the country has seen, quoting industry analysts and western officials briefed on the matter.

A group known as IRLeaks, which has a history of hacking Iranian companies, was likely behind the breach, the officials said.

The hackers are said to have initially threatened to sell the data they collected, which included the personal account and credit card data of millions of Iranians, on the dark web unless they received $10 million in cryptocurrency, but later settled on a smaller sum.

Iran’s authoritarian regime pushed for a deal, fearing that word of the data theft would destabilize the country’s already-wobbly financial system, which is under intense strain amid the international sanctions the country faces, the officials said.

Iran never acknowledged the mid-August breach, which forced banks to shut down cash machines across the country.

IRleaks entered the banks’ servers via a company called Tosan, which provides data and other digital services to Iran’s financial sector, the officials said.

Using Tosan, the hackers appear to have siphoned data from both private banks and Iran’s central bank. Of Iran’s 29 active credit institutions, as many as 20 were hit, including the Bank of Industry and Mines and the Post Bank of Iran.

Though the attack was reported at the time by Iran International, an opposition news outlet, neither the suspected hackers nor the ransom demands were disclosed.

Iran’s supreme leader delivered a cryptic message in the wake of the attack, blaming the US and Israel for “spreading fear among our people,” without acknowledging the country’s banks were under assault.

Despite the growing tensions between Iran and both the US and Israel, people familiar with the Iranian banking hack told POLITICO that IRLeaks is affiliated with neither the US nor Israel.