While the eastern United States recovers from this week’s devastasting storm, the nation’s Homeland Security chief used “Superstorm Sandy” to promote the importance of national cybersecurity protection.
The attacker who penetrated the Dutch CA DigiNotar last year had complete control of all eight of the company’s certificate-issuing servers during the operation and he may also have issued some rogue certificates that have not yet been identified. The final report from a security company commissioned to investigate the DigiNotar attack shows that the compromise of the now-bankrupt certificate authority was much deeper than previously thought.
ANAHEIM, CALIF.–The sharing of information on threats and attacks between government agencies and companies in the private sector has been tried numerous times and in many different ways over the last decade, with varying degrees of success. The need for information flowing in both directions likely is more pressing than ever right now, with high-level attacks targeting critical infrastructure systems and utilities every day, but much of that data in the government realm remains classified and few enterprises are eager to reveal details, either. As the attacks continue, officials say there may be a need for a new mechanism to get the information flowing.
An alert from the Department of Homeland Security late last week urges private- and public-sector industrial control system (ICS) owners to be proactive in auditing the security, particularly, authentication controls of their systems. The alert is in response to a growing concern over the number of exploit tools available online targeting ICS and SCADA systems responsible for running critical infrastructure, as well as an evolving interest from hacktivists who are using specialized search engines to find control systems reachable online.
ANAHEIM, CALIF.–The theft of intellectual property through attacks on U.S. networks, both government-owned and private, has become one of the major concerns for officials at the top level of the federal government, not just among security staffs, but at the upper echelons of the White House and intelligence agencies, as well, the former top cybersecurity adviser to President Obama said.
A fraud ring that attacked financial transfer systems in an attempt to get at wealthy high-end banking customers used a complicated web of malware and compromised servers in several countries to walk off with an estimated $78 million earlier this year. While the attacks targeted financial systems, the victims seem to be limited to companies involved in manufacturing, import-export businesses, and state or local governments.
Although DDoS attacks have been a serious problem for more than a decade now and security staffs have a good handle on how they’re executed and how to handle them, attackers constantly adjust their tactics in order to defeat the best defenses available. One of the more recent tactics adopted by attackers is the use of open DNS resolvers to amplify their attacks, and this technique, while not novel, is beginning to cause serious problems for the organizations that come under these attacks.
Defense secretary Leon Panetta couldn’t resist, could he? He couldn’t fight the urge to dig deep into the information security cliché handbook and yank out that old chestnut about a Cyber Pearl Harbor.Seriously, is there a more cringe-inducing, FUD-filled phrase than Cyber Pearl Harbor? Never mind that it’s offensive to the families of those who fell on that date, but it raises the questions of whether the leader of the United States Department of Defense is so disengaged from reality that he decides that’s the best crutch to lean on? Or does he just need a new speech writer?
Attacks against SCADA and industrial-control systems have become a major concern for private companies as well as government agencies, with executives and officials worried about the potential effects of a major compromise. Security experts in some circles have been warning about the possible ramifications of such an attack for some time now, and researchers have found scores of vulnerabilities in SCADA and ICS systems in the last couple of years. Now, engineers at Kaspersky Lab have begun work on new operating system designed to be a secure-by-design environment for the operation of SCADA and ICS systems.
One of three previously unseen pieces of malware discovered during forensic analysis of the Flame malware command-and-control servers has been identified as a secondary surveillance tool deployed against specially identified targets, and only after an initial Flame or Gauss compromise, researchers said today.
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