A New Report from a Washington D.C. think tank with ties to the Obama
Administration says the U.S. needs to overhaul its cyber security
planning and issue a kind of Monroe Doctrine for cyber space to
discourage attacks against U.S. interests.
With not even half of the year gone, 2011 is becoming perhaps the ugliest year on record for major attacks, breaches and incidents. Lockheed Martin, one of the larger suppliers of technology and weapons systems to the federal government, has become the latest high-profile target of a serious attack, and while such incidents are bad news indeed for the victims, they may serve a vital purpose in forcing companies to disclose more data about breaches and attacks.
An internal document listing the backdoor accounts for switches manufactured by networking equipment vendor Allied Telesis was circulating online Friday, a day after an internal support page providing instructions on accessing hard coded back door accounts in the company’s products was found to be publicly accessible.
IT administrators know there’s nothing more frustrating than losing administrative access to your network equipment. But Allied Telesis, a Japan-based maker of switches, routers and other networking devices, has a fix: guaranteed backdoors for every product.
The Wikileaks scandal has dominated headlines for the better part of two years, with revelations about the leak of classified military documents, diplomatic cables and more. Now PBS’s award-winning investigative news show, Frontline, is taking a crack at Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and the rest.
Siemens AG said on Tuesday that it was talking to its customers about what it acknowledged were “security gaps” in its Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), after an NSS Labs researcher disclosed the discovery of what he described as serious security holes in the company’s industrial control systems.
Dillon Beresford, the NSS Labs researcher who disclosed serious holes in industrial control system software from Siemens says the company is downplaying the seriousness of the vulnerabilities in its public statements, and that a supposed “fix” for the vulnerabilities is inadequate.
UPDATE: A week after a security researcher decided to cancel a technical discussion of security holes in industrial control software from Siemens, Inc., public exploits for the vulnerabilities are on hold while the company works to shore up systems running its Simatic programmable logic controller (PLC) software.
An analysis of the Qakbot worm finds the malware is more prevalent than ever and outfitted with an arsenal of data theft tools. That’s bad news for unemployed workers in Massachusetts, where the Department of Labor network is still recovering from a rampant Qakbot infection.
Security researcher Dillon Beresford decided not to present a talk at the TakedownCon in Dallas on Thursday, citing concerns about mayhem that could have resulted. But in an e-mail, he told Threatpost that the vulnerabilities could allow remote attackers to start or stop Siemens Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and harvest information from the devices.
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