Spear phishing attacks against U.S. government officials, politicians and public policy wonks are using a D.C. think tank favored by the Obama Administration as bait, according to a report from researcher Mila Parkour.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge will present evidence of what they say is wide spread manipulation of search results that direct unwitting Web surfers to dodgy and illicit online pharmacy sites.
Reports about the potential for biometric scanning to usher in a new age of super snooping have prompted a retort from the industry itself, as one CEO used an interview with InfoSecurity.com this week to throw cold water on research from Carnegie Mellon University and argue that people – not face scanners – are the source of privacy breaches.
DEFCON, the cash-only, aliases-welcome hacker conference took place in the moral vacuum of Las Vegas, Nevada this weekend, as it has every Summer since 1993. This year there was no shortage of controversial presentations and panel discussions. If you were short the airfare, the $150 entrance fee, gave up on the three hour line-ageddon to pick up your badge or – admit it – your boss (or spouse) just wouldn’t let you go, have no fear. The show was crawling with media, including computer security reporters and even the mainstream media (CBS and NPR were there). Here’s our round up of some of the major stories to come out of this year’s DEFCON conference.
Hacker collectives, LulzSec and Anonymous claim to have compromised the servers of the Missouri Sheriff’s Association, posting some 10GB of sensitive data online.
By B.K. DeLongWith alleged Anonymous leadership such as Sabu and opponents such as th3j35t3r tweeting about their supposed shenanigans in Las Vegas, the question on everyone’s mind this week is whether Anonymous is truly walking the halls of this week’s Black Hat and DEFCON hacker conferences. Some believe the answer to that question is almost certainly ‘yes’ but not for the reasons you might think – here’s my opinion based on several discussions I’ve had throughout the week.
Researchers at the annual Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas have demonstrated how cloud computing, facial recognition technology, Facebook, a freely available personal information can be used to match faces in a crowd to detailed online profiles.
Former Microsoft executive Steven VanRoekel will succeed current Chief of Information Technology officer Vivek Kundra, the White House announced Thursday, according to a report in The New York Times.
Global 2000 companies can be split into two categories, according to the author of a new white paper from McAfee (PDF); those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know.“The only organizations that are exempt from this threat,” writes the paper’s author, Dmitri Alperovitch, “are those that don’t have anything valuable or interesting worth stealing.”
Dillon Beresford used a presentation at the Black Hat Briefings on Wednesday to detail more software vulnerabilities affecting industrial controllers from Siemens, including a serious remotely exploitable denial of service vulnerability, more hard-coded administrative passwords, and even an easter egg program buried in the code that runs industrial machinery around the globe.
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