The Conficker worm infected several hundred machines and critical medical equipment in an undisclosed number of U.S. hospitals recently, a security expert said on Thursday in a panel at the RSA security conference. “It was not widespread, but it raises the awareness of what we would do if there were millions” of computers infected at [...]
When American forces in Iraq wanted to lure members of Al Qaeda into a trap, they hacked into one of the group’s computers and altered information that drove them into American gun sights. When President George W. Bush ordered new ways to slow Iran’s progress toward a nuclear bomb last year, he approved a plan [...]
The United States has no clear military policy about how the nation might respond to a cyberattack on its communications, financial or power networks, a panel of scientists and policy advisers warned Wednesday, and the country needs to clarify both its offensive capabilities and how it would respond to such attacks. (NY Times)
The Olympic Games in London could suffer a severe “cyber attack” unless urgent action is taken, according to former home secretary David Blunkett. He said terrorists could hack into computer and communications systems causing a “complete meltdown”. The Labour MP said such an attack would be “devastating” but systems existed to block it. He is [...]
For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China’s government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has discovered it’s worse: It’s hundreds of thousands of everyday civilians. And they’ve only just begun. (PopSci)
NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, speaking at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco, told the audience of security professionals on Tuesday that the NSA does “not want to run cyber security for the United States government.” Aiming to dispel news reports — and counter previous intelligence agency statements — that the National Security [...]
Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project — the Defense Department’s costliest weapons program ever — according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks. Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force’s air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet [...]
General Dynamics Information Technology has announced last month that Homeland Security Department was seeking to hire people, who understand hackers’ tools and tactics and are able to analyze Internet traffic and identify vulnerabilities in the federal systems. It is also known that Pentagon plans to increase the number of cyberexperts it can train each year [...]
The National Security Agency has been campaigning to lead the government’s rapidly growing cybersecurity programs, raising privacy and civil liberties concerns among some officials who fear that the move could give the spy agency too much control over government computer networks. (NY Times)
A sophisticated FBI-produced spyware program has played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in federal investigations into extortion plots, terrorist threats and hacker attacks in cases stretching back at least seven years, newly declassified documents show. As first reported by Wired.com, the software, called a “computer and internet protocol address verifier,” or CIPAV, is designed to infiltrate [...]
