Lawmakers are urging the Food and Drug Administration to more thoroughly vet certain implantable medical devices for security, not just safety, risks. They include life-saving defibrillators, insulin pumps and pacemakers, which have been shown in recent years to be vulnerable to remote attacks.
The National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) of the Philipines has asked for assistance from law enforcement after a handful of government sites in the country, including the NTC’s site, were brought offline this morning in a hack allegedly carried out by PrivateX, an offshoot of the hacktivist group Anonymous.
So now it’s the White House’s turn. Having taken a swing at just about every other piece of the U.S. government’s network infrastructure, attackers, reportedly based in China, recently targeted a machine on an unclassified network inside the White House Military Office and were able to compromise it through a spear-phishing attack. The attack has drawn a lot of attention, as stories that include the words “White House” and “attack” do, but the notion that this attack may be the one that finally forces the U.S. to address the threat from foreign attacks is misguided.
Dennis Fisher talks with Gary McGraw of Cigital about the release of the BSIMM4 data, how software security programs have matured in the last four years and how the government has become distracted by cyberwar and is ignoring software security, to its detriment.
For several years now, Congress has been wandering around the wilderness, trying to figure out why so much of America’s intellectual property is being sucked into a giant vortex somewhere over Asia and whether they should do something to stop it, like maybe pass a cybersecurity law. They’ve taken innumerable swings at it, and struck out every time, with the two parties unable to agree on what needs to be in a cybersecurity bill and what entities should be covered by it. Now Congress is in recess and it looks less and less likely that anything will be passed before the end of the session. And, for once, we all should be thankful for our lawmakers’ inability to act.
People in the security industry often criticize the federal government for being woefully behind the times on information security, not understanding the current threat landscape and not having enough trained law enforcement agents who can handle sophisticated computer crimes. Steven Chabinsky doesn’t want to hear it. A longtime FBI lawyer and former chief of the bureau’s Cyber Intelligence Section, Chabinsky believes that the government is doing a better job at security than ever before, as is the private sector. But, he also believes the attackers are still gaining ground every day.
Huawei, the massive Chinese technology company that has come under criticism for its close ties to China’s government, is defending itself, saying that it has never stolen national intelligence or intellectual property and does not support any groups that do so. The company has been a frequent target of critics who allege that it trades information and secrets with the Chinese government, allegations its officials have consistently denied.
A Tempe, Arizona man was arrested Tuesday for allegedly taking part in the June 2011 attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.’s network, in which passwords and other personal data was stolen from one million user accounts.Raynaldo Rivera, 20, was charged with conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer, which could earn him up to 15 years in prison if he is found guilty. He was ordered to appear in a Los Angeles courtroom Sept. 14.
The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) posted a broad agency announcement [PDF] recently, calling on contractors to submit concept papers detailing technological demonstrations of ‘cyberspace warfare operations’ (CWO) capabilities.
As security defenses have advanced and become more adaptive in the last decade, malware authors and attackers have had to respond, looking for new ways to get their malicious software onto PCs or exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities. One target is the system BIOS, the low-level instruction set that loads when the computer boots, and now the U.S. government has released some draft specifications for helping to secure BIOS implementations.
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