Critical Infrastructure

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is sounding alarms about a collection of overly vague cyber-security bills making their way through Congress.

The security firm Alienvault reports that its own research on phishing attacks against non governmental organizations supporting the Tibetan Government in Exile is now being used as bait in a new round of phishing attacks on those same NGOs.

Threatpost spent much of the last year chasing after Greg Hoglund, the founder and CEO of HB Gary. First, it was to get his reaction to the bruising encounter his firm had with the hacking group Anonymous. Then it was an endless series of requests on the aftermath of that hack, including the departure of HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr, and the company’s decision to pull out of the RSA Conference in 2011. When Greg finally did speak out it wasn’t to us.So we were happy when Hoglund, whose firm was recently acquired by the company Mantech International Corp., agreed to speak at the Kaspersky Lab Security Analysts’ Summit in Cancun, Mexico in February. His talk there on “Lateral Movement and Other APT Interaction Patterns Within the Enterprise” reinforced Hoglund’s reputation as one of the top experts on malicious code.Threatpost editor Paul Roberts caught up with Hoglund after the speech. And, while Anonymous and HBGary Federal were not up for discussion on the record, Hoglund offered some great insights into the delicate art of tracking down remote access trojans (or RATs) after they have a foothold in your network, as well as the mistakes companies make in trying to prevent and respond to security incidents.

Researchers around the world put their heads together and solved the identity of ‘mystery code’ in the Duqu Trojan horse program, researchers from Kaspersky Lab announced on Monday.

A Federal Judge acceded to a request from the U.S. Attorney’s Office to extend the operation of Domain Name System servers that are the last lifeline to the Internet for hundreds of thousands of machines infected by the DNSChanger malware, following a bust of the group controlling the infected machines in November.

As information filtered out about the arrests of senior members of the group Anonymous and LulzSec on Tuesday, a portrait emerged of a group of mostly teenaged and 20 something hackers who blended greed and ideology in a string of high profile hacks stretching back more than a year.

The security community might understand what the Stuxnet worm did. Now the war is over what the worm means – Stuxnet’s legacy, if you will. The latest to weigh in on that question is Steve Croft, of the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes.