Dennis Fisher

WASHINGTON–The U.S. government has a lot of money. Not as much as it used to have, of course, but still, it has a lot. It also has a lot of computers and servers and routers and other things that move and store data. In fact, they have so many that they don’t really know what all of them are doing at any given time. That’s turning into a fairly thorny security problem for some of the country’s more vital networks, and even the most well-funded agencies are having a hard time addressing it.

WASHINGTON–The commander of the U.S. Cyber Command said that the federal government is working on a system now that would allow it to work with ISPs and others to  help stop ongoing attacks against government and private networks by pushing intelligence and attack signatures to them.

WASHINGTON–One of the keys to addressing the widespread security threats facing both private and government networks is to develop more secure operating systems from the ground up and not rely on trying to secure existing ones, top CIA and Pentagon information assurance officials said.

Google complied with 93 percent of the requests for user data that it received from U.S. law enforcement agencies through the first six months of this year. In the latest update to its Transparency Report, Google for the first time not only disclosed the number of requests that it receives, but also the number of user accounts that those requests encompass.

Google has fixed more than two dozen vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser and also implemented a defense against the BEAST SSL attack. The bugs fixed in the new version of Chrome include 11 high-severity flaws.

If you were born anytime in the last 50 years, the personal computing age has comprised the majority of your life. Depending upon how you want to mark its beginning, the PC era started somewhere in the mid-1970s, and, remarkably, many of the people who were responsible for the founding of the industry have continued to influence its direction to this day. Sadly, some of them have passed on recently, and with them has gone their knowledge, wisdom and experience.

A group of researchers has released a tool that they say implements a denial-of-service attack against SSL servers by triggering a huge number of SSL renegotiations, eventually consuming all of the server’s resources and making it unavailable. The tool exploits a widely known issue with the way that SSL connections work.