Government


Google Warns of Spike in Iranian Phishing Attacks

With a key election in Iran looming on Friday, Google officials say they have seen a major uptick in the volume of phishing attacks against users in Iran, possibly coming from the same group that was using fake Google certificates to attack Iranian targets in 2011 after the compromise of DigiNotar.

New Bill Would Declassify FISC Opinions

A group of eight senators from both parties have introduced a new bill that would require the attorney general to declassify as many of the rulings of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as possible as a way of bringing into the sunlight much of the law and opinion that guides the government’s surveillance efforts.


Google’s chief legal officer addressed a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller contesting recent media reports regarding the breadth of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs and requesting that his company be allowed to publish more national security request data in order to quell media speculation.

A group of people, including a former federal prosecutor and the parents of a Navy SEAL sniper killed in action, have filed a class-action law suit against the National Security Agency, Verizon and President Obama over the NSA’s collection of cell phone data. The suit says the order that enabled the surveillance program is “the broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued” and enables indiscriminate collection of data.

The top U.S. intelligence official addressed the recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s covert cell-phone and email data collection surveillance programs on Thursday, saying that the programs have been ongoing for years, are fully authorized under U.S. law and that the leaks regarding the programs are “reprehensible” and could endanger the country’s national security.

We were warned. Over and over again. Not just by privacy advocates and by security experts and by civil liberties organizations and by the guy on the corner in the tin foil hat shouting about the government intercepting his brain waves. We were warned by some of the very people charged with overseeing the administration’s efforts to expand its domestic intelligence gathering capabilities. We were warned by politicians.

The predominant narrative among U.S. officials and cybersecurity experts is that Chinese hackers, allegedly at the behest of their government, are thoroughly compromising the computer networks of American government, defense, and public sector organizations in order to steal any valuable data found within them on a daily basis. What you don’t hear so often, though we’d be remiss to ignore it and you’d be a fool not to believe it, is that the U.S. is doing the same exact thing to China.

WASHINGTON–The topic of critical infrastructure security may be the prettiest girl at the dance right now for both politicians and technology companies, but the problem of attackers going after these targets is one that security people have been dealing with for some time. But that doesn’t mean they have a good handle on it or clear solution for the problem. In fact, there are still a number of old obstacles standing in the way of addressing the issue.