Government

The other Korea’s specter loomed large among speculators and fingers pointers Wednesday morning when reports surfaced that the networks of several prominent South Korean banks and broadcasters dropped offline.

Researchers have uncovered a long-term cyber-espionage campaign that used a combination of legitimate software packages and commodity malware tools to target a variety of heavy industry, government intelligence agencies and political activists. Known as the TeamSpy crew because of its affinity for using the legitimate TeamViewer application as part of its toolset, the attackers may have been active for as long as 10 years, researchers say.

The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday joined a chorus of privacy advocates supporting changes to a 1986 law that currently allows the government to review some emails without a warrant.

The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) believes that “serious weaknesses remain” in the ways that the Internal Revenue Service handles its internal network, problems that could directly implicate taxpayer data according to a report the regulatory group released on Friday.

Politicians, security researchers and others involved in the fight against cybercrime often compare the situation to efforts to combat traditional organized crime. Some of the tricks and tactics are comparable, and so are the motives, but there’s one major difference between the two groups: Cybercriminals have virtually no fear of being caught. The chances of a cybercriminal being caught, prosecuted and actually serving time in prison are incredibly small, especially in relation to the volume of cybercrime activity occurring today.

VANCOUVER–When Peiter Zatko, the security researcher and pioneering hacker known as Mudge, joined the federal government several years ago to help run a DARPA research program, some in the security industry wondered what effect someone with his background could have in an organization as famously change-resistant and slow as the Department of Defense. As it turns out, the Cyber Fast Track program he started has been a huge success and though the CFT is ending in less than a month, the program may well serve as a model for other agile research programs inside the U.S. government. 

Google today revealed – if in vague terms – it last year received less than 1,000 “national Security letters” from federal authorities seeking financial and communications data on up to almost 2,000 individuals. The disclosure of such government requests marks a first for a major Internet service provider.