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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,...

Security: The Pentagon has disclosed perhaps the largest theft of sensitive data by an unnamed foreign government. The threat to our electronic infrastructure is real, growing and as dangerous as a North Korean missile. In outlining America's cyberwarfare strategy last Thursday at the National Defense University, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn disclosed that 24,000 sensitive files containing Pentagon data at a defense company were accessed in a cyberattack in March, likely by a foreign government. He didn't disclose the identity of that government, but in a bit of an understatement he acknowledged, "We have a pretty good idea." So...

A child becomes computer literate at primary school. Meanwhile, North Korea's most prodigious young students are identified and trained in advanced cyberwarfare techniques As South Korea blames North Korea for a recent slew of cyberattacks, two defectors share their experiences, as a hacker and trainer of "cyberwarriors" in the reclusive communist country, with Al Jazeera shedding some light into the inner workings of the North's cyberwarfare programme. In the process, Kim Heung-kwang and Jang Se-yul also warn of the regime's concentrated efforts to bolster its cyberwarfare capabilities. The hackers' professor Kim Heung-kwang was a computer science professor in North...

CNN) -- They've breached or busted the websites of the CIA, PBS and the U.S. Senate, and launched at least part of an extended attack on Sony, whose PlayStation Network was brought to a grinding halt for the better part of a month. And, to hear them tell it, it's all for a laugh. Meet Lulz Security, or LulzSec, the gleeful and secretive band of hackers who appear to be responsible for a string of high-profile and sometimes embarrassing Internet attacks. Their most recent strike, and arguably the most ambitious, was a distributed denial-of-service attack Wednesday that shut down the...

Last year's Stuxnet virus attack represented a new kind of threat to critical infrastructure. Just over a year ago, a computer in Iran started repeatedly rebooting itself, seemingly without reason. Suspecting some kind of malicious software (malware), analysts at VirusBlokAda, an antivirus-software company in Minsk, examined the misbehaving machine over the Internet, and soon found that they were right. Disturbingly so: the code they extracted from the Iranian machine proved to be a previously unknown computer virus of unprecedented size and complexity. On 17 June 2010, VirusBlokAda issued a worldwide alert that set off an international race to track down...

The FBI announced Sunday it shut down an Atlanta-based website that tracks cyber-crime after the site was compromised by a mysterious, yet increasingly audacious group of hackers. InfraGard Atlanta, a nonprofit partnership between local business, government and academic security experts and the FBI, was hacked late last week by Lulz Security. LulzSec, as it’s known on-line in cyber security channels, hijacked the InfraGard site and published the email addresses, usernames and passwords of its 180 members. On its website, LulzSec wrote that the InfraGard volunteers – which include internet security experts at Equifax, Georgia Tech, the U.S. Army, DeKalb County...

Google wouldn't be human if it weren't relieved that the latest Chinese hacking incident targeted not a hole in Google's defenses but a gullibility of its customers. The proper term is "spear phishing" for the use of email cons to scam a specific, chosen individual into revealing his or her password, allowing unauthorized access to inboxes and online accounts. In a blog post this week, Google announced that the latest attacks seem to come from Jinan, China. The targets were the Gmail accounts of "senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military...

"The potential for the next Pearl Harbor could very well be a cyber-attack," he testified on Capitol Hill Thursday Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also appeared, telling the committee, "This threat is increasing in scope and scale, and its impact is difficult to overstate." ........ Panetta told the committee, "This is a real national security threat that we have to pay attention to. I know there are a lot of aspects to it. "The Internet, the cyber-arena ... is a vastly growing area of information that can be used and abused in a number of ways." U.S. officials and...

The Iranian authorities have promised to "put cyberpolice all over the country" as it comes under threat from online dissent at home and computer sabotage from abroad. The country's head of police, Ismael Ahmadi Moghaddam, said Iran had to stamp out "defamation and mischief" at the opening of a new headquarters in Qom, the religious centre of the country. He gave few details of his plans, but his words suggests he intends to continue developing the Chinese-style model already in place of using a mixture of technological censorship using keywords and large numbers of trained police to monitor websites. He...

Body of murdered cyberwar expert found in landfill Military man dumped into three-ring whodunit Dan Goodin January 5, 2010 The body of a decorated US Army officer was found dumped in a Delaware landfill on New Years Eve day, a few days after he expressed concern that the nation wasn't adequately prepared for cyber warfare, according to news reports following the bizarre whodunit. Events surrounding the murder of John P. Wheeler III, who most recently worked part-time for defense contractor Mitre Corporation on cyber defense topics, read like a Tom Clancy novel. The 66-year-old worked for three Republican administrations, was...

      WASHINGTON — It's a tough time to be a member of the U.S. armed forces. Those serving in our all-volunteer military — and their families — are stretched and stressed by more than nine years of war. Unfortunately, our commander in chief — supposedly the champion of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardsmen and Marines — isn't doing anything to make serving in uniform any easier. President Barack Obama — fresh from his 3 1/2-hour "visit" to Afghanistan — continues to insist that the U.S. Senate act immediately to allow active homosexuals to serve in the military....

War is transforming itself before our eyes, turning into something unfamiliar and strange. Information has taken a place as a major class of weaponry, with sabotage and subterfuge as preferred tactics. On the new battlefield, these weapons are available not only to nation-states, but to organizations and even individuals. The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is something that ought to be more widely known than it is.

The Wikileaks organization has morphed from a relatively harmless aid to government whistleblowers into a threat to U.S. national security. It should be treated accordingly. As with the July dump of Afghan war documents, the mainstream press has attempted to kindle story lines from the Iraq war data dump that imply scandal, particularly regarding civilian casualties. But once again, the information is underwhelming. There are no smoking guns except for some inconvenient truths about the actual existence of Saddam Hussein's weapons-of-mass-destruction program and Iranian involvement in Iraq's insurgency. For the most part, however, this type of information was well known...

A sophisticated worm designed to steal industrial secrets and disrupt operations has infected at least 14 plants, according to Siemens. Called Stuxnet, the worm was discovered in July when researchers at VirusBlokAda found it on computers in Iran. It is one of the most sophisticated and unusual pieces of malicious software ever created—the worm leveraged a previously unknown Windows vulnerability (now patched) that allowed it to spread from computer to computer, typically via USB sticks. The worm, designed to attack Siemens industrial control systems, has not spread widely. However, it has affected a number of Siemens plants, according to company...

SNIPPET: "Oops, Microsoft did it again. Part of the company’s Government Security Program (GSP), Microsoft has offered the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) a peek inside the source code of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server. This is the second time that the company has (publicly) shared source code with the FSB, following a similar deal which took place in 2002, this time involving source code for Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2000. Microsoft has done similar deals with China in 2003, and most recently in 2010. However, in the light of...

The Pentagon would consider a military response in the case of a cyber attack against the United States, a US defense official said on Wednesday. Asked about the possibility of using military force after a cyber assault, James Miller, undersecretary of defense for policy, said: "Yes, we need to think about the potential for responses that are not limited to the cyber domain." But he said it remained unclear what constituted an act of war in cyberspace. "Those are legal questions that we are attempting to address," Miller said at a conference in Washington, adding that "there are certainly a...

In response to the continuous compromise of networks, multiple countries have begun developing secure platforms and operating systems. Computer companies, university researchers, defense R&D contractors and militaries around the world recognize the criticality of networks and embedded processors within their equipment. They also recognize how vulnerable they are and that’s why so much attention is being given to building in security at every level of the system including the operating system. As discussed here, China’s Trusted Computing Platform (TCP) program has been underway for some time now and can be traced back to the early 2000s. The Chinese TCP includes...

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...

BEIJING—China-based hackers stole Indian national-security information, 1,500 emails from the Dalai Lama's office and other sensitive documents, a new report said Tuesday. Researchers at the University of Toronto said they were able to observe the hacking and trace it to core servers located in China and to people based in the southwestern city of Chengdu. The researchers said they monitored the hacking for the past eight months. The report said it has no evidence of involvement by the Chinese government, but it again put Beijing on the defensive. Separate reports earlier this year said security investigators had traced attacks on...

Many nations are taking advantage of the Internet to encourage, or even organize, patriotic Internet users to obtain hacking skills. This enables the government to use (often informally) these thousands of hackers to attack enemies (foreign or domestic.) These organizations arrange training and mentoring to improve the skills of group members. Turkey has over 44,000 of these hackers, Saudi Arabia has over 100,000, Iraq has over 40,000, Russia over 100,000 and China, over 400,000. While many of these Cyber Warriors are rank amateurs, even the least skilled can be given simple tasks. And out of their ranks will emerge more...