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Cyber security experts told Congress today that the Obama administration should take Healthcare.gov offline until privacy vulnerabilities are addressed and detection capabilities are improved. David Kennedy, a so-called “white hat hacker” who tests security flaws by hacking online systems to help identify weaknesses, warned that there are critical flaws and exposures “currently on the website that hackers could use to extract sensitive information.” “The purpose of security isn’t to say, ‘Hey, we’re 100 percent impenetrable all the time,’ but can we detect the hackers in the very early stages of the life cycle of the attack, monitor that, and prevent...

The American intelligence service - NSA - infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software designed to steal sensitive information. Documents provided by former NSA-employee Edward Snowden and seen by this newspaper, prove this. A management presentation dating from 2012 explains how the NSA collects information worldwide. In addition, the presentation shows that the intelligence service uses ‘Computer Network Exploitation’ (CNE) in more than 50,000 locations. CNE is the secret infiltration of computer systems achieved by installing malware, malicious software. One example of this type of hacking was discovered in September 2013 at the Belgium telecom provider Belgacom....

Here's to your health...your health insurance credentials, that is. Information security service provider Dell SecureWorks has uncovered in a new report that buyers are dropping big bucks for health insurance documents that are being hawked on the internet underground with the goal of using them to commit fraud. Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) senior security researcher Don Jackson has investigated underground market supply and demand for years, and beginning in May, he sought to update how buyers are spending their money in 2013. Jackson discovered people are laying down top dollar for all-inclusive health insurance dossiers known as “Kitz,”...

Experts’ warnings of Obamacare website’s complete lack of security apparently have been justified. The website gave at least 3 unknown individuals access to a woman’s Social Security number, address, and other data that could be used for identity theft. Customer service operators at Healthcare.gov’s 1-800 number told Lisa Martinson about the unauthorized access when she called in to change her password. When Martinson asked for her information to be removed from the site she was told it would take 5 days.

Someone may have posted something on this already...Scary concept and has a little too close to real feel... http://www.dragondaymovie.com/?video=video-8-3

**SNIP** According to the US authorities, the arrested man hacked into systems of the US Army, Nasa and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others. **SNIP** The suspected hackers allegedly placed "back doors", or code, to allow them to get back into the systems later to steal confidential information.

The revelation came after Germany's secret service investigated the devices It warned that they were 'trojan horses' capable of fishing for information Warnings have gone out to every government that received them America’s NSA spy agency has been under fire from around the world for its surveillance activity over the past few months. Now the Russians are facing criticism for some allegedly shady operations, too. It’s claimed that USB drives and phone chargers, given to world leaders at the G20 summit in Russia were 'Trojan horses' capable of sending data back to the Kremlin. David Cameron did not receive one...

Israel and not America was behind the hacking of millions of French phones, it was claimed today. [Snip] But today’s Le Monde newspaper provides evidence that it was in fact Israeli agents who were listening in. France first suspected the U.S. of hacking into former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s communications network when he was unsuccessfully trying for re-election in 2012. Intelligence officials Bernard Barbier and Patrick Pailloux travelled from Paris to Washington to demand an explanation, but the Americans hinted that the Israelis were to blame. The Americans insisted they have never been behind any hacking in France, and were always

The man whose name is synonymous with computer security shreds Obamacare’s web strategy. The very worst kind of identity theft is medical identity theft, but when you also combine this with all sorts of additional...

A service that sells personal data to identity thieves has been getting its wares from hacked data brokers storing information similar to what Obamacare marketplaces plan to use, setting the scene for fraudsters to collect government subsidies. According to a new investigative report by cybersecurity researcher Brian Krebs, the service, known as SSNDOB, hacked LexisNexis and other large data aggregators that supply ID check information.

"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...

(WASHINGTON) -- Even the U.S. government has to deal with those pesky, Internet-based scams out of Africa. New court documents show that several years ago, the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies fell victim to an intricate fraud scheme, whereby individuals in Kenya were able to divert payments from those agencies to their own bank accounts. In 2008, a group of unidentified individuals in Kenya somehow accessed the U.S. government’s Central Contractor Registry, a password-protected database that maintains bank account information of government contractors and research institutions doing work for the government, according...

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – California may become the first state to issue digital license plates that can be registered electronically and record tolls. Privacy advocates are concerned the plates could become tracking devices for law enforcement. Instead of a metal license plate, the digital plate would be a computer screen, slightly larger than an iPad. Registering the plates could be done wirelessly.

Abstract. We describe the use of formal methods in the development of IRONSIDES, an implementation of DNS with superior performance to both BIND and Windows, the two most common DNS servers on the Internet. More importantly, unlike BIND and Windows, IRONSIDES is impervious to all single-packet denial of service attacks and all forms of remote code execution. Introduction DNS is a protocol essential to the proper functioning of the Internet. The two most common implementations of DNS are the free software version BIND and the implementations that come bundled with various versions of Windows. Unfortunately, despite their ubiquity and...

Following the death of Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed contributor Michael Hastings in a fiery car crash, and the subsequent revelation of a panicked email he sent to his colleagues just before he died, this question has arisen: could someone have hacked his car? That's unlikely, and here's why. P Hastings' 2013 Mercedes C250 coupe crashed into a tree on Highland Ave. in Los Angeles around 4:30 am on June 18. The car burst into flames, and it took the coroner two days to positively ID Hastings' body. P It sounds like perfect fodder for a good conspiracy theory. After all,...

Has anybody experienced this lately? I will go to a webpage on my office computer then later during the day that very same page will open up on my cellphone in Safari. Mind you I didn't visit that web page on my cell phone at all and didn't sync it with my computer either. I'm wondering if someone has hacked my work computer, is capturing the webpage addresses then has my cellphone number and access to the account to make it open up on my cellphone remotely. I know how part of that could be done but it would take...

O'REILLY: "Personal Story" segment tonight. CBS News announced on Friday that Investigative Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson's computer was hacked into late last year. This, combined with the James Rosen situation here at Fox News and the A.P. snooping, causing a lot of concern. With us now on a Factor Cable Exclusive is Ms. Attkisson. So, when did you know that somebody was messing with your computer. SHARYL ATTKISSON, INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT, CBS NEWS: Well, there were signs probably around 2011 but I don't think I recognized exactly what was going on until perhaps the fall of last year when so many things...

Via the Right Scoop, a follow-up to Friday’s post. Forgive me for a possibly stupid question but when she says that her computers were turning on and off, she means they were powering on and then powering down, not that they were merely “waking up” from sleep mode, right? When I tweeted the link to this, a bunch of people tweeted back that a computer might “wake up” automatically due to Windows Update. But Attkisson has had professional computer forensics people investigate, though; obviously she knows the difference by now between a computer updating itself and doing something freaky weird...

Classified US government data shown to the South China Morning Post by whistle-blower Edward Snowden has provided a rare insight into the effectiveness of Washington's top-secret global cyberspying programme. New details about the data can be revealed by the Post after further analysis of information Snowden divulged during an exclusive interview on Wednesday in which the former CIA computer analyst exposed extensive hacking by the US in Hong Kong and the mainland. The FBI said yesterday it had launched a criminal investigation and was taking "all necessary steps" to prosecute Snowden for exposing secret US surveillance programmes. FBI Director Robert...