Cyber security experts warned on Thursday that the U.S. government is failing to learn the lessons of past computer and intelligence breaches and often exhibits a careless attitude towards securing the data it keeps.
Allegations made on Wednesday by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown that journalists working for Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid used malicious software to break into and gather information from computers belonging to the subjects of investigations was greeted with a strong denial by a spokewoman from News International.
A hardware hacking group is claiming to have found a way to turn Vodafone’s Sure Signal Femtocell base stations into hacking devices that can siphon off subscribers’ phone data and then use it to make calls on their account.
In the face of continued attacks on federal agencies and contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and IRC Federal that do highly sensitive security work for the U.S. government, Sen. John McCain has asked Senate leaders to appoint a select committee to look into the attacks and data leaks that have plagued Washington throughout 2011.
You might think that everything that needs to be written on Stuxnet already has. After all, Threatpost has spilled (virtual) column inches on the stealthy worm, which targeted Siemens Simatic S7 programmable logic controllers. That’s in addition to posts by the likes of Symantec, McAfee and the mainstream media. But there’s still a story behind the story that hasn’t been told….until now.
Digital civil liberties organization, the Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF), appealed to the U.S. District Court of Colorado arguing that encrypted personal data is covered by the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self incrimination.
The loose hacking collective known as Anonymous resumed its campaign against the U.S. government and companies that do business with it on Monday, releasing a trove of documents from government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.
Members of the loosely organized group conducting the AntiSec hacking campaign have compromised a company called IRC Federal, which does contracting for the FBI and other federal agencies, posting a large trove of information online in retaliation for what the group says is IRC Federal’s record of “selling out their ‘skills’ to the US empire.
One thing that CME Group, the company that runs the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, wants to make perfectly clear is that it places a “high value on protecting its intellectual property and trade secrets.” That was the clear message from CME following the arrest of an employee for stealing company secrets.
In a House committee hearing on cybersecurity threats Thursday, a DHS official said he was aware of some cases in which software and hardware manufactured overseas had arrived in the U.S. pre-loaded with security bugs. However, the official did not say that those cases involved vulnerabilities or backdoors planted intentionally.
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