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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,...