Free Republic

"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....

“MI5 hiring Asian teenagers to fight cyber terror” London, September 21, 2009 First Published: 00:09 IST(21/9/2009) Last Updated: 02:44 IST(21/9/2009) SNIPPET: “MI5 head Jonathan Evans has told his staff that the recruits were essential to combat cyber terrorism which has been traced to China, Russia and Pakistan — the hackers have also intercepted messages from terrorists in Belmarsh maximum security prison, the newspaper said. In a report to Lord West, the Security Minister, Evans has revealed that during the summer over 1,000 hits were made on computers in Whitehall. Other targets have been air traffic control, power stations and the...

CNET Reports: ”Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.[…] CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency. The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for...

Computer scientists in Japan say they've developed a way to break the WPA encryption system used in wireless routers in about one minute. The attack gives hackers a way to read encrypted traffic sent between computers and certain types of routers that use the WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) encryption system. The attack was developed by Toshihiro Ohigashi of Hiroshima University and Masakatu Morii of Kobe University, who plan to discuss further details at a technical conference set for Sept. 25 in Hiroshima. Last November, security researchers first showed how WPA could be broken, but the Japanese researchers have taken the...

The Internet has now become a vital outlet for commerce, communications & social networking to name a few, and has now breed an over-dependence in our daily lives. It's also become a target from more sinister factions and made our critical infrastructure now extremely vulnerable to cyber attacks. I have just completed a 4 week period of research and production for an audio documentary called 'The Slow Road to Cybersecurity'. What I have encountered, has made me wish I had never known about it. Cybersecurity has now entered a new era of concern, our risk and vulnerability is becoming a...

WASHINGTON -- Russian hackers hijacked American identities and U.S. software tools and used them in an attack on Georgian government Web sites during the war between Russia and Georgia last year, according to new research to be released Monday by a nonprofit U.S. group. In addition to refashioning common Microsoft Corp. software into a cyber-weapon, hackers collaborated on popular U.S.-based social-networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook Inc., to coordinate attacks on Georgian sites, the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit found. While the cyberattacks on Georgia were examined shortly after the events last year, these U.S. connections weren't previously known. "U.S. corporations...

The distributed denial-of-service attack that hampered access to social networking and blogging sites all went after one pro-Georgia blogger, according to security company reports. According to a post from F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen, the attacks focused on Cyxymu's accounts at Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and Livejournal, and also included a "Joe Job" spam campaign that was designed to look as if the unwanted messages had been sent by Cyxymu. McAfee offers a similar analysis with a post that ties the spam campaign to the same botnet that launched the DDoS attack, and says that a cyxymu account at Fotki.com was also targeted....

A hacker attack Thursday shut down the fast-growing messaging service Twitter for hours, while Facebook experienced intermittent access problems. Twitter said in its status blog Thursday morning it was "defending against a denial-of-service attack," in which hackers command scores of computers to a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through.

"Microblogging site still slow after assault paralyzed it for hours"-Twitter confirmed this morning that the site had been taken down by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack...

The micro-blogging site Twitter has come under attack this afternoon, taking it down for more than an hour. On the site's corporate blog, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said: "On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. "We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate."

WASHINGTON -- Federal agencies are facing a severe shortage of computer specialists, even as a growing wave of coordinated cyberattacks against the government poses potential national security risks, a private study found.

The U.K. was the likely source of a series of attacks last week that took down popular Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea, according to an analysis performed by a Vietnamese computer security analyst. The results contradict assertions made by some in the U.S. and South Korean governments that North Korea was behind the attack. Security analysts had been skeptical of the claims, which were reportedly made in off-the-record briefings and for which proof was never delivered. The week-long distributed denial of service attack involved sending multiple requests to a handful of Web sites from tens of thousands...

Hackers extracted lists of files from computers that they contaminated with the virus that triggered cyberattacks last week in the United States and South Korea, police in Seoul said Tuesday. The attacks, in which floods of computers tried to connect to a single Web site at the same time to overwhelm the server, caused outages on prominent government-run sites in both countries. The finding means that hackers not only used affected computers for Web attacks, but also attempted to steal information from them. That adds to concern that contaminated computers were ordered to damage their own hard disks or files...

South Korea's state intelligence organization said Friday it has discovered that a wave of cyber attacks carried out earlier this week into key government and private websites in South Korea and the United States was launched from computers in 16 countries, Yonhap News Agency reported. The National Intelligence Service made the report to a closed-door meeting with members of a parliamentary intelligence committee, Yonhap quoted committee members as saying. North Korea was not among the 16 countries, which include South Korea, the United States, Japan, and Guatemala, Yonhap said. The cyber attacks have been traced to 86 Internet Protocol addresses...

South Korea has issued security warnings after the disruption of major Internet sites by an apparent cyber attack. Several U.S. Web sites have also been affected. Reports are emerging in South Korean media that intelligence officials suspect North Korea may have had a hand in the disruption. South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted parliamentary intelligence committee lawmakers as saying North Korea may be behind the apparent cyber attack. Wednesday marks the 15th anniversary of the death of the North's revered first leader, Kim Il Sung. In past years, North Korea has used the occasion to show defiance or superiority toward...

A few days ago, I read this article "Spies 'infiltrate US power grid' ", and I thought, "Wow, that's hardly a surprise," but I blew it off. I disregarded it-not because Michael Jackson's funeral was on TV, or because I was preparing/partying/recovering from 3 days of straight BBQ party for the Fourth of July. No, I blew it off because we all suspected this kind of thing was always happening, always possible, and it's like the threat of nuclear war: awful, not something one wants to think about, and we kind of already know the consequences. Today, multiple papers are...

The powerful attack that overwhelmed computers at U.S. and South Korean government agencies for days was even broader than initially realized, also targeting the White House, the Pentagon and the New York Stock Exchange. Other targets of the attack included the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, State Department, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post, according to an early analysis of the malicious software used in the attacks. Many of the organizations appeared to successfully blunt the sustained computer assaults. The Associated Press obtained the target list from security experts analyzing the attacks. It was not immediately clear...

North Korea is suspected of launching a cyber attack that paralysed the websites of South Korean and United States government agencies, banks and businesses, the first such large-scale attack attempted by the isolated communist state.

Do we retaliate for cyber attacks with cyber attacks? If not - WHY NOT?

COVERT RADIO SHOW http://covertradioshow.com # http://covertradioshow.com/podcast.cfm?pid=187 Covert Radio Daily Blast May 7 North Korea has hackers working round the clock on cyberwarfare. Could they have been behind recent attacks on the Alaskan Air Traffic Control system? Are we prepared for Cyber Warfare? Narco Traffickers are declaring war on our cops, and the latest in the coming war between Georgia and Russia.