Government


Belgian Telco Belgacom Compromised

A Belgian telecom company that handles some of the undersea cables that carry international voice traffic said Monday that its internal network had been compromised sometime in the last few months and malware had planted on some of its systems. Belgacom said the attack only affected its own systems, and not those of customers, and said it has filed a complaint with the Belgian federal authorities about the incident.

Threatpost News Wrap, September 13, 2013

Dennis Fisher and Mike Mimoso talk about the news of the last couple of weeks, including the revelations of the NSA’s anti-cryptography capabilities, the botnet making use of Tor and the Kimsuky cyberespionage attack.

Unanswered Questions on the NSA Leaks

The flood of documents regarding the NSA’s collection methods and capabilities that have been leaked this summer has produced thousands of news stories and several metric tons of speculation about what it all means. But for all of the postulating, analysis and reporting, there are still a lot of questions left unanswered in all of this. Let’s try to address some of them.


The federal government has released hundreds of pages of documents, including orders and opinions from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, related to the NSA’s surveillance programs, but legislators who have been involved in the process say that there still are significant details of the agency’s email and phone collection activities that remain secret. Senators […]

UPDATE–The revelations last week in leaked NSA documents that the intelligence agency had influenced the standards process at NIST to allegedly deliberately weaken unnamed cryptographic algorithms have spurred a huge amount of speculation and discussion in the security community about the implications and consequences of the NSA’s actions. For its part, NIST is seeking to […]

The IETF is considering a range of options to help reengineer some of the fundamental protocols that underpin the Internet in response to revelations that the NSA and other intelligence agencies are conducting widespread, dragnet-style surveillance online. The group, which is responsible for developing the standards that govern much of the technical workings of the […]

Kaspersky Lab is always working to develop new technologies for protecting critical computer systems from cybercriminals. In July, I had the opportunity to represent Kaspersky at a symposium sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), focused on the national Cybersecurity Framework in the U.S., a document that has the potential to define the standards for protecting critical infrastructure for years to come.

As security experts and cryptographers continue to debate and discuss the implications of the revelations of the NSA’s capabilities against various encryption protocols and systems, some of the larger Internet companies are taking steps to protect their users’ data against the new threat. Google, which has been in the middle of many of the conversations […]