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Exclusive: Sarah Palin Under Cyber-Attack from Wikileaks Supporters in 'Operation Payback'* December 08, 2010 5:12 PM Political Punch Power, pop, and probings from ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper The website and personal credit card information of former Gov. Sarah Palin were cyber-attacked today by Wikileaks supporters, the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate tells ABC News in an email.

CNN) -- A computer hacker who calls himself "The Jester" claimed responsibility for the cyber attack which took down the WikiLeaks site Sunday, shortly before it started posting hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables. The Jester, who describes himself as a "hacktivist for good," said he took the controversial site down "for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops, 'other assets' & foreign relations."

Iran is going nuclear over a malicious computer worm targeting the country's atomic energy facilities. The Stuxnet worm has targeted not only Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant -- scheduled to go online in a matter of weeks -- but also the personal computers of the government's nuclear officials, the country's national news agency reports. Iran has not yet publically pointed blame to the West, but several Internet security experts publicly stated that they suspect that a hostile government such as the U.S. or Israel may be behind the cyberattack. "This would not be easy for a normal group to put together,"...

Iran's nuclear agency is trying to combat a complex computer worm that has affected industrial sites throughout the country and is capable of taking over power plants, Iranian media reports said. Experts from the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran met this week to discuss how to remove the malicious computer code, or worm, the semi-official ISNA news agency reported Friday. The computer worm, dubbed Stuxnet, can take over systems that control the inner workings of industrial plants. Experts in Germany discovered the worm in July, and it has since shown up in a number of attacks — primarily in Iran,...

National Security: Aiming at a world where nuclear weapons are obsolete, the administration's nuclear posture review leaves a world without American nuclear weapons and the backbone to use them. After his stunning bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto lamented that all that had been accomplished was to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve. Under policies announced by the Obama administration, a devastating chemical or biological attack on this country might merely awaken our very own Hamlet and fill him with a terrible sense of angst. We have said before that rather...

Ever since Google disclosed in January that Internet intruders had stolen information from its computers, the exact nature and extent of the theft has been a closely guarded company secret. But a person with direct knowledge of the investigation now says that the losses included one of Google’s crown jewels, a password system that controls access by millions of users worldwide to almost all of the company’s Web services, including e-mail and business applications.

It came as a surprise this month to Wang Jianwei, a graduate engineering student in Liaoning, China, that he had been described as a potential cyberwarrior before the United States Congress. Larry M. Wortzel, a military strategist and China specialist, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 10 that it should be concerned because “Chinese researchers at the Institute of Systems Engineering of Dalian University of Technology published a paper on how to attack a small U.S. power grid sub-network in a way that would cause a cascading failure of the entire U.S.”

What if a crippling attack struck the country's digital infrastructure? Experts including current and former officials tackle the question. The results show that the peril is real and growing. The crisis began when college basketball fans downloaded a free March Madness application to their smart phones. The app hid spyware that stole passwords, intercepted e-mails and created havoc. Soon 60 million cellphones were dead. The Internet crashed, finance and commerce collapsed, and most of the nation's electric grid went dark. White House aides discussed putting the Army in American cities. "We're in uncharted territory here," was the most common refrain...

Threads disappear ... I posted this to bloggers and personal but the News & Activism topics come up, I get pinged over & over for the same posts, and etc.. What's going on?!! Are we under attack?

Washington insiders recently sweated out a real-time war game where a cyberattack crippled cell phone service, Internet and even electrical grids across the U.S. The unscripted, dynamic simulation allowed former White House officials and the Bipartisan Policy Center to study the problems that might arise during a real cyberattack emergency, according to Aviation Week's Ares Defense Blog. The Policy Center's vice-president reports ""The general consensus of the panel today was that we are not prepared to deal with these kinds of attacks."

The United States is at risk of a crippling cyber attack that could "wreak havoc" on the country because the "technological balance" makes it much easier to launch a cyber strike than defend against it, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said Tuesday.

February 12, 2010 China Alarmed by Security Threat From Internet By SHARON LaFRANIERE and JONATHAN ANSFIELD BEIJING — Deep inside a Chinese military engineering institute in September 2008, a researcher took a break from his duties and decided — against official policy — to check his private e-mail messages. Among the new arrivals was an electronic holiday greeting card that purported to be from a state defense office. The researcher clicked on the card to open it. Within minutes, secretly implanted computer code enabled an unnamed foreign intelligence agency to tap into the databases of the institute in the city...

It was almost 9 p.m. in Tehran as I published this post, and people around the world are still trying to decide what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threatened "punch" against the West is going to be. Some influential Americans appear to think it might come as a cyber attack.

Google May Leave China Because of Cyberattacks By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO Google Inc. said it is "reviewing the feasibility of our business operations in China" and may back out of China entirely, as it disclosed it had been hit with major cyberattacks it believes to have originated from the country. Google disclosed its thinking in a blog post Tuesday. In the post, Google said it detected a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China" in mid-December and that the attack resulted in "the theft of intellectual property from Google." The post said that Google believed...

"Project Grey Goose and University at Albany SUNY to investigate major Power Grid blackouts caused by hackers" SNIPPET: "This is an open call for volunteers who wish to participate in a joint Project Grey Goose / University at Albany SUNY open source intelligence investigation into power grid blackouts caused by hacker attacks. The scope is global and includes the U.S. Interested parties should contact me from their work email address with an expression of interest, a brief bio, and your experience, if any, in SCADA systems in general or the power grid in particular. All respondents will be kept confidential....

Security: A Senate bill lets the president "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "nongovernmental" computer networks and do what's needed to respond to the threat. Didn't they just collect our e-mail addresses?We wish this was just a piece of the fictional "Dr. Strangelove" that fell to the cutting-room floor, but it's not. It is a real piece of disturbingly vague legislation sponsored by Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. Senate Bill 773 would grant the administration emergency powers (where have we heard that before?) in the event of a cyberemergency that the president would have...

Facebook Inc. is providing new details of how an attack aimed at a Georgian blogger Thursday disrupted its site and crashed others, including Twitter Inc. and LiveJournal Inc. The company rooted out the cause of the massive denial-of-service attack, said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt, after noticing that the compromised computers that began flooding its site Thursday morning were directing traffic to the profile page of a single pro-Georgian blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia. The Cyxymu blogger couldn't immediately be reached. In a blog post Friday, Twitter co-founder Biz...

Profile of a real cyberwar Beware the mayhem of malware on the march By Aaron Mannes and James Hendler | Wednesday, August 5, 2009 The denial-of-service (DoS) attacks that started on July 4 garnered typical headlines about cyberwar, but in fact, from a technical standpoint, those "attacks" may be the opposite of real cyberwar. A much less noticed report in Israel's leading daily, Ha'aretz, on Israel's operations against Iran's nuclear program may give greater insight into how cyberwar actually will work. It is no secret that several countries, including the United States, China, Russia and Israel, have examined cyberwar capabilities....

LONDON, July 21 (Reuters) - Olympic organisers are "very alive" to the threat of a cyber attack on the London 2012 Olympics, made more challenging because of its evolving nature, senior Interior Ministry officials said on Tuesday. Ticketing systems, the transport network and hotel bookings as well as security are among potential targets. Olympic security officials are also planning for the possible diversion of aircraft to protect airspace around the venues from terrorist attacks, the officials said. The greatest threat to security at the Games is international terrorism, the government's latest "Safety and Security Strategy" report said.

Amidst all the congressional to-ing and fro-ing associated with the President's controversial health care, cap-and-trade and "hate crimes" initiatives, it would be easy for most legislators to overlook a hearing the House Homeland Security Committee has scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. If Congress fails to address the subject of that hearing, however, it literally will not matter whether the government addresses any of those other, disproportionately prominent agenda items. The title of the hearing - "Securing the Modern Electric Grid from Physical and Cyber Attacks" - fails to communicate the magnitude of the danger, and the imperative for urgent corrective action....