Paul Roberts

Privacy Fail: Is Uncle Sam Encouraging Bad Security?

CANCUN, MEXICO – A prominent privacy activist says that leading software vendors, and the U.S. government are failing the public when it comes to Internet privacy, and that big changes are needed to prevent consumers from criminals, advertisers and government spies.

Cyber Cops Wrestle With Legal Hurdles, Public Perception

CANCUN, MEXICO — A panel of top law enforcement officers in charge of cyber criminal investigations reveals that the guys with the white hats face an uphill climb if they want to take down cyber criminal kingpins, with outdated laws and processes on the one hand, and an increasingly skeptical and privacy-conscious public on the other.

Update: Verisign Admits To Security Breaches in 2010

Verisign, the Internet security company responsible for management of the .COM domain, told federal regulators that it was the victim of several successful attacks in 2010, but that those incidents were not reported to the company’s management until September, 2011. The news was first reported by Reuters.


Threatpost’s exclusive interview with Ralph Langner continues, as our conversation shifts from  the legacy of the Stuxnet worm to larger issues facing the critical infrastructure sector including mounting attacks, tensions between vendors and security researchers over responsible disclosure, and what’s needed to secure critical infrastructure and industrial control systems.  

Researchers at the security firm M86 report that hackers have compromised hundreds of Web sites that use the Wordpress content management system. The sites, mostly small Web pages and blogs, are being used to fool spam filters and redirect unwitting visitors to drive by download Websites that will install malicious software on vulnerable systems.

Ralph Langner is the closest thing to a rock star that you get in the Dockers and pocket-protector world of industrial control systems. The German researcher made headlines in 2010 as among the first security experts to analyze parts of the Stuxnet worm’s code devoted to manipulating programmable logic controllers by Siemens, and the first to explicitly link the Stuxnet malware with an effort to disable Iran’s uranium enrichment operation.

VIEW SLIDESHOW Scenes from S4 2012S4 is a conference hosted by Digital Bond, a security consulting firm based in Sunrise, Florida. Now in its fifth year, the S4 draws some of the world’s top experts in securing industrial control systems to sunny Miami Beach to discuss the state of the art.