Remote hackers springing inmates from their jail cells — it sounds like a plot lifted from an old episode of “24” or “Prison Break.” But authorities are concerned by new research that claims such an attack is feasible.
In news that seems like it could be lifted from an old 24 or Prison Break plotline, authorities are concerned by new research that claims hackers could remotely open the cell doors of federal prisons.In addition to staging a jailbreak, hackers could sabotage a prison’s intercom system and closed-circuit television system to cause further nightmares for federal authorities.
It was a busy weekend for the shadowy collective of Internet hackers and activists that calls itself Anonymous, with claims by the group to have launched attacks that took down the Web pages of both government- and private sector Web sites as well as public- and Internet personalities, including Judge William Adams, the subject of a viral video that shows him reportedly beating his daughter with a belt.
by Dan GeerEditor’s Note: As the CISO of In-Q-Tel, the CIA-backed strategic investment firm focused on developing technologies for the intelligence community, Dan Geer gets paid to help find the answers to big questions about computer security, national security, privacy and technology. Headlines proliferate about sophisticated cyber attacks, the looming specter of cyber warfare and ongoing espionage by nations like China and Russia. That means Dan’s job gets more important with each passing day. So what’s on Dan Geer’s mind these days? We asked him what questions he was mulling and, as usual, the answers we got back were both eye-opening and provocative. Here, in Monday morning ‘shot of espresso’ format (and with as little editing as possible) is our three minute speed date with Dan’s brain.
A few months after the hysteria around Stuxnet had died down, officials in Iran announced in April that some sensitive systems in the government’s networks had been attacked by a new piece of malware, known then as Stars. It now appears that attack was, in fact, the first appearance of an early version of Duqu, the most recent in a line of sophisticated attack tools that experts say have been designed to take out specific targets in a variety of sensitive networks.
The Associated Press published a report today detailing, for the first time, a unit within the CIA, referring to itself as the ‘vengeful librarians,’ that is responsible for monitoring the vast and various social networks, local and international news, radio, and television, Internet chat rooms, and pretty much anything from which they can procure intelligence.
In its most blunt statement to date, the U.S. government accused both China and Russia of conducting far flung cyber espionage campaigns against U.S. and other Western firms in an effort to promote domestic interests.
In a speech on Wednesday, Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel said that a federal plan for qualifying and providing security audits on private sector cloud providers will become mandatory for any agency that wanted to contact with third party cloud providers, according to a report on GovInfoSecurity.com. But even as the U.S. federal government forges ahead with plans to shift a quarter of its IT spending to cloud-based services, efforts to launch that program – the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP)- are falling way behind schedule, according to a GAO report.
UPDATE: An independent security researcher has warned officials in Australia, the US and China about a serious, remotely exploitable hole in language translation software that is used by leading corporations, universities and governments.
A newly discovered installer for the Duqu malware includes an exploit for a previously unknown vulnerability in the Windows kernel that allows remote code execution. Microsoft is working on a fix for the kernel vulnerability right now. The exact location and nature of the flaw isn’t clear right now.
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