The specter of politically motivated cyber attacks reared its head again this week, while closer to home, the names of two software giants: Google and Adobe were all over the headlines when it came to security this week, as several bugs were found…and fixed in the companies products. Read
on for the full week in review.
The nation of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, found its access to the Internet severed by a massive denial of service attack, according to a report by Arbor Networks. The source or motivation of the attack isn’t known, but it is believed that the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have targeted the country’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunication (or PTT), the main conduit for Internet traffic in and out of the authoritarian nation.
Search giant Google violated the United Kingdom’s Data Protection Act by gobbling up personal data, in addition to images and GPS data, with its roving Street View autos.
According to a report by the BBC, the UK’s Information Commissioner ruled there was a “significant breach” of the country’s data privacy laws by Google, which will not face monetary penalties or punishment, but will have to allow its data protection practices to be audited by the Information Commissioner’s Office.
UPDATED: ICS-CERT, the emergency response team for industrial control systems, has warned companies that run SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) software that the systems running it may be easily discovered using a free Web based search engine dubbed Shodan.
A new family of Trojan Horse programs is being used to stifle political opposition to the Communist Party in Vietnam, according to an analysis by researchers at SecureWorks. The Trojan, dubbed Vecebot, is a new family of malware and has been linked to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against bloggers who have written critically of the ruling Communist Party and Chinese mining operations in the country, SecureWorks said.
Autumn conferences grabbed the headlines this week as presentations at the Toorcon Conference in San Diego and SecTor in Toronto wrapped up October, with revelations about the vulnerability of social networking sessions and critical infrastructure headlining.
Endgame Systems is expanding from the government sector to commercial anti botnet services with a $29 million investment.
A report in The Atlantic claims that a technical glitch at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming took 50 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) offline for around 45 minutes on Saturday – a serious breach of national security.
Federal agents on Monday raided the Melrose, Massachusetts home of a missile systems expert who formerly worked at U.S. defense
contractor Raytheon. Several boxes of items were taken by FBI and Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agents from the home, which is owned by Richard M. Lloyd.
Companies that make supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and industrial control software are still dangerously lax when it comes to application security and vulnerable to attack, according to a researcher from security firm Tenable Inc. who warned that the use of coded administrative “backdoor” passwords of the type used by the Stuxnet worm isn’t uncommon.
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