Government


Stars Attack on Iran Was Early Version of Duqu

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.

CIA Admits It Monitors, Analyzes Facebook, Twitter

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 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.

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.

Microsoft Research has proposed a mitigation for a known potential attack against verifiable electronic voting machines that could help prevent insiders from being able to alter votes after the fact. The countermeasure to the “trash attack” involves adding a cryptographic hash to the receipts that voters receive.

With more and more victims of identity theft minted every day, figuring out if you’re one of the unlucky masses with a leaked email password is yeoman’s work. Now one security researcher is trying to make it easy with PwnedList.com, a Web site that collects leaked and stolen data, then tells Internet users whether their information is in it.