Free Republic

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...

Actions to retaliate for treatment of WikiLeaks, Manning, spokesman for Anonymous says. DALLAS — A leader of the computer hackers group known as Anonymous is threatening new attacks on major U.S. corporations and government officials as part of at an escalating “cyberwar” against the citadels of American power. “It’s a guerilla cyberwar — that’s what I call it,” said Barrett Brown, 29, who calls himself a senior strategist and “propagandist” for Anonymous. He added: “It’s sort of an unconventional, asymmetrical act of warfare that we’ve involved in. And we didn’t necessarily start it. I mean, this fire has been burning.”...

(LEAD) S. Korean Web sites suffer DDoS attack SEOUL, March 4 (Yonhap) -- The Web sites of South Korea's presidential office and other major institutions came under a cyber attack on Friday, but there were no immediate reports of damage, industry sources said. The presidential office Cheong Wa Dae, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and top lender Kookmin Bank were among some 40 institutions whose Web sites were infected by the so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) from 10 a.m., AhnLab Inc. said in a statement. Additional attacks were expected to begin at 6:30 p.m., said AhnLab, South Korea's top...

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,"...