The Department of Defense is pulling the plug on Cyber Fast Track, a program aimed at tapping reformed hackers and other security hotshots to solve cyber-defense problems quickly.
Looking to circumvent the typical onerous, long-term process of funding grants, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) used the program to improve the government’s ability to keep up with fast-moving bad actors on the cybercriminal stage.
Malware researchers at Seculert say they've found two more cases of highly targeted malware coming out of China, and claim to have back-traced it to the same geographical region that was fingered as the source of the Project Aurora attacks.
"It's using a similar MO – infected PDFs sent out as part of a spear-phishing campaign," Aviv Raff, CTO of Seculert, told The Register. "We resolved it and found it was reporting to an IP address in China with the same physical location as the previous attacks. They are up to something."
LAST month, US President Barack Obama issued an executive order to bolster his nation’s cyber-defenses, a move unpopular with some hacker movements and civil society advocates, eagerly awaited by many, and considered insufficient by some experts.
Speaking at the 2013 RSA Conference in San Francisco, FBI Director Robert Muller explained that the partnership between government agencies and private industry must be strengthened, also saying that a new approach is needed in the effort to combat cybercrime.
Muller has highlighted the fact that after 9/11, the FBI has been trying to fight terrorism by identifying and disrupting terrorist threats.
China has apparently added a unique new weapon to its sprawling arsenal. A new report from U.S. security company Mandiant reveals a new Chinese military unit dedicated to carrying out hacking attacks against Western targets that include major corporations and industries. Such a move is almost unprecedented and exemplifies how conflict is evolving into the digital realm. It has become all too easy for a hostile nation to target another's infrastructure though the internet.
The Indian government reportedly has received the PIN details of BlackBerry handsets shipped to the country, and may ask for similar data of every BlackBerry handset worldwide to allow it to monitor messages between users in the country and abroad.
The White House and Congress are said to be planning new cybersecurity legislation, rumored to be announced this week, as intelligence reports suggest a cyberespionage campaign is taking aim at the country’s economic competitiveness.
The National Intelligence Estimate cited China as the main country responsible for hacking into secure U.S. institutional and business computer networks to obtain data or information illegally for financial gain. The current attempt to breach U.S. computer security is so large, in fact, the Washington Post calls the endeavor “massive and sustained.”
The government of Myanmar denied today that they were behind attempts on hacking emails of journalists around the world.
Google had warned that the country may have been behind the "state-sponsored attacks" on local and international reporters. There were 12 attacks last week, where the journalists received messages from Google when they logged into Gmail that hackers "may be attempting to compromise your account or your computer."
The French news magazine L'Express has reported that in May computers in the offices of France's then-president Nicolas Sarkozy were attacked by Flame, the malware jointly developed by the US and Israel to collect information on the Iranian nuclear program, and that staff at the Elysee Palace covered up the attack. "Hackers have not only managed to get to the heart of French political power," L'Express reported, "but they were able to search the computers of close advisers of Nicolas Sarkozy."
President Barack Obama has signed a classified directive laying out new guidelines for cyber-operations that national security planners can use to protect U.S. computer networks from attack, a senior administration official said Wednesday.
"It continues to be our policy that we shall undertake the least action necessary to mitigate threats and that we will prioritize network defense and law enforcement as the preferred courses of action," the official, who asked not to be named, said in an email.
