Forget about data stealing trojans. Unidentified thieves got a hold of top secret plans for a joint French-British drone aircraft project the old fashioned way: by snatching an executive’s briefcase at a Paris train station.
The Obama administration today unveiled a new consumer-privacy plan designed to help better protect users’ rights online, including a privacy “bill of rights” that spells out exactly what consumers should expect from the companies they work with online. In conjunction with this new initiative, Google has said that it finally will add the do-not-track button to its Chrome browser.
Researchers are warning about a flaw in the Domain Name System (DNS) that could allow attackers to keep a malicious domain alive and accessible, despite efforts to remove it.
The anarchic hacking collective Anonymous took credit for a successful attack on Web sites belonging to the FTC. The attack, on Friday, was in protest for the U.S. Government’s support of ACTA, the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.[Story updated to include comment from the FTC.]
While Russians prepare for their presidential election on March 4, attackers already are ahead of the game, having begun a series of DDoS attacks against several media sites and at least one site belonging to a candidate. The attacks are coming from several different botnets, but so far haven’t had the desired effect of completely taking the sites offline.
A bipartisan group of Senators introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 yesterday. The bill aims to secure federal and private sector networks that provide essential services or that are deemed “critical” to the nation in some other way.
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.
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