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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,"...

A new cyber division, jointly managed by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command’s (Northcom) Operations Division, is up and running after approval by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta earlier this month. The U.S. Northern Command Joint Cyber Center (JCC) has three main missions: improving cyber domain situational awareness, improving the defense of the commands’ networks, and providing cyber consequence response and recovery support to civil authorities upon request, according to an announcement from the joint center. The division includes members from the intelligence, operations, and command and control systems divisions as well as a four- to...

Chinese cyberwarfare would pose a "genuine risk" to the U.S. military in a conflict, for instance over Taiwan or disputes in the South China Sea, according to a report prepared for the U.S. Congress. Operations against computer networks have become fundamental to Beijing's military and national development strategies over the past decade, said the 136-page analysis by Northrop Grumman Corp released on Thursday by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Chinese commercial firms, bolstered by foreign partners, are giving the military access to cutting-edge research and technology, the analysis said. The Chinese military's close ties to large Chinese telecommunications...

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...