VIEW SLIDESHOW Scenes from SAS 2012At Kaspersky Lab’s Security Analyst Summit last week, over 100 researchers and law enforcement officials converged in Cancun, Mexico over the course of five days to network and discuss a veritable cornucopia of security topics. Topics such as privacy, SCADA and PLC security, tracking cybercriminals and the evolution of malware were discussed in depth.
Security researchers made good on a promise to release new exploits for programmable logic controllers (PLCs). The exploits include one targeting a flaw in the implementation of the EtherNet/IP (Industrial Protocol) used in many IP-enabled PLCs. The security hole, if left unaddressed, could enable a remote attacker to crash or unexpectedly reboot the devices, which are critical components of almost every industrial – and critical infrastructure installation.
President Obama is asking for $769 million to fund information security initiatives via the Department of Homeland Security in 2013. That amount is nearly twice what DHS asked for last year to fund its cybersecurity work.
The fallout from last month’s S4 Conference continues in February, with a planned Valentine’s Day release of tools that make it easy to test and exploit vulnerable programmable logic controllers and other industrial control systems. Among the releases will be a tool for cracking passwords on the common ECOM programmable logic controllers by Koyo Electronics, a Japanese firm, according to a blog post by Reid Wightman for Digital Bond.
A report finds that around half of the Fortune 500 corporations and government agencies infected with the DNS Changer malware are still infected, two months after authorities moved to shut down the massive botnet.
CANCUN, MEXICO – A prominent privacy activist says that leading software vendors, and the U.S. government are failing the public when it comes to Internet privacy, and that big changes are needed to prevent consumers from criminals, advertisers and government spies.
CANCUN, MEXICO — A panel of top law enforcement officers in charge of cyber criminal investigations reveals that the guys with the white hats face an uphill climb if they want to take down cyber criminal kingpins, with outdated laws and processes on the one hand, and an increasingly skeptical and privacy-conscious public on the other.
Razvan Manole Cernaianu, perhaps better known as Tinkode, the hacker who gained notoriety after allegedly compromising a number of websites, including those of NASA, the European Space Agency, and Sun Microsystems, was recently arrested in Romania.
CANCUN–The skill of attackers, combined with the difficulty and cost of finding and fixing vulnerabilities in software–especially after deployment–has reached the point that it’s now more effective and efficient for vendors to concentrate on making life more difficult for those attackers looking to exploit bugs.
Verisign, the Internet security company responsible for management of the .COM domain, told federal regulators that it was the victim of several successful attacks in 2010, but that those incidents were not reported to the company’s management until September, 2011. The news was first reported by Reuters.
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.
