NSA Budget Doc Reveals Investment in Crypto Breaking, Hacking
New documents leaked by Edward Snowden quantify the resources supporting an extensive intelligence community crypto-cracking program.
Government
Threatpost News Wrap, August 30, 2013
Dennis Fisher and Mike Mimoso discuss the big stories of the last couple of weeks, including the Syrian Electronic Army’s attacks against the registrar for the New York Times and Twitter, and the release of Facebook’s first transparency report.
APT Groups Using G20 Summit as Lure in Targeted Attacks
A spate of known cyberespionage groups have been using the G20 Summit as a lure for new waves of attacks, and security researchers say one of the groups is likely the same one that was responsible for the attack on the New York Times earlier this year.
Vermont’s Norwich University secured another round of funding – $9.9 million in federal contracts – for cybersecurity research this week.
Newly declassified documents released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the EFF show that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2011 declared that the National Security Agency’s techniques for collecting upstream Internet communications was unconstitutional and illegal.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week issued a series of guidelines regarding the regulation of radio frequency (RF) technology in medical devices, moves that if put into practice, could eventually help shore up the increasingly vulnerable medical device security world.
It has been a rough few months for the National Security Agency, and specifically for its director, Gen. Keith Alexander. Now, there’s a petition, on the White House’s own Web site, to have Alexander removed from his position.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration restored its servers yesterday, 10 days after an attack that knocked the agency’s website offline.
Dennis Fisher and Mike Mimoso discuss the news from Black Hat and DEF CON, particularly the fact that the Web seems to be broken and that a lot of the attacks revealed in Las Vegas don’t have easy solutions.
When Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency and chief of U.S. Cyber Command, agreed to deliver the opening keynote at Black Hat USA 2013, he had no idea that by the time he took the stage many of the NSA’s most secret information-collection programs would be public knowledge, thanks to Edward Snowden.
