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Anonymous, the group of activist hackers, claimed to have crashed the Justice Department website on Thursday in retaliation for prosecutors shutting down the popular file-sharing site Megaupload.com. "The government takes down Megaupload? 15 minutes later Anonymous takes down government & record label sites," the group wrote on its Twitter account. A Justice Department spokesman did not confirm whether the agency had suffered a cyber attack, but justice.gov was not loading as of Thursday afternoon.

The following is an excerpt from “Bowing to Beijing” (Regnery Publishing, Nov. 14, 2011): In November 1997, Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism that “we’re facing the possibility of an electronic Pearl Harbor. … There is going to be an electronic attack on this country some time in the future.” Two years later, he told a secret session of the House Armed Services Committee, “We are at war - right now. We are in cyberwar.” Fast-forward more than a decade, to 2011. President Obama’s choice for secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, tells the Senate...

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,...

Security: The Pentagon has disclosed perhaps the largest theft of sensitive data by an unnamed foreign government. The threat to our electronic infrastructure is real, growing and as dangerous as a North Korean missile. In outlining America's cyberwarfare strategy last Thursday at the National Defense University, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn disclosed that 24,000 sensitive files containing Pentagon data at a defense company were accessed in a cyberattack in March, likely by a foreign government. He didn't disclose the identity of that government, but in a bit of an understatement he acknowledged, "We have a pretty good idea." So...

A child becomes computer literate at primary school. Meanwhile, North Korea's most prodigious young students are identified and trained in advanced cyberwarfare techniques As South Korea blames North Korea for a recent slew of cyberattacks, two defectors share their experiences, as a hacker and trainer of "cyberwarriors" in the reclusive communist country, with Al Jazeera shedding some light into the inner workings of the North's cyberwarfare programme. In the process, Kim Heung-kwang and Jang Se-yul also warn of the regime's concentrated efforts to bolster its cyberwarfare capabilities. The hackers' professor Kim Heung-kwang was a computer science professor in North...

CNN) -- They've breached or busted the websites of the CIA, PBS and the U.S. Senate, and launched at least part of an extended attack on Sony, whose PlayStation Network was brought to a grinding halt for the better part of a month. And, to hear them tell it, it's all for a laugh. Meet Lulz Security, or LulzSec, the gleeful and secretive band of hackers who appear to be responsible for a string of high-profile and sometimes embarrassing Internet attacks. Their most recent strike, and arguably the most ambitious, was a distributed denial-of-service attack Wednesday that shut down the...

Last year's Stuxnet virus attack represented a new kind of threat to critical infrastructure. Just over a year ago, a computer in Iran started repeatedly rebooting itself, seemingly without reason. Suspecting some kind of malicious software (malware), analysts at VirusBlokAda, an antivirus-software company in Minsk, examined the misbehaving machine over the Internet, and soon found that they were right. Disturbingly so: the code they extracted from the Iranian machine proved to be a previously unknown computer virus of unprecedented size and complexity. On 17 June 2010, VirusBlokAda issued a worldwide alert that set off an international race to track down...

The FBI announced Sunday it shut down an Atlanta-based website that tracks cyber-crime after the site was compromised by a mysterious, yet increasingly audacious group of hackers. InfraGard Atlanta, a nonprofit partnership between local business, government and academic security experts and the FBI, was hacked late last week by Lulz Security. LulzSec, as it’s known on-line in cyber security channels, hijacked the InfraGard site and published the email addresses, usernames and passwords of its 180 members. On its website, LulzSec wrote that the InfraGard volunteers – which include internet security experts at Equifax, Georgia Tech, the U.S. Army, DeKalb County...

Google wouldn't be human if it weren't relieved that the latest Chinese hacking incident targeted not a hole in Google's defenses but a gullibility of its customers. The proper term is "spear phishing" for the use of email cons to scam a specific, chosen individual into revealing his or her password, allowing unauthorized access to inboxes and online accounts. In a blog post this week, Google announced that the latest attacks seem to come from Jinan, China. The targets were the Gmail accounts of "senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military...

"The potential for the next Pearl Harbor could very well be a cyber-attack," he testified on Capitol Hill Thursday Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also appeared, telling the committee, "This threat is increasing in scope and scale, and its impact is difficult to overstate." ........ Panetta told the committee, "This is a real national security threat that we have to pay attention to. I know there are a lot of aspects to it. "The Internet, the cyber-arena ... is a vastly growing area of information that can be used and abused in a number of ways." U.S. officials and...

The Iranian authorities have promised to "put cyberpolice all over the country" as it comes under threat from online dissent at home and computer sabotage from abroad. The country's head of police, Ismael Ahmadi Moghaddam, said Iran had to stamp out "defamation and mischief" at the opening of a new headquarters in Qom, the religious centre of the country. He gave few details of his plans, but his words suggests he intends to continue developing the Chinese-style model already in place of using a mixture of technological censorship using keywords and large numbers of trained police to monitor websites. He...

Body of murdered cyberwar expert found in landfill Military man dumped into three-ring whodunit Dan Goodin January 5, 2010 The body of a decorated US Army officer was found dumped in a Delaware landfill on New Years Eve day, a few days after he expressed concern that the nation wasn't adequately prepared for cyber warfare, according to news reports following the bizarre whodunit. Events surrounding the murder of John P. Wheeler III, who most recently worked part-time for defense contractor Mitre Corporation on cyber defense topics, read like a Tom Clancy novel. The 66-year-old worked for three Republican administrations, was...

      WASHINGTON — It's a tough time to be a member of the U.S. armed forces. Those serving in our all-volunteer military — and their families — are stretched and stressed by more than nine years of war. Unfortunately, our commander in chief — supposedly the champion of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardsmen and Marines — isn't doing anything to make serving in uniform any easier. President Barack Obama — fresh from his 3 1/2-hour "visit" to Afghanistan — continues to insist that the U.S. Senate act immediately to allow active homosexuals to serve in the military....

War is transforming itself before our eyes, turning into something unfamiliar and strange. Information has taken a place as a major class of weaponry, with sabotage and subterfuge as preferred tactics. On the new battlefield, these weapons are available not only to nation-states, but to organizations and even individuals. The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is something that ought to be more widely known than it is.

The Wikileaks organization has morphed from a relatively harmless aid to government whistleblowers into a threat to U.S. national security. It should be treated accordingly. As with the July dump of Afghan war documents, the mainstream press has attempted to kindle story lines from the Iraq war data dump that imply scandal, particularly regarding civilian casualties. But once again, the information is underwhelming. There are no smoking guns except for some inconvenient truths about the actual existence of Saddam Hussein's weapons-of-mass-destruction program and Iranian involvement in Iraq's insurgency. For the most part, however, this type of information was well known...

A sophisticated worm designed to steal industrial secrets and disrupt operations has infected at least 14 plants, according to Siemens. Called Stuxnet, the worm was discovered in July when researchers at VirusBlokAda found it on computers in Iran. It is one of the most sophisticated and unusual pieces of malicious software ever created—the worm leveraged a previously unknown Windows vulnerability (now patched) that allowed it to spread from computer to computer, typically via USB sticks. The worm, designed to attack Siemens industrial control systems, has not spread widely. However, it has affected a number of Siemens plants, according to company...

SNIPPET: "Oops, Microsoft did it again. Part of the company’s Government Security Program (GSP), Microsoft has offered the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) a peek inside the source code of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server. This is the second time that the company has (publicly) shared source code with the FSB, following a similar deal which took place in 2002, this time involving source code for Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2000. Microsoft has done similar deals with China in 2003, and most recently in 2010. However, in the light of...

The Pentagon would consider a military response in the case of a cyber attack against the United States, a US defense official said on Wednesday. Asked about the possibility of using military force after a cyber assault, James Miller, undersecretary of defense for policy, said: "Yes, we need to think about the potential for responses that are not limited to the cyber domain." But he said it remained unclear what constituted an act of war in cyberspace. "Those are legal questions that we are attempting to address," Miller said at a conference in Washington, adding that "there are certainly a...

In response to the continuous compromise of networks, multiple countries have begun developing secure platforms and operating systems. Computer companies, university researchers, defense R&D contractors and militaries around the world recognize the criticality of networks and embedded processors within their equipment. They also recognize how vulnerable they are and that’s why so much attention is being given to building in security at every level of the system including the operating system. As discussed here, China’s Trusted Computing Platform (TCP) program has been underway for some time now and can be traced back to the early 2000s. The Chinese TCP includes...

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...

BEIJING—China-based hackers stole Indian national-security information, 1,500 emails from the Dalai Lama's office and other sensitive documents, a new report said Tuesday. Researchers at the University of Toronto said they were able to observe the hacking and trace it to core servers located in China and to people based in the southwestern city of Chengdu. The researchers said they monitored the hacking for the past eight months. The report said it has no evidence of involvement by the Chinese government, but it again put Beijing on the defensive. Separate reports earlier this year said security investigators had traced attacks on...

Many nations are taking advantage of the Internet to encourage, or even organize, patriotic Internet users to obtain hacking skills. This enables the government to use (often informally) these thousands of hackers to attack enemies (foreign or domestic.) These organizations arrange training and mentoring to improve the skills of group members. Turkey has over 44,000 of these hackers, Saudi Arabia has over 100,000, Iraq has over 40,000, Russia over 100,000 and China, over 400,000. While many of these Cyber Warriors are rank amateurs, even the least skilled can be given simple tasks. And out of their ranks will emerge more...

In 2018, the U.S. Navy hopes to take a major step toward fielding a cyber-attack system on a tactically survivable, fighter-size aircraft. Although researchers are cautious about discussing their cyberwarfare and electronic attack projects, one company states that it is "developing a weapon system that can deliver cyber-effects through free space into an aperture." That opaque explanation refers to a cyber-weapon, sized for a tactical aircraft or UAV, that can create a long-range data stream -- most likely from an active, electronically scanned array (AESA) emitter. The emitter will function both as radar and the source of these uniquely tailored...

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.”

The United States is building an elite cyber defence team to guard the nation's public and private computer systems, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Wednesday. "We need the best brains we can bring to bear on meeting the challenge," Napolitano told computer security specialists at a premier RSA Conference. "We are building one of the best teams anywhere, but our success depends in no small part on our ability to collaborate with the private sector." She challenged those at the conference to join forces with the department and help teach people the importance of protecting themselves from online crooks...

US national security leaders and top cyber warriors from around the world are gathering here to plot defenses against criminals and spies that increasingly plague the Internet. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and White House Cyber Security Coordinator Howard Schmidt will take part in this week's RSA conference along with computer defense companies and technology icons such as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Craigslist creator Craig Newmark. "We have before us more data moving into the cloud and more sophisticated cyber criminals," said Qualys chief executive Philippe Courtot, who is among the keynote speakers at the premier event that kicks...

Citing the need to take stronger measures against cyber warfare, Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, demanded that access to the Internet be restricted to “licensed drivers.” “We wouldn’t let a person get behind the wheel of a car without a license, so why should we allow just anyone with a computer to cruise the web?” Mundie asked. Mundie contended that by screening those who want to use the Internet, “governments could dramatically reduce the incidence of hostile actions against them. Making those who want to use the web prove they are no threat to the government...

In the last few months, major Russian newspapers, that have been critical of the government, have been attacked by hackers. Currently, Novaya Gazeta, highly respected for its investigative reporting, has had its web site shut down by hackers for a week (via a powerful DDOS attack). Novaya Gazeta publishes three issues a week, and its reporting is picked up globally via its web site. Novaya Gazeta's reporting has certainly upset some people, as four of their reporters have been murdered in the past nine years. Last November, hackers broke into the web site of mass audience (circulation of a million)...

Less than two years after the U.S. Air Force officially dumped its planned Cyber Command, it's scaled-back replacement, the 24th Air Force, recently officially opened for business. Over the past five years, the air force has been trying to establish a new Cyber War operation and use it to gain overall control for all Department of Defense Cyber War activities. The other services were not keen on this. That resistance, plus internal problems (losing track of nuclear weapons, cost overruns on new aircraft, inability to perform on the battlefield) led to the Cyber Command operation being scaled back to being...

In a paper published by the head of the Military Intelligence Directorate, Major General Amos Yadlin of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), in the Intelligence Research Center Journal, described the development of cyberwarfare, computer attacks in the 21st century, and the capabilities required from armies to fight this medium successfully. According to Maj. Gen. Yadlin, cyberwarfare is divided into three areas: intelligence gathering, defense and attack. "Anyone who is able to hack (personal computers, cell phones and internet) ends up knowing quite a lot. If you catch my drift," warned the Military Intelligence chief in the article. "Just imagine the...

The United States faces an evolving list of potential adversaries in the 21st century that not only continue to seek weapons of mass destruction, but are honing the skills necessary to wage battle in cyberspace as well as outer space, a panel of national security experts said Jan. 20. The nature of warfare has changed significantly since the end of the 20th century, with new technologies and threats emerging faster than ever, U.S. Air Force Gen. Robert Kehler, commander of Air Force Space Command, said during a panel discussion at the Conference on National Security Strategy and Policy here. The...

Experts: US gov't needs to prepare for cyberwar Cyberwar is difficult to define, but the U.S. needs a strategy, a group of experts says By Grant Gross, IDG News Service January 27, 2010 04:31 PM ET Sponsored by: The U.S. government needs to figure out how it will respond to acts of cyberwar, as foreign governments increasingly look to gain advantages in cyberspace, a group of cybersecurity experts said Wednesday. One problem, however, is that there wasn't consensus among the panelists on what exactly constitutes an act of war in cyberspace. The U.S. military has used cyberattacks to disrupt enemy...

In South Korea, the Ministry of Defense has got its new Cyber War Center operational . In addition to this military Cyber War unit, South Korea is forming a cyber police force to help protect commercial and government organizations from hackers. The new organization is part of the National Intelligence Service (South Korea's CIA) and hired 3,000 Internet security experts. These agents work with victims of Internet crime, coordinating the use of other government agencies to catch the hackers, and develop improved security. All of this is in response to the growing number of Internet based attacks coming from North...

The report card is mixed regarding next-generation nonkinetic, or limited effects, weaponry ­developed by the U.S. and its allies. Cyber-warfare turns on three critical aspects--attack, defense and assessment. Information-technology industry officials say attack capabilities are receiving attention and funding. Defenses against cyber-attack have begun attracting support because of persistent adversaries who flourish in the Wild West atmosphere of the Russian and Chinese cyber-worlds. The big shortfall, they agree, is in battle damage assessment (BDA). "I'm trying to render an enemy system nonfunctional with a nonkinetic attack," says John Osterholz, BAE Systems vice president for integrated cyber-warfare and cyber-security. "How do...

ANNAPOLIS | U.S. Naval Academy officials said Monday that they were exploring ways of working knowledge about cyberwarfare into the core curriculum for all students because of the rising significance of cybersecurity. Right now, the academy offers some elective courses, classes mostly taken by computer science and information technology majors. But unlike the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in New York and the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, the Annapolis school does not even have a club for students interested in the field. "On a bunch of different levels, in terms of opening up to cyberwarfare, outside...

Peter Schiff's campaign website has been repeatedly targeted by cyber attackers, his brother and spokesman said this afternoon. The campaign has notified the FBI. Schiff, a Republican running for U.S. Senate, had planned a "moneybomb'' -- a one-day online fundraising blitz -- for today, but just minutes before midnight, when the moneybomb was set to start, the website went down, his brother, Andrew Schiff, said. "These are coordinated attacks,'' Andrew Schiff said in a brief phone interview. It wasn't the first time the website has been hit, Andrew Schiff said. The campaign had been targeted several times in the past...

November 4, 2009: South Korea has confirmed suspicions that Internet based attacks earlier this year came from "the norks" (North Korea). The South Korean NIS (National Intelligence Service) has completed its investigation of the route the July attacks took, and has traced the origin back to the North Korean Ministry of Post and Telecommunications facilities. While there was no apparent damage from the July attacks (which hit government sites in South Korea and the United States), similar attacks have made away with secret data. For example, the South Korean military recently reported that someone hacked into a classified network, and...

SNIPPET: "After the 4 July DDoS attacks, wrongly attributed to North Korea, it’s wise to treat reports of DPRK security hacks with some caution. Nevertheless, The Korea Times reports the following: Classified Info on Dangerous Chemicals Hacked Hackers stole classified information on dangerous chemicals in their raid on the South Korean army computer network in what was believed to be an attack by North Korea, Yonhap News Agency reported Saturday, quoting government officials." SNIPPET: "The Sydney Morning Herald adds more information: A North Korea cyber warfare unit hacked into a South Korean military command earlier this year and stole some...

North Korea is increasingly focused on cyber warfare, improvised explosives and missile technology as the regime fears it would be defeated in a direct confrontation with US and South Korean forces, a US commander said on Tuesday. The emphasis on unconventional methods comes amid signs North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il appears to be firmly "in charge" and in decent health, General Walter Sharp, commander of US forces in Korea, told reporters on Tuesday. "I think the North Koreans probably realized they could not win in a normal conventional all-out attack," Sharp said. Given the strength of South Korean and US...

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...

A widespread and unusually resilient computer attack that began July 4 knocked out the Web sites of several government agencies, including some that are responsible for fighting cyber crime, The Associated Press has learned. The Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week, according to officials inside and outside the government. Some of the sites were still experiencing problems Tuesday evening. Cyber attacks on South Korea government and private sites also may be linked, officials there said. U.S. officials refused to publicly...

May 13th, 2009 China's 'secure' OS Kylin - a threat to U.S offensive cyber capabilities? Posted by Dancho Danchev @ 6:23 am Categories: Browsers, Complex Attacks, Governments, Hackers, Kernel-level Exploits... Tags: China, Operating System, Operating Systems, Linux, Software... Picture a cyber warfare arms race where the participating countries have spent years of building offensive cyber warfare capabilities by exploiting the monoculture on one another’s IT infrastructure. Suddenly, one of the countries starts migrating to a hardened operating system of its own, and by integrating it on systems managing the critical infrastructure it successfully undermines the offensive cyber warfare capabilities developed...

By the end of WWII, 11 Colossus machines were in use Bletchley Park is best known for the work done on cracking the German codes and helping to bring World War II to a close far sooner than might have happened without those code breakers. But many believe Bletchley should be celebrated not just for what it ended but also for what it started - namely the computer age. The pioneering machines at Bletchley were created to help codebreakers cope with the enormous volume of enciphered material the Allies managed to intercept. The machine that arguably had the greatest influence...

-China has installed a secure operating system known as " Kylin" on government and military computers designed to be impenetrable to U.S. military and intelligence agencies, The Washington Times reported on Tuesday. The newspaper said the existence of the secure operating system was disclosed to Congress during recent hearings that included new details on how China's government is preparing to wage cyberwarfare with the U.S.

Cyberwar is now a fact of life in 21st Century wars. Actual and potential enemies of America already know the dimensions of Cyberwar and have moved into full combat. With a real world combat engagement in Georgia and Estonia, the Russians have shown skill. Make no mistake; in certain arenas the Russians are smart and capable, and as the invasion of Georgia shows, ruthless. They have world class scientists and engineers. It is well known they are excellent Cyber Warfighters who have now also apparently harnessed their criminal hackers to augment their worldwide reach. This melding of Russian conventional military...

WEST POINT, N.Y. — The Army forces were under attack. Communications were down, and the chain of command was broken. Pacing a makeshift bunker whose entrance was camouflaged with netting, the young man in battle fatigues barked at his comrades: “They are flooding the e-mail server. Block it. I’ll take the heat for it.” These are the war games at West Point, at least last month, when a team of cadets spent four days struggling around the clock to establish a computer network and keep it operating while hackers from the National Security Agency in Maryland tried to infiltrate it...

COVERT RADIO SHOW http://covertradioshow.com # http://covertradioshow.com/podcast.cfm?pid=187 Covert Radio Daily Blast May 7 North Korea has hackers working round the clock on cyberwarfare. Could they have been behind recent attacks on the Alaskan Air Traffic Control system? Are we prepared for Cyber Warfare? Narco Traffickers are declaring war on our cops, and the latest in the coming war between Georgia and Russia.

North Korea runs a cyber warfare unit that tries to hack into U.S. and South Korean military networks to gather confidential information and disrupt service, a news report said Tuesday. The North's military has expanded the unit, staffing it with about 100 personnel, mostly graduates of a Pyongyang university that teaches computer skills, Yonhap news agency reported, citing an intelligence agency it didn't identify. South Korea's Defense Ministry said it is aware that Pyongyang has been training hackers in recent years but did not provide details and had no other comment. The National Intelligence Service — South Korea's main spy...

National Defense: America's electrical grid may have been implanted with cyber-"bombs" waiting to go off. Russia and China are preparing for a new kind of warfare. Where will you be when the lights go out?On April 1, as part of our "Inside The Stimulus" series, we said the proposed "smart grid" designed to monitor electrical use and distribution would make it easier for hackers to break in and possibly disable parts or all of it. Turns out this was no April Fool's joke. A few weeks ago the Pentagon released its 2008 report to Congress titled "Military Power of the...

The Army, Navy, and Air Force all maintain cyberwarfare components, but these organizations exist as ill-fitting appendages that attempt to operate in inhospitable cultures where technical expertise is not recognized, cultivated, or completely understood. The services have developed effective systems to build traditional leadership and management skills. BY LTC GREGORY CONTI & COL JOHN "BUCK" SURDU Disclaimer The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the US Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the US Government. At critical points in history, technological advances have driven...