Free Republic

An al Qaeda video calling for "electronic jihad" illustrates the urgent need for cybersecurity standards for the most critical networks in the United States, a group of senators said. The video calls for cyberattacks against networks such as the electric grid and compares vulnerabilities in the United States' critical cyber networks to the vulnerabilities in the country's aviation system before 9/11, according to a statement Tuesday from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. "This is the clearest evidence we've seen that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups want to attack the cyber systems of our critical infrastructure,"...

The BBC has suffered a sophisticated cyber-attack following a campaign by Iranian authorities against its Persian service, director-general Mark Thompson said on Wednesday. Thompson also reported attempts to jam satellite feeds of the British Broadcasting Corporation services into Iran and to swamp its London phone lines with automated calls. In extracts from a speech he will make later on Wednesday, Thompson stopped short of explicitly accusing Tehran of being behind the cyber-attack, but he described the coincidence of the attacks as "self-evidently suspicious". Last month, Thompson accused Iranian authorities of arresting and threatening the families of BBC journalists to force...

The Jihad Will Be YouTubed by Raffaello Pantucci December 15, 2011 FOREIGN POLICY - The AFPAK Channel SNIPPET: "While clearly the technology to make such videos is something that is universal, it does seem as though it is aspirant jihadists in the West who find it easiest to use. There was no evidence that Gul was being directed by foreign terrorist organizations to produce his material, and his case shows the continued existence of young Westerners producing radical material on their own. It may indeed be the case that the virtual armies have yet to fully emerge as active warriors...

Hackers who attempt to attack Israel in cyberspace will be met with a "forceful response," warned Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon on Saturday -- one comparable to the response meted out to terrorists. Speaking at a cultural forum at a community center in Be'er Sheva, Ayalon said Israel views incidents such as the attack in which a Saudi hacker exposed the credit card numbers and information of thousands of Israelis at least twice last week as "acts of terror." An Israeli blogger claimed Friday that he was able to figure out the identity of the hacker, who claimed he was...

Iran has moved most of its government websites to local hosts to protect them from cyber attacks, the country's deputy communications minister said on Thursday. Ali Hakim Javadi, who is also head of Iran's technology organisation, said more than 90 percent of the websites had already been transferred as "it was necessary to protect governmental information on the Internet."

Foreign hackers broke into a water plant control system in Illinois last week and damaged a water pump in what appears to be the first reported case of a malicious cyber attack damaging a critical computer system in the United States, according to an industry expert. On Nov. 8, a municipal water district employee in Illinois noticed problems with the city’s water pump control system, and a technician determined the system had been remotely hacked into from a computer located in Russia, said Joe Weiss, an industry security expert who obtained a copy of an Illinois state fusion center report...

Foreign hackers broke into a water plant control system in Illinois last week and damaged a water pump in what appears to be the first reported case of a malicious cyber attack damaging a critical computer system in the United States, according to an industry expert. Dave Marcus, director of security research for McAfee Labs, said that the computers that control critical systems in the United States are vulnerable to attacks that come through the Internet, and few operators of these systems know how to detect them. “So many are ill-prepared for cyber attacks,” Marcus said. Problems with the system...

JERUSALEM, Israel (AP) -- Many of Israel's official websites have gone down in what the government says is a broad technical malfunction. The sites include that of the Mossad and Shin Bet intelligence services, the military spokesman, the Interior Ministry and others.

One objective might be significant damage to a coal/oil fired plant that provides electricity to the Grid. How would they do that? A simple example would be my electric tea pot at home. Every morning I fill the tea pot with water and turn it on. When the water comes to a boil, I turn it off and pour the water into a cup. My tea pot has a mechanical on-off switch but if I leave it on, the water boils out and the overheat safety switch automatically turns it off. If it was controlled by a computer a cyber...

Cyber-attackers could have stolen defense contractor's passwords October 08, 2011 Passwords for servers at defense contractor Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. (MHI) may have been stolen during a wide-ranging cyber-attack. The Kobe Shipyard and Machinery Works, which builds submarines, and the Nagoya Guidance and Propulsion Systems Works, which makes missile-related products, were among installations compromised in the attack, which was reported to the Metropolitan Police Department on Sept. 30. In total, 45 servers and 38 personal computers at 11 of MHI's facilities were infected with viruses. An analysis of a virus used in the attack suggests the perpetrators used simplified Chinese...

Non-English Speakers May Be Behind M'bishi Heavy Cyberattacks Tokyo, Sept. 30 (Jiji Press)--The viruses used in the recent cyberattacks on Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. <7011> may have been created outside the English-speaking world, analyses by a computer security firm showed Friday. Simplified Chinese characters were used for remote manipulation of target servers and several simple misspellings were found in programs written in English, according to the company, which analyzed some of the viruses. Given those facts, it is suspected that someone that can understand Chinese but is not good at using English created the viruses, the company said. In...

The attack over the summer was apparently launched in Iran and compromised a Dutch company's digital authentication certificates. Without trustworthy certificates, users who think they're dealing with online banks or sites such as such as Google might actually be dealing with an impostor. Reporting from Washington— A major cyber attack in Europe that apparently was launched from Iran has revealed significant vulnerabilities in the Internet security systems used to authenticate websites for banking, email and e-commerce around the world. The attack over the summer wrought havoc in the Netherlands, where the Justice Minister warned the public last Sunday that the...

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,...

Washington — The military and intelligence services of Russia and China are conducting a sustained campaign to steal American commercial and military secrets through cyber espionage, according to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and he warned that sophisticated computer hacking poses a major danger to U.S. interests. "Nation states are investing huge amounts of time, personnel and money to steal our data," Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said Friday in a speech to an association of retired U.S. intelligence officers. "We are not as prepared as we need to be." Rogers' remarks were framed as a warning against overly...

The world's most extensive case of cyber-espionage, including attacks on U.S. government and U.N. computers, is set to be revealed Wednesday by online security firm McAfee, and analysts are speculating that China is behind the attacks. The spying was dubbed "Operation Shady RAT," or "remote access tool" by McAfee -- and it led to a massive loss of information that poses a huge economic threat, wrote vice president of threat research Dmitri Alperovitch "What is happening to all this data — by now reaching petabytes as a whole — is still largely an open question," Alperovitch wrote on a blog detailing the threat. "However,...

Leon Panetta, at a confirmation hearing for the post of Defense secretary, says the US will need to take 'both defensive ... as well as aggressive measures' to deal with the threat of cyberattack.The next great battle America faces is likely to involve cyberwarfare, Leon Panetta, the Central Intelligence Agency director, warned senators Thursday, predicting that “the next Pearl Harbor that we confront could very well be a cyberattack that cripples" America’s electrical grid and its security and financial systems. “It’s going to take both defensive measures as well as aggressive measures to deal with that,” said Mr. Panetta,...

TEHRAN (AFP) – Iran has been hit with new malicious software as part of cyber attacks against the country, a military officer told Mehr news agency on Monday without specifying the target. "Certain characteristics about the 'Stars' virus have been identified, including that it is compatible with the (targeted) system," Gholam Reza Jalali, commander of the Iranian civil defence organisation, told the agency. "In the initial stage, the damage is low and it is likely to be mistaken for governmental executable files," Jalali said, adding that Iranian experts were still investigating the full scope of the malware's abilities. He did...

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) — The Oak Ridge National Laboratory hopes to restore limited email on Tuesday after a cyber attack over the weekend. Laboratory Director Thom Mason says officials shut down electronic access to the lab Friday night after a highly sophisticated cyber attack, known as Advanced Persistent Threat, according to The Knoxville News Sentinel. Closing access ensured that no data was extracted from ORNL computers.

When first discovered in 2010, the Stuxnet computer worm posed a baffling puzzle. Beyond its unusually high level of sophistication loomed a more troubling mystery: its purpose. Ralph Langner and team helped crack the code that revealed this digital warhead's final target -- and its covert origins. In a fascinating look inside cyber-forensics

Due to the growing list of brands disclosing that they have been compromised as a result of this breach, I’m going to go ahead and tag this as a massive breach. And I only expect it to get bigger as more announcements come out from Epsilon customers. Last night we reported on a breach at marketing services provider, Epsilon, the world’s largest permission-based email marketing provider. Initially we wrote that the breach had affected Kroger, the nation's largest traditional grocery retailer. There is a list of companies at the link (but I don't know if that is going to be...

Millions of sites hit with mass-injection cyberattackBy Sarah Jacobsson Purewal April 1, 2011 10:37 AM ET PC World - Hundreds of thousands -- and possibly millions -- of websites have been hit with a cyberattack that some are calling "one of the biggest mass-injection attacks we've ever seen." The attack was discovered on March 29 by security firm WebSense, and the injected domain was called lizamoon.com -- thus, the name of the mass-injection is "LizaMoon." According to WebSense, LizaMoon uses SQL Injection to add malicious script to compromised sites. While the first injected domain was lizamoon.com, additional URLs have since...

Tweet from Tammy Bruce: It looks as though all Palin supporting blogs and site are down. There may be a coordinated attack, more soon This includes 5 sites under the "Conservatives4Palin.com" umbrella.

Ever since it passed, the national health care law commonly known as ObamaCare has been entangled in legal battles and heated national debate. As polls have consistently shown, a majority of the public remains opposed to the law and many are worried because they never found out what was even in it. While the law has spurred countless news stories, a recent one you may have missed involved the attorney David Rivkin, who successfully led the multi-state challenge to ObamaCare filed in Florida. A prominent conservative voice, Rivkin has been a staunch defender of the Constitution in a variety of...

Actions to retaliate for treatment of WikiLeaks, Manning, spokesman for Anonymous says. DALLAS — A leader of the computer hackers group known as Anonymous is threatening new attacks on major U.S. corporations and government officials as part of at an escalating “cyberwar” against the citadels of American power. “It’s a guerilla cyberwar — that’s what I call it,” said Barrett Brown, 29, who calls himself a senior strategist and “propagandist” for Anonymous. He added: “It’s sort of an unconventional, asymmetrical act of warfare that we’ve involved in. And we didn’t necessarily start it. I mean, this fire has been burning.”...

(LEAD) S. Korean Web sites suffer DDoS attack SEOUL, March 4 (Yonhap) -- The Web sites of South Korea's presidential office and other major institutions came under a cyber attack on Friday, but there were no immediate reports of damage, industry sources said. The presidential office Cheong Wa Dae, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and top lender Kookmin Bank were among some 40 institutions whose Web sites were infected by the so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) from 10 a.m., AhnLab Inc. said in a statement. Additional attacks were expected to begin at 6:30 p.m., said AhnLab, South Korea's top...

Exclusive: Sarah Palin Under Cyber-Attack from Wikileaks Supporters in 'Operation Payback'* December 08, 2010 5:12 PM Political Punch Power, pop, and probings from ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper The website and personal credit card information of former Gov. Sarah Palin were cyber-attacked today by Wikileaks supporters, the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate tells ABC News in an email.

CNN) -- A computer hacker who calls himself "The Jester" claimed responsibility for the cyber attack which took down the WikiLeaks site Sunday, shortly before it started posting hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables. The Jester, who describes himself as a "hacktivist for good," said he took the controversial site down "for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops, 'other assets' & foreign relations."

Iran is going nuclear over a malicious computer worm targeting the country's atomic energy facilities. The Stuxnet worm has targeted not only Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant -- scheduled to go online in a matter of weeks -- but also the personal computers of the government's nuclear officials, the country's national news agency reports. Iran has not yet publically pointed blame to the West, but several Internet security experts publicly stated that they suspect that a hostile government such as the U.S. or Israel may be behind the cyberattack. "This would not be easy for a normal group to put together,"...

Iran's nuclear agency is trying to combat a complex computer worm that has affected industrial sites throughout the country and is capable of taking over power plants, Iranian media reports said. Experts from the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran met this week to discuss how to remove the malicious computer code, or worm, the semi-official ISNA news agency reported Friday. The computer worm, dubbed Stuxnet, can take over systems that control the inner workings of industrial plants. Experts in Germany discovered the worm in July, and it has since shown up in a number of attacks — primarily in Iran,...

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...

Ever since Google disclosed in January that Internet intruders had stolen information from its computers, the exact nature and extent of the theft has been a closely guarded company secret. But a person with direct knowledge of the investigation now says that the losses included one of Google’s crown jewels, a password system that controls access by millions of users worldwide to almost all of the company’s Web services, including e-mail and business applications.

It came as a surprise this month to Wang Jianwei, a graduate engineering student in Liaoning, China, that he had been described as a potential cyberwarrior before the United States Congress. Larry M. Wortzel, a military strategist and China specialist, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 10 that it should be concerned because “Chinese researchers at the Institute of Systems Engineering of Dalian University of Technology published a paper on how to attack a small U.S. power grid sub-network in a way that would cause a cascading failure of the entire U.S.”

What if a crippling attack struck the country's digital infrastructure? Experts including current and former officials tackle the question. The results show that the peril is real and growing. The crisis began when college basketball fans downloaded a free March Madness application to their smart phones. The app hid spyware that stole passwords, intercepted e-mails and created havoc. Soon 60 million cellphones were dead. The Internet crashed, finance and commerce collapsed, and most of the nation's electric grid went dark. White House aides discussed putting the Army in American cities. "We're in uncharted territory here," was the most common refrain...

Threads disappear ... I posted this to bloggers and personal but the News & Activism topics come up, I get pinged over & over for the same posts, and etc.. What's going on?!! Are we under attack?

Washington insiders recently sweated out a real-time war game where a cyberattack crippled cell phone service, Internet and even electrical grids across the U.S. The unscripted, dynamic simulation allowed former White House officials and the Bipartisan Policy Center to study the problems that might arise during a real cyberattack emergency, according to Aviation Week's Ares Defense Blog. The Policy Center's vice-president reports ""The general consensus of the panel today was that we are not prepared to deal with these kinds of attacks."

The United States is at risk of a crippling cyber attack that could "wreak havoc" on the country because the "technological balance" makes it much easier to launch a cyber strike than defend against it, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said Tuesday.

February 12, 2010 China Alarmed by Security Threat From Internet By SHARON LaFRANIERE and JONATHAN ANSFIELD BEIJING — Deep inside a Chinese military engineering institute in September 2008, a researcher took a break from his duties and decided — against official policy — to check his private e-mail messages. Among the new arrivals was an electronic holiday greeting card that purported to be from a state defense office. The researcher clicked on the card to open it. Within minutes, secretly implanted computer code enabled an unnamed foreign intelligence agency to tap into the databases of the institute in the city...

It was almost 9 p.m. in Tehran as I published this post, and people around the world are still trying to decide what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threatened "punch" against the West is going to be. Some influential Americans appear to think it might come as a cyber attack.

Google May Leave China Because of Cyberattacks By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO Google Inc. said it is "reviewing the feasibility of our business operations in China" and may back out of China entirely, as it disclosed it had been hit with major cyberattacks it believes to have originated from the country. Google disclosed its thinking in a blog post Tuesday. In the post, Google said it detected a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China" in mid-December and that the attack resulted in "the theft of intellectual property from Google." The post said that Google believed...

"Project Grey Goose and University at Albany SUNY to investigate major Power Grid blackouts caused by hackers" SNIPPET: "This is an open call for volunteers who wish to participate in a joint Project Grey Goose / University at Albany SUNY open source intelligence investigation into power grid blackouts caused by hacker attacks. The scope is global and includes the U.S. Interested parties should contact me from their work email address with an expression of interest, a brief bio, and your experience, if any, in SCADA systems in general or the power grid in particular. All respondents will be kept confidential....

Security: A Senate bill lets the president "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "nongovernmental" computer networks and do what's needed to respond to the threat. Didn't they just collect our e-mail addresses?We wish this was just a piece of the fictional "Dr. Strangelove" that fell to the cutting-room floor, but it's not. It is a real piece of disturbingly vague legislation sponsored by Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. Senate Bill 773 would grant the administration emergency powers (where have we heard that before?) in the event of a cyberemergency that the president would have...

Facebook Inc. is providing new details of how an attack aimed at a Georgian blogger Thursday disrupted its site and crashed others, including Twitter Inc. and LiveJournal Inc. The company rooted out the cause of the massive denial-of-service attack, said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt, after noticing that the compromised computers that began flooding its site Thursday morning were directing traffic to the profile page of a single pro-Georgian blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia. The Cyxymu blogger couldn't immediately be reached. In a blog post Friday, Twitter co-founder Biz...

Profile of a real cyberwar Beware the mayhem of malware on the march By Aaron Mannes and James Hendler | Wednesday, August 5, 2009 The denial-of-service (DoS) attacks that started on July 4 garnered typical headlines about cyberwar, but in fact, from a technical standpoint, those "attacks" may be the opposite of real cyberwar. A much less noticed report in Israel's leading daily, Ha'aretz, on Israel's operations against Iran's nuclear program may give greater insight into how cyberwar actually will work. It is no secret that several countries, including the United States, China, Russia and Israel, have examined cyberwar capabilities....

LONDON, July 21 (Reuters) - Olympic organisers are "very alive" to the threat of a cyber attack on the London 2012 Olympics, made more challenging because of its evolving nature, senior Interior Ministry officials said on Tuesday. Ticketing systems, the transport network and hotel bookings as well as security are among potential targets. Olympic security officials are also planning for the possible diversion of aircraft to protect airspace around the venues from terrorist attacks, the officials said. The greatest threat to security at the Games is international terrorism, the government's latest "Safety and Security Strategy" report said.

Amidst all the congressional to-ing and fro-ing associated with the President's controversial health care, cap-and-trade and "hate crimes" initiatives, it would be easy for most legislators to overlook a hearing the House Homeland Security Committee has scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. If Congress fails to address the subject of that hearing, however, it literally will not matter whether the government addresses any of those other, disproportionately prominent agenda items. The title of the hearing - "Securing the Modern Electric Grid from Physical and Cyber Attacks" - fails to communicate the magnitude of the danger, and the imperative for urgent corrective action....

`NK Cyber Warfare Unit Masterminding DDoS Attacks` JULY 11, 2009 09:20 The North Korean military`s cyber warfare unit is believed to be responsible for this week`s massive cyber attacks on major South Korean and U.S. government and civilian Web sites. South Korea`s National Intelligence Service said this to lawmakers yesterday. Park Sung-do, second deputy director of the service, told an unofficial meeting with members of the National Assembly’s intelligence committee yesterday morning that a research center called "No. 110," under the Reconnaissance Bureau of the North Korean People’s Army is believed to have masterminded the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The...

PCs Used in Korean DDoS Attacks May Self Destruct There are signs that the concerted cyber attacks targeting U.S. and Korean government and commercial Web sites this past week are beginning to wane. Yet, even if the assaults were to be completely blocked tomorrow, the attackers could still have one last, inglorious weapon in their arsenal: New evidence suggests that the malicious code responsible for spreading this attack includes instructions to overwrite the infected PC's hard drive. Update: This is already happening. Please be sure to read the updates at the end of this post. Original post: According to Joe...

/begin my summary S. Korean Intelligence: Cyberattack, the Work of N. Korean Military (in a report to legislature) Ddos attacks on major institutions in S. Korea and U.S. were the operation by Institute No. 110 under Reconnaisance Bureau of N. Korean General Staff, according to Kookmin Ilbo on July 10. According to its report to Intelligence Committee at National Assembly, the N. Korean institute staged a mock Ddos attack on Korean Communications Commission and a provincial university last month. The institute develops hacking programs and runs undercover hacking units overseas, according to a lawmaker present at the intelligence committee. /end...

US officials eye North Korea in cyber attack By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer 2 hrs 36 mins ago WASHINGTON – U.S. authorities on Wednesday eyed North Korea as the origin of the widespread cyber attack that overwhelmed government Web sites in the United States and South Korea, although they warned it would be difficult to definitively identify the attackers quickly. The powerful attack that targeted dozens of government and private sites underscored how unevenly prepared the U.S. government is to block such multipronged assaults.

The powerful attack that overwhelmed computers at U.S. and South Korean government agencies for days was even broader than initially realized, also targeting the White House, the Pentagon and the New York Stock Exchange. Other targets of the attack included the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, State Department, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post, according to an early analysis of the malicious software used in the attacks. Many of the organizations appeared to successfully blunt the sustained computer assaults. The Associated Press obtained the target list from security experts analyzing the attacks. It was not immediately clear...