Free Republic

FBI Director Christopher Wray on April 18 warned national security and intelligence experts, as well as students, that risks the government of China poses to U.S. national and economic security are “upon us now”—and that U.S. critical infrastructure is a prime target. “The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America’s will to resist,” he said in...

"When people don't see stuff on Google, they think no one can find it. That's not true." That's according to John Matherly, creator of Shodan, the scariest search engine on the Internet. Unlike Google, which crawls the Web looking for websites, Shodan navigates the Internet's back channels. It's a kind of "dark" Google, looking for the servers, webcams, printers, routers and all the other stuff that is connected to and makes up the Internet. (Shodan's site was slow to load Monday following the publication of this story.) Shodan runs 24/7 and collects information on about 500 million connected devices and...

Aren’t you glad Shodan is in the hands of good guys like John Matherly?Ask John Matherly if he’s a hacker, and he’ll struggle for a moment with the term. On one hand, he’s a hacker, in the sense that he’s an innovative programmer, arms deep in the information-security industry. On the other, he’s hypersensitive to how his baby—a project called Shodan—is portrayed in the press. In the past year, it’s surged in notoriety and not just in technology publications, such as Ars Technica and Wired. Shodan’s been the subject of multiple Washington Post investigative features, profiled on Dutch television and...

SNIPPET: "Social media is no longer simply a fun way to share updates on the harmless idiosyncrasies of our lives. It can undermine national security, and there ought to be a more robust discussion between the Bay Area technology world and Washington on what to do about it. Cyber-terrorism, especially the potential for electronic tampering with U.S. industrial or military installations, is a paramount national security threat that Washington is working to forestall. We're all working to protect our accounts from hackers. But the cyber-threat getting far less public attention involves the social media networks we use every day and the...

SNIPPET: "WASHINGTON, April 2 (UPI) -- A blackout of al-Qaida's main Web sites is in its 11th day, and officials think the forums may have been brought down in a cyberattack. While no one has claimed credit for disabling the sites..." SNIPPET: "The loss of information typically confuses and frustrates the readers of the Web sites. "It leaves the rank-and-file to guess which messages and which messengers are genuine al-Qaida, and provides undercover operators with new opportunities to disrupt the movement," said A. Aaron Weisburd, senior fellow at the Homeland Security Policy Institute."

A foreign spy agency pulled off the most serious breach of Pentagon computer networks ever by inserting a flash drive into a U.S. military laptop, a top defense official said Wednesday.

The FBI on Wednesday announced that it had charged 53 defendants, the largest number ever charged in a cybercrime case, following a multinational investigation into a phishing scheme that operated in the United States and Egypt. Thirty-three of the 53 defendants named in the indictment have been arrested, the FBI said, and several others are being sought. The investigation, dubbed "Operation Phish Phry," began in 2007. Authorities in Egypt have charged 47 defendants linked to the phishing operation. Phishing is a form of social engineering that attempts to convince Internet users, via e-mail or other means, to provide online credentials...

SNIPPET: "Today the world faces a wide array of cyber threats. The majority of these threats are aimed at the Western democracies and the Western-leaning countries of other regions. The reason for this is simple: They are ripe targets. These countries are either highly dependent, almost completely in some cases, on cyber means for nearly every significant societal interaction or are racing toward that goal. They seek the speed, accuracy, efficiency, and ease that a "wired" system of systems brings and all the benefits that accrue to such a situation. The danger we face is that there are many individuals,...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=53850 Official Cites Value of Cyberspace to Warfighting Operations By Gerry J. Gilmore American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, April 8, 2009 – Maintaining and protecting the U.S. military’s worldwide computer network is a vital component of national security, a senior official said here today. “For the United States military, cyberspace is a warfighting domain and it is critical to our operations,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters. “And so, we do have to aggressively protect our networks and our ability to work in cyberspace.” It also is important, Whitman said, that the Defense...