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In order to combat a wave of cyberattacks that have rattled the US banking industry since last year, the FBI has given certain banking executives extensive briefings of their classified investigations. The collaboration is part of a new policy being initiated by the FBI to try and foster closer cooperation between authorities and the private sector. It reportedly involved a number of bank officials being given high-level security clearance before a video conference briefing last month. During the briefing, the FBI’s executive assistant director Richard McFeely urged bank executives to share any data they have on cyberattacks they’ve suffered.

It was a brazen bank heist, but a 21st-century version in which the criminals never wore ski masks, threatened a teller or set foot in a vault. In two precision operations that involved people in more than two dozen countries acting in close coordination and with surgical precision, thieves stole $45 million from thousands of A.T.M.'s in a matter of hours. In New York City alone, the thieves responsible for A.T.M. withdrawals struck 2,904 machines over 10 hours starting on Feb. 19, withdrawing $2.4 million. The operation included sophisticated computer experts operating in the shadowy world of Internet hacking, manipulating...

Middle East- and North Africa-based criminal hackers are preparing cyberattacks this week against the websites of high-profile U.S. government agencies, banks and other companies, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The attacks, dubbed #OpUSA, for Operation USA, will begin Tuesday, the department said in a warning bulletin circulated to the private sector last week. The bulletin was first obtained and posted online by blogger and cybercrime expert Brian Krebs.

Hackers launched a coordinated cyberattack on Israel over the weekend in an attempt to “wipe Israel off the map of the Internet,” defacing some 20,000 Israeli Facebook accounts and nearly 2,000 Israeli websites. The anarchist hacking collective known as Anonymous formally launched “Operation Israel” on Sunday, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. The stated goal of the attack was to wreak havoc on Israeli servers, government websites, and Internet users. The hackers penetrated and defaced multiple Israeli websites including government, schools, banks, and a website for children with cancer, according to regional media reports. Among the government websites breached were...

How To Protect Your Computers, Networks From Anonymous Israel Cyber AttackBy Joel Leyden Israel News AgencyJerusalem, Israel --- April 2, 2013 … Threats have been made against the people of Israel for thousands of years. The latest threat now comes from a less macho, publicity seeking Internet group called Anonymous. Anonymous says that on April 7, 2013 it will "erase Israel from the Internet." It ain't gonna happen. Not today, not April 7 and not next year. “OpIsrael,” which is being organized by anti-Zionist hackers, are said to be targeting the 100 largest Websites in Israel, including banks, credit card...

A Dutch web-hosting company caused disruption and the global slowdown of the internet, according to a not-for-profit anti-spam organization. The interruptions came after Spamhaus, a spam-fighting group based in Geneva, temporarily added the Dutch firm, CyberBunker, to a blacklist that is used by e-mail providers to weed out spam. Cyberbunker is housed in a five-story former NATO bunker and famously offers its services to any website “except child porn and anything related to terrorism". As such it has often been linked to behaviour that anti-spam blacklist compilers have condemend. It retaliated with a huge 'denial of service attack'. These work...

The 2009 cyberattack by the U.S. and Israel that crippled Iran’s nuclear program by sabotaging industrial equipment constituted “an act of force” and was likely illegal under international law, according to a manual commissioned by NATO’s cyber defense center in Estonia. “Acts that kill or injure persons or destroy or damage objects are unambiguously uses of force,” according to “The Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare.” Michael N. Schmitt, the manual’s lead author, told The Washington Times that “according to the U.N. charter, the use of force is prohibited, except in self-defense.” Under the charter, states...

The Defense Science Board's new report on protecting the Pentagon's computer networks calls for the development of a special force armed with its own bombers, cruise missiles, and cyber weapons to respond to a devastating cyber attack. Kind of like a mini, conventionally-armed Strategic Command for cyber deterrence. We've heard Pentagon leaders acknowledge that they are building up their offensive cyber capabilities to deter destructive cyber attacks that could harm thousands or even millions of Americans. However, the new report says that the U.S. must go further to "ensure the President has options beyond a nuclear-only response to a catastrophic...

Last week, the American computer security firm Mandiant released a detailed study shedding light on the secret cybercorps of the Chinese government. The “Shanghai Group,” or Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army, is believed to operate out of a nondescript 12-story building (above) on the outskirts of Shanghai. Over the past six years, Mandiant claims to have tracked thousands of attacks on American industry, business, government and military targets originating from that area. Given the ubiquity of information technology, the threat of cyberattacks will continue to grow. The scope of these assaults can range from accessing confidential information and...

WASHINGTON – The United States now is facing two serious national security challenges, but they aren’t expected to be addressed effectively because of the serious budgetary headaches Congress has created, and a virtually deadlocked legislature on just about every issue pending, according to report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin. And the White House apparently isn’t paying attention. The first is the growing concern of the impact that an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, event – either natural or manmade – could have on the national grid system, on which the Department of Defense has a 99 percent dependency. The other concern...

The wave of distributed denial of service attacks that hit U.S. banks in October was next to nothing compared to what could happen if cybercriminals actually carry through with their plans for next year. According to a report released today by McAfee Labs, an impending attack on U.S. financial institutions—dubbed Project Blitzkrieg—isn’t only a possibility, it’s a “credible threat.” “McAfee Labs believes that Project Blitzkrieg is a credible threat to the financial industry and appears to be moving forward as planned,” the report reads. “Although Project Blitzkrieg hasn’t yet infected thousands of victims and we cannot directly confirm any cases...

SNIPPET: "Social media is no longer simply a fun way to share updates on the harmless idiosyncrasies of our lives. It can undermine national security, and there ought to be a more robust discussion between the Bay Area technology world and Washington on what to do about it. Cyber-terrorism, especially the potential for electronic tampering with U.S. industrial or military installations, is a paramount national security threat that Washington is working to forestall. We're all working to protect our accounts from hackers. But the cyber-threat getting far less public attention involves the social media networks we use every day and the...

Wife's bank card was denied use yesterday. Bank said their on line service was not working. I suggested Iran was mounting a cyber attack due to the war footings around Israel. Wife said I was paranoid. I did find a September article (FreeBeacon.com/iran-cyber-attacks-step-up) about Iran cyber attacking banks. Officials tried to blame The Video LOL but the article said it was Iran being upset about sanctions. Article said attacks were ongoing. Any Freepers know of a good website that reports current cyber attacks?

The U.S. is at war, a cyber war. And businesses and government are at risk, said Eric Rosenbach, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy in an interview with CNBC. "I read my intel brief every morning at 5:30 a.m. and it's never a very good news story at all," Rosenbach said. "There are a lot more attacks, and I hate to admit it but I fear that there will be some type of spectacular attack against the United States or one of our allies before there is comprehensive legislation and real appreciation to take this seriously." Just one...

WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials are increasingly convinced that Iran was the origin of a serious wave of network attacks that crippled computers across the Saudi oil industry and breached financial institutions in the United States, episodes that contributed to a warning last week from Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta that the United States was at risk of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor.” (snip) Among American officials, suspicion has focused on the “cybercorps” that Iran’s military created in 2011 — partly in response to American and Israeli cyberattacks on the Iranian nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz — though there is no hard...

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned Thursday that the United States was facing the possibility of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor” and was increasingly vulnerable to foreign computer hackers who could dismantle the nation’s power grid, transportation system, financial networks and government... ...Defense officials insisted that Mr. Panetta’s words were not hyperbole, and that he was responding to a recent wave of cyberattacks on large American financial institutions. He also cited an attack in August on the state oil company Saudi Aramco, which infected and made useless more than 30,000 computers. But Pentagon officials acknowledged that Mr. Panetta was also pushing for...

SNIPPET: "New York City is the center of a public uproar as Internet blogger Pamela Gellar rises with an “anti-jihad” ad campaign." SNIPPET: "Gellar and her group are protesting the Jihad, which in definition is the religious duty of Muslims. According to the Dictionary of Islam, jihad is defined as “A religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad . . . enjoined especially for the purpose of advancing Islam and repelling evil from Muslims.” The literal meaning of jihad, according to the British Broadcasting Network, “is struggle or effort, and it means much more than...

Bill Gertz has the grim news in the Washington Free Beacon: Hackers linked to China's government broke into one of the U.S. government's most sensitive computer networks, breaching a system used by the White House Military Office for nuclear commands, according to defense and intelligence officials familiar with the incident. One official said the cyber breach was one of Beijing's most brazen cyber attacks against the United States and highlights a failure of the Obama administration to press China on its persistent cyber attacks. Disclosure of the cyber attack also comes amid heightened tensions in Asia, as the Pentagon moved...

Hackers linked to China’s government broke into one of the U.S. government’s most sensitive computer networks, breaching a system used by the White House Military Office for nuclear commands, according to defense and intelligence officials familiar with the incident.

Hackers linked to China’s government broke into one of the U.S. government’s most sensitive computer networks, breaching a system used by the White House Military Office for nuclear commands, according to defense and intelligence officials familiar with the incident.

@mrubin1971Two news stories from recent weeks, if true, should raise a red flag in the United States that Iran is preparing to use Hezbollah to strike at U.S. interests in Latin America, if not in the United States itself.First, this story from the Lebanese news portal Naharnet and sourced in part to Israeli radio. The Naharnet story was taken down shortly after it appeared: Hezbollah is using a training base established by Iran in northern Nicaragua near the border with Honduras, the Israeli radio reported on Thursday [September 6]. “The area is cordoned off and there are around 30 members...

The Government Admits The US Power Grid Can Be Taken Out At Any Time Walter Hickey Aug. 1, 2012, 7:00 PM The Government Accountability Office just released a report backing up earlier findings: because a series of recommendations were ignored, the U.S. electric grid remains highly susceptible to cyberattacks. The grid is reliant on a number of IT systems that have known and likely unknown vulnerabilities. The result of a cyberattack on the grid could result in damage to electricity control systems, power outages, and failures in safety equipment on a scale currently unknown. GAO believes that there are still...

Iranian nuclear facilities have reportedly been attacked by a “music” virus, turning on lab PCs at night and blasting AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” Mikko Hypponen, Chief Researcher at Finnish digital security firm F-secure, publicly released a letter he received from an unnamed Iranian scientist. The researcher, who claimed to work for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), said that another virus has struck the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in central Iran and a secret underground research facility at Fordo, southwest of Tehran. The letter’s author reported that the virus shut down equipment (made by Germany’s Siemens Corporation) and automated systems at...

Some two weeks after Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta warned of a potential “cyber-Pearl Harbor” involving a possible attack on the electric grid, Mother Nature took the cue and hit the East Coast with a storm that left millions of us for days without electricity from the grid. Some said silent thanks for that old generator they’d thought to stick in the garage. Though it wasn’t a cyberattack, but Mother Nature gave parts of the grid a good lashing anyway. On my country road south of Annapolis, two transformers were blown down from their perches on telephone poles, and...

Some 60m euro is stolen from bank accounts in a massive cyber raid, after fraudsters raid dozens of banks around the world. Sixty million euro has been stolen from bank accounts in a massive cyber bank raid after fraudsters raided dozens of financial institutions around the world. According to a joint report by software security firm McAfee and Guardian Analytics, more than 60 firms have suffered from what it has called an "insider level of understanding". "The fraudsters' objective in these attacks is to siphon large amounts from high balance accounts, hence the name chosen for this research - Operation...

Leading cyber security firm McAfee has issued a startling breaking news report that indicates the U.S., European and Latin American financial systems are under a massive financial attacks that have digitally siphoned some $2.5 billion from thousands of accounts from various financial institutions. According to McAfee, the attacks are ongoing and international law enforcement agencies are currently working to shut them down: McAfee and Guardian Analytics have uncovered a highly sophisticated, global financial services fraud campaign that has reached the American banking system. As this research study goes to press, we are working actively with international law enforcement organizations to...

...Admissions from “the highest levels” of the U.S. government that it was party to a cyber attack on Iran risks a retaliation that could take many forms, compelling further escalation. ...

An al Qaeda video calling for "electronic jihad" illustrates the urgent need for cybersecurity standards for the most critical networks in the United States, a group of senators said. The video calls for cyberattacks against networks such as the electric grid and compares vulnerabilities in the United States' critical cyber networks to the vulnerabilities in the country's aviation system before 9/11, according to a statement Tuesday from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. "This is the clearest evidence we've seen that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups want to attack the cyber systems of our critical infrastructure,"...

The BBC has suffered a sophisticated cyber-attack following a campaign by Iranian authorities against its Persian service, director-general Mark Thompson said on Wednesday. Thompson also reported attempts to jam satellite feeds of the British Broadcasting Corporation services into Iran and to swamp its London phone lines with automated calls. In extracts from a speech he will make later on Wednesday, Thompson stopped short of explicitly accusing Tehran of being behind the cyber-attack, but he described the coincidence of the attacks as "self-evidently suspicious". Last month, Thompson accused Iranian authorities of arresting and threatening the families of BBC journalists to force...

The Jihad Will Be YouTubed by Raffaello Pantucci December 15, 2011 FOREIGN POLICY - The AFPAK Channel SNIPPET: "While clearly the technology to make such videos is something that is universal, it does seem as though it is aspirant jihadists in the West who find it easiest to use. There was no evidence that Gul was being directed by foreign terrorist organizations to produce his material, and his case shows the continued existence of young Westerners producing radical material on their own. It may indeed be the case that the virtual armies have yet to fully emerge as active warriors...

Hackers who attempt to attack Israel in cyberspace will be met with a "forceful response," warned Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon on Saturday -- one comparable to the response meted out to terrorists. Speaking at a cultural forum at a community center in Be'er Sheva, Ayalon said Israel views incidents such as the attack in which a Saudi hacker exposed the credit card numbers and information of thousands of Israelis at least twice last week as "acts of terror." An Israeli blogger claimed Friday that he was able to figure out the identity of the hacker, who claimed he was...

Iran has moved most of its government websites to local hosts to protect them from cyber attacks, the country's deputy communications minister said on Thursday. Ali Hakim Javadi, who is also head of Iran's technology organisation, said more than 90 percent of the websites had already been transferred as "it was necessary to protect governmental information on the Internet."

Foreign hackers broke into a water plant control system in Illinois last week and damaged a water pump in what appears to be the first reported case of a malicious cyber attack damaging a critical computer system in the United States, according to an industry expert. On Nov. 8, a municipal water district employee in Illinois noticed problems with the city’s water pump control system, and a technician determined the system had been remotely hacked into from a computer located in Russia, said Joe Weiss, an industry security expert who obtained a copy of an Illinois state fusion center report...

Foreign hackers broke into a water plant control system in Illinois last week and damaged a water pump in what appears to be the first reported case of a malicious cyber attack damaging a critical computer system in the United States, according to an industry expert. Dave Marcus, director of security research for McAfee Labs, said that the computers that control critical systems in the United States are vulnerable to attacks that come through the Internet, and few operators of these systems know how to detect them. “So many are ill-prepared for cyber attacks,” Marcus said. Problems with the system...

JERUSALEM, Israel (AP) -- Many of Israel's official websites have gone down in what the government says is a broad technical malfunction. The sites include that of the Mossad and Shin Bet intelligence services, the military spokesman, the Interior Ministry and others.

One objective might be significant damage to a coal/oil fired plant that provides electricity to the Grid. How would they do that? A simple example would be my electric tea pot at home. Every morning I fill the tea pot with water and turn it on. When the water comes to a boil, I turn it off and pour the water into a cup. My tea pot has a mechanical on-off switch but if I leave it on, the water boils out and the overheat safety switch automatically turns it off. If it was controlled by a computer a cyber...

Cyber-attackers could have stolen defense contractor's passwords October 08, 2011 Passwords for servers at defense contractor Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. (MHI) may have been stolen during a wide-ranging cyber-attack. The Kobe Shipyard and Machinery Works, which builds submarines, and the Nagoya Guidance and Propulsion Systems Works, which makes missile-related products, were among installations compromised in the attack, which was reported to the Metropolitan Police Department on Sept. 30. In total, 45 servers and 38 personal computers at 11 of MHI's facilities were infected with viruses. An analysis of a virus used in the attack suggests the perpetrators used simplified Chinese...

Non-English Speakers May Be Behind M'bishi Heavy Cyberattacks Tokyo, Sept. 30 (Jiji Press)--The viruses used in the recent cyberattacks on Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. <7011> may have been created outside the English-speaking world, analyses by a computer security firm showed Friday. Simplified Chinese characters were used for remote manipulation of target servers and several simple misspellings were found in programs written in English, according to the company, which analyzed some of the viruses. Given those facts, it is suspected that someone that can understand Chinese but is not good at using English created the viruses, the company said. In...

The attack over the summer was apparently launched in Iran and compromised a Dutch company's digital authentication certificates. Without trustworthy certificates, users who think they're dealing with online banks or sites such as such as Google might actually be dealing with an impostor. Reporting from Washington— A major cyber attack in Europe that apparently was launched from Iran has revealed significant vulnerabilities in the Internet security systems used to authenticate websites for banking, email and e-commerce around the world. The attack over the summer wrought havoc in the Netherlands, where the Justice Minister warned the public last Sunday that the...

Chinese state television has broadcast footage of what two experts on the Chinese military say appears to be a military institute demonstrating software designed to attack websites in the U.S. Although it could be a decade old or a mock-up, the 10-second segment—part of a longer report on cybersecurity—appears to be a rare example of an official source contradicting China'a repeated assertions that it doesn't engage in cyberattacks, according to Andrew Erickson and Gabe Collins of the China SignPost analytical service, which specializes in military matters. The slightest suggestion that the Chinese military has attacked U.S. websites is highly sensitive,...

Washington — The military and intelligence services of Russia and China are conducting a sustained campaign to steal American commercial and military secrets through cyber espionage, according to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and he warned that sophisticated computer hacking poses a major danger to U.S. interests. "Nation states are investing huge amounts of time, personnel and money to steal our data," Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said Friday in a speech to an association of retired U.S. intelligence officers. "We are not as prepared as we need to be." Rogers' remarks were framed as a warning against overly...

The world's most extensive case of cyber-espionage, including attacks on U.S. government and U.N. computers, is set to be revealed Wednesday by online security firm McAfee, and analysts are speculating that China is behind the attacks. The spying was dubbed "Operation Shady RAT," or "remote access tool" by McAfee -- and it led to a massive loss of information that poses a huge economic threat, wrote vice president of threat research Dmitri Alperovitch "What is happening to all this data — by now reaching petabytes as a whole — is still largely an open question," Alperovitch wrote on a blog detailing the threat. "However,...

Leon Panetta, at a confirmation hearing for the post of Defense secretary, says the US will need to take 'both defensive ... as well as aggressive measures' to deal with the threat of cyberattack.The next great battle America faces is likely to involve cyberwarfare, Leon Panetta, the Central Intelligence Agency director, warned senators Thursday, predicting that “the next Pearl Harbor that we confront could very well be a cyberattack that cripples" America’s electrical grid and its security and financial systems. “It’s going to take both defensive measures as well as aggressive measures to deal with that,” said Mr. Panetta,...

TEHRAN (AFP) – Iran has been hit with new malicious software as part of cyber attacks against the country, a military officer told Mehr news agency on Monday without specifying the target. "Certain characteristics about the 'Stars' virus have been identified, including that it is compatible with the (targeted) system," Gholam Reza Jalali, commander of the Iranian civil defence organisation, told the agency. "In the initial stage, the damage is low and it is likely to be mistaken for governmental executable files," Jalali said, adding that Iranian experts were still investigating the full scope of the malware's abilities. He did...

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) — The Oak Ridge National Laboratory hopes to restore limited email on Tuesday after a cyber attack over the weekend. Laboratory Director Thom Mason says officials shut down electronic access to the lab Friday night after a highly sophisticated cyber attack, known as Advanced Persistent Threat, according to The Knoxville News Sentinel. Closing access ensured that no data was extracted from ORNL computers.

When first discovered in 2010, the Stuxnet computer worm posed a baffling puzzle. Beyond its unusually high level of sophistication loomed a more troubling mystery: its purpose. Ralph Langner and team helped crack the code that revealed this digital warhead's final target -- and its covert origins. In a fascinating look inside cyber-forensics

Due to the growing list of brands disclosing that they have been compromised as a result of this breach, I’m going to go ahead and tag this as a massive breach. And I only expect it to get bigger as more announcements come out from Epsilon customers. Last night we reported on a breach at marketing services provider, Epsilon, the world’s largest permission-based email marketing provider. Initially we wrote that the breach had affected Kroger, the nation's largest traditional grocery retailer. There is a list of companies at the link (but I don't know if that is going to be...

Millions of sites hit with mass-injection cyberattackBy Sarah Jacobsson Purewal April 1, 2011 10:37 AM ET PC World - Hundreds of thousands -- and possibly millions -- of websites have been hit with a cyberattack that some are calling "one of the biggest mass-injection attacks we've ever seen." The attack was discovered on March 29 by security firm WebSense, and the injected domain was called lizamoon.com -- thus, the name of the mass-injection is "LizaMoon." According to WebSense, LizaMoon uses SQL Injection to add malicious script to compromised sites. While the first injected domain was lizamoon.com, additional URLs have since...

Tweet from Tammy Bruce: It looks as though all Palin supporting blogs and site are down. There may be a coordinated attack, more soon This includes 5 sites under the "Conservatives4Palin.com" umbrella.

Ever since it passed, the national health care law commonly known as ObamaCare has been entangled in legal battles and heated national debate. As polls have consistently shown, a majority of the public remains opposed to the law and many are worried because they never found out what was even in it. While the law has spurred countless news stories, a recent one you may have missed involved the attorney David Rivkin, who successfully led the multi-state challenge to ObamaCare filed in Florida. A prominent conservative voice, Rivkin has been a staunch defender of the Constitution in a variety of...