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Just when you thought you were safe, a new hacking toy comes along and rocks your world. Imagine a tool exists that lets hackers pluck encryption keys from your laptop right out of the air. You can’t stop it by connecting to protected Wi-Fi networks or even disabling Wi-Fi completely. Turning off Bluetooth also won’t help you protect yourself. Why? Because the tiny device that can easily be hidden in an object or taped to the underside of a table doesn’t use conventional communications to pull off capers. Instead it reads radio waves emitted by your computer’s processor, and there’s...

German-owned Patriot missiles stationed in Turkey were briefly taken over by hackers, according to media reports on Tuesday.The attack took place on anti-aircraft ‘Patriot’ missiles on the Syrian border. The American-made weapons had been stationed there by the Bundeswehr (German army) to protect Nato ally Turkey. According to the civil service magazine, the missile system carried out “unexplained” orders. It was not immediately clear when these orders were carried out and what they were. The magazine speculates about two weak spots in the missile system which could be exploited by hackers. One such weakness is the Sensor-Shooter-Interoperability (SSI) which exchanges...

Major attacks on the U.S. power grid system are “increasing,” with hackers stepping up efforts to penetrate critical systems and to implant malicious software that could compromise the power grid and result in a nationwide crisis, according to a government report. While experts have long signaled that the U.S. power grid and related systems are vulnerable to physical attacks by terrorists and other individuals, the U.S. government is now warning that sensitive computer systems that maintain the grid are increasingly being attacked, according to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report that was not made public until the Federation of American...

The National Archives and Records Administration recently detected unauthorized activity on three desktops indicative of the same hack that extracted sensitive details on millions of current and former federal employees, government officials said Monday. The revelation suggests the breadth of one of the most damaging cyber assaults known is wider than officials have disclosed. The National Archives' own intrusion-prevention technology successfully spotted the so-called indicators of compromise during a scan this spring, said a source involved in the investigation, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the incident. The discovery was made soon after the Department of Homeland Security's...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/encryption-would-not-have-helped-at-opm-says-dhs-official/

As government officials answered questions about the recent Office of Personnel Management data breach, former and current congressional staffers processed the notices they are receiving from the agency that they, too, were affected by the breach. Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, D-Va., told CQ Roll Call Tuesday that his press secretary, George Burke, who has never worked for the executive branch, received a notice from the OPM saying his personal identifiable information may have been compromised. Connolly said he spoke with someone in the office of the House Chief Administrative Officer, and it appeared that congressional staffers who had a break...

Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab announced that it has detected an intrusion into its own systems, and you'll never believe who the company thinks is behind it. CEO Eugene Kaspersky claims a nation-state hacked into his company's network in order to steal information about its technologies. The unidentified hackers exploited security flaws in Microsoft Software Installer files to infect Kaspersky's network with malware. Kaspersky is referring to the malware as "Duqu 2.0", because it appears to be tied to the same cybercriminals that used Duqu malware to attack Iran, India, France and Ukraine a few years ago. Back then, the hackers...

A hacker attack on the Bundestag (German parliament) earlier in 2015 means that an entirely new network will have to be built after experts failed to fix the breach. The Federal Office of Information Technology Security (BSI) decided that it could no longer defend against the attack and had to give up, broadcasters NDR and WDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on Thursday. Der Spiegel reported on Wednesday evening that data was still flowing out of the parliament to unknown recipients, and that rebuilding the network using completely new hardware would take months and cost millions. …

A hack announced last week affected all current and retired federal employees, and hackers got their hands on much more personal information than previously announced, the American Federation of Government Employees said Thursday.A December breach of government systems containing personal information of millions of federal employees was worse than originally thought. A union of federal workers said Thursday that the attack, announced last week, had stolen confidential information of every single federal employee, past or present -- far more than was previously revealed. The government disputes those claims. It's the latest in a spree of damaging hacks against the government,...

Hackers stole personnel data and Social Security numbers for every federal employee, a government worker union said Thursday, charging that the cyberattack on U.S. employee data is far worse than the Obama administration has acknowledged. Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, said on the Senate floor that the December hack into Office of Personnel Management data was carried out by "the Chinese."

Those of us who have had security clearances in the past endured plenty of lectures on the need to secure sensitive material. The Office of Personnel Management in the Obama administration apparently needed to listen a little more carefully. A hack by China’s intelligence service not only exposed four million current federal employees, but also thirty years of data from security clearances, with the most personally sensitive information possible now exposed to foreign spies:(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Data stolen from U.S. government computers by suspected Chinese hackers included security clearance information and background checks dating back three decades, U.S. officials said on Friday,...

Chinese hackers breached the computer system of the Office of Personnel Management in December, officials said Thursday, and the agency will notify some 4 million current and former federal employees that their personal data may have been compromised. The hack was the second major intrusion of the agency by China in less than a year. OPM, using new tools, discovered the breach in April, said officials at the agency who declined to comment on who was behind the hack. Other U.S. officials, who spoke on conditions of anonymity because it is an ongoing investigation, identified the hackers as being from...

Hackers have struck one of the world's largest internet dating websites, leaking the highly sensitive sexual information of almost four million users onto the web. The stolen data reveals the sexual preferences of users, whether they're gay or straight, and even indicates which ones might be seeking extramarital affairs. In addition, the hackers have revealed email addresses, usernames, dates of birth, postal codes and unique internet addresses of users' computers. Channel 4 News has been investigating the cyber underworld, discovering which websites have been hacked and exposing the trade in personal information of millions of people through so-called "dark web"...

Thieves are stealing money from people's credit cards, bank and PayPal accounts -- by first tapping into their Starbucks mobile app. Starbucks (SBUX) on Wednesday acknowledged that criminals have been breaking into individual customer rewards accounts. The Starbucks app lets you pay at checkout with your phone. It can also reload Starbucks gift cards by automatically drawing funds from your bank account, credit card or PayPal. That's how criminals are siphoning money away from victims. They break into a victim's Starbucks account online, add a new gift card, transfer funds over -- and repeat the process every time the original...

A group of hackers affiliated with ISIS are threatening to carry out a cyber attack—dubbed “Message to America”—against a number of targets 2 p.m. EST today. The targets were not identified on ISIS forums and social channels but the hackers are promising something “surprising” that “will frighten America”.

If the U.S. intelligence community believes that Russia poses a greater cyber spying threat than China, what will it make of this? Russia and China signed a cyber-security deal on Friday, which experts say could firm up Russia’s ties with the east and may become a foundation for binding cyber security ties in the future. According to the text of the agreement posted on the Russian government’s website on Wednesday, Russia and China agree to not conduct cyber-attacks against each other, as well as jointly counteract technology that may “destabilize the internal political and socio-economic atmosphere,” ”disturb public order” or...

A former commander of U.S. nuclear forces is leading a call for taking U.S. and Russian nuclear missiles off high alert, arguing that keeping them less ready for prompt launch would reduce the risk of miscalculation in a crisis. It also could keep a possible cyberattack from starting a nuclear war, he said, although neither Washington nor Moscow appears interested in negotiating an agreement to end the practice of keeping nuclear missiles on high alert. Retired Gen. James Cartwright said in an interview that “de-alerting” nuclear arsenals could foil cyber intruders by reducing the chance of firing a weapon in...

The United States on Thursday disclosed a cyber intrusion this year by Russian hackers who accessed an unclassified U.S. military network, in a episode Defense Secretary Ash Carter said showed the growing threat and the improving U.S. ability to respond.

AVS WinVote machines used in three presidential elections in state ‘would get an F-minus’ in security, said computer scientist who pushed for decertification Touchscreen voting machines used in numerous elections between 2002 and 2014 used “abcde” and “admin” as passwords and could easily have been hacked from the parking lot outside the polling place, according to a state report. The AVS WinVote machines, used in three presidential elections in Virginia, “would get an F-minus” in security, according to a computer scientist at tech research group SRI International who had pushed for a formal inquiry by the state of Virginia for...

Evidence that Russian computer hackers penetrated security at the White House and State Department was brushed aside by National Security Council spokesman Mark Stroh. “Since the Administration has no hostile designs on Russia we don’t consider their gaining access to confidential correspondence at the State Department or White House a threat to our security,” Stroh maintained. “In a way, this could be a good thing. They will see that we bear them no ill will. That could open up new avenues for better relations between our two countries.” “It would be far more worrisome if our correspondence had been illicitly...