An indictment filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York charges seven individuals with a a global scheme to commit Internet advertising fraud. The scheme infected more than four million machines in over 100 countries with malware. It is believed to have netted the scammers more than $14 million in commissions from online advertisers.
The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is credited with helping to create the modern Internet, used a conference to call on hackers and other visionaries to help save it.
UPDATED–There were widespread Internet outages and slowdowns on Monday after backbone provider Level3 Communications had a major outage, affecting some downstream providers and enterprises. The company says that the problem stemmed from a software issue with some of its routers.
by Dan GeerEditor’s Note: As the CISO of In-Q-Tel, the CIA-backed strategic investment firm focused on developing technologies for the intelligence community, Dan Geer gets paid to help find the answers to big questions about computer security, national security, privacy and technology. Headlines proliferate about sophisticated cyber attacks, the looming specter of cyber warfare and ongoing espionage by nations like China and Russia. That means Dan’s job gets more important with each passing day. So what’s on Dan Geer’s mind these days? We asked him what questions he was mulling and, as usual, the answers we got back were both eye-opening and provocative. Here, in Monday morning ‘shot of espresso’ format (and with as little editing as possible) is our three minute speed date with Dan’s brain.
A few months after the hysteria around Stuxnet had died down, officials in Iran announced in April that some sensitive systems in the government’s networks had been attacked by a new piece of malware, known then as Stars. It now appears that attack was, in fact, the first appearance of an early version of Duqu, the most recent in a line of sophisticated attack tools that experts say have been designed to take out specific targets in a variety of sensitive networks.
Infosec Insider content is written by a trusted community of Threatpost cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
Sponsored Content is paid for by an advertiser. Sponsored content is written and edited by members of our sponsor community. This content creates an opportunity for a sponsor to provide insight and commentary from their point-of-view directly to the Threatpost audience. The Threatpost editorial team does not participate in the writing or editing of Sponsored Content.
