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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?