Government

For five years, it hid in the weeds of networks used by Eastern European diplomats, government employees and scientific research organizations, stealing data and infecting more machines in an espionage campaign rivaling Flame and others of its ilk. The campaign, called Rocra or Red October by researchers at Kaspersky Lab, focused not only on workstations, but mobile devices and networking gear to gain a foothold inside strategic organizations. Once inside, attackers pivoted internally and stole everything from files on desktops, smartphones and FTP servers, to email databases using exploits developed in China and Russian malware, Kaspersky researchers said.

A 24-year-old Algerian man remains in a Thai jail awaiting extradition to the United States, where he is suspected of masterminding more than $100 million in global bank heists using the ZeuS and SpyEye Trojans.Malaysian authorities believe they’ve apprehended the hacker Hamza Bendelladj, who they say has been jetsetting around the world using millions of dollars stolen online from various banks. He was arrested at a Bangkok airport enroute from Malaysia to Egypt.

A week after the disclosure of the existence of a fraudulent certificate for Google domains that resulted from the mistaken issuance of a subordinate certificate by a Turkish certificate authority, officials at TURKTRUST are continuing to defend their actions in response to the incident, and say that there is “no evidence of any attack or hacking attempt on our system”.

The series of missteps and failures that led to a Turkish government-related agency eventually ending up with a valid wild card certificate for Google domains began in June 2011 when the TURKTRUST certificate authority began preparing for an audit of its systems and started moving some certificate profiles from production systems to test systems. Two months later, a pair of subordinate certificates–which carried the full power and inherited trust of TURKTRUST’s root certificate as far as most browsers were concerned–were issued, and one of them later was used by a Turkish government transportation and utility agency to create an attacker’s holy grail: a valid certificate enabling him to intercept encrypted Google traffic.

UPDATE – The Senate today rejected the inclusion of four privacy-friendly amendments before voting to reauthorize the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that grants the federal government the authority to clandestinely monitor electronic communications involving foreign citizens coming into or out of the United States without the probable cause required for traditional warrants.

In the early days of the Obama administration, the president declared cyberspace a critical asset. Since then, little more than lip service has been paid on a policy level to the security of the country’s critical infrastructure, despite increasing public awareness of the problem and high-profile attacks on business and government alike.

The European Union has set a series of ambitious goals for itself: by 2020, the 27 member states expect to collectively use 20 percent renewable energy, reduce CO2 emissions by 20 percent, and increase energy efficiency by 20 percent. In order to accomplish these goals, Europe will need to perform a major overhaul to its power grid, which will play an integral role in the development of the Union’s proposed energy economy.