Cybersecurity

Increasingly Aggressive Russia, Cyberwarfare a Growing Threat to UK, Says MI5 Chief

"In the first newspaper interview given by an incumbent MI5 chief in the service's 107-year history, Andrew Parker said that at a time when much of the focus was on Islamic extremism, covert action from other countries was a growing danger. Most prominent was Russia," Ewen MacAskill and Paul Johnson reporting in The Guardian. more

FBI Withheld Warning Democratic National Committee of Suspected Russian Role in Hack

Russian hackers believed to be affiliated with the Russian government continued to have access to Democratic Party computers for months during the critical phase in the U.S. presidential campaign, the sources have said. more

Moscow Calls US Accusations of Russian DNC Hack “Unprecedented Anti-Russian Hysteria”

The Foreign Ministry in Moscow says U.S. accusations that Russia was responsible for cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations lack any proof and are an attempt by Washington to fan "unprecedented anti-Russian hysteria". more

US Ramping Up to Defeat Terrorism Online

Obama administration is ramping up its efforts to fight terrorism -- "How the US is working to defeat ISIS online" Kristina Wong reprots today in the Hill: "Driving the effort is the recently set up Global Engagement Center, housed at the State Department but led by retired Navy SEAL Cmdr. Michael Lumpkin, a former top Pentagon official." more

U.S. Targets Russian Mastermind Behind Dominant Ransomware Landscape, Offers $10 Million Reward

The U.S. government has declared criminal charges, economic sanctions, and a $10 million reward for information leading to the arrest of a Russian citizen, Mikhail Matveev. Accused of a series of ransomware attacks, Matveev's alleged operations, known as Babuk, have targeted entities such as the D.C. police, an airline, and other American industries. more

UK Raises Cybersecurity Spending to $2.3 Billion

Britain's finance minister on Tuesday announced government's new five year National Cyber Security Strategy, almost doubling the funding from its 2011 plan to 1.9 billion-pound ($2.3 billion). more

Reprot Suggests China Hacked High-Level Officials at Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation

The former chairman, chief of staff and general counsel of the agency were all infiltrated. more

British Banks Not Fully Reporting Cyber Attacks, Fear Punishment, Bad Publicity

"Britain's banks are not reporting the full extent of cyber attacks to regulators for fear of punishment or bad publicity, bank executives and providers of security systems say," reports Lawrence White in Reuters today. more

US Senators in Letter to Yahoo Say Late Hack Disclosure “Unacceptable”

"A group of Democratic U.S. senators on Tuesday demanded Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) to explain why hackers' theft of user information for half a billion accounts two years ago only came to light last week and lambasted its handling of the breach as "unacceptable," reports Dustin Volz from Washington in Reuters. more

Is Zoom’s Server Security Just as Vulnerable as the Client Side?

Zoom programmers made elementary security errors when coding, and did not use protective measures that compiler toolchains make available. It's not a great stretch to assume that similar flaws afflict their server implementations. While Mudge noted that Zoom's Windows and Mac clients are (possibly accidentally) somewhat safer than the Linux client, I suspect that their servers run on Linux.Were they written with similar lack of attention to security? more

The xz liblzma Vulnerability

On 29 March 2024, an announcement was posted notifying the world that the Open-Source Software (OSS) package "xz-utils," which includes the xz data compression program and a library of software routines called "liblzma" and which is present in most Linux distributions, had been compromised. The insertion of the compromised code was done by "Jia Tan", the official maintainer of the xz-utils package. more