Posts Tagged hackers

US Government Ignores External Threats While Creating Fake Internal Threats

From Wired.com:

P4x says he was later contacted by the FBI but was never offered any real help to assess the damage from North Korea’s hacking or to protect himself in the future. Nor did he ever hear of any consequences for the hackers who targeted him, an open investigation into them, or even a formal recognition from a US agency that North Korea was responsible. It began to feel, as he put it, like “there’s really nobody on our side.” 

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Chinese Hacking Team Caught Taking Over Decoy Water Plant

From: MIT

A hacking group accused of being operated by the Chinese army now seems to be going after industrial control systems.

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Chinese Hackers Breached Google’s Surveillance Database

From: Threat Level

Hackers Who Breached Google in 2010 Accessed Company’s Surveillance Database

…The database contained years’ worth of information on law enforcement surveillance surveillance orders issued by judges around the country. The hackers were hoping to discover if law enforcement agents were investigating undercover Chinese intelligence operatives who were working out of the U.S.

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Russian Hackers Attack Illinois Utility

From: PopSci

The Illinois Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center released a “Public Water District Cyber Intrusion” report on November 10 that indicates that hackers may have had access to the system since September. Hackers using Russian IP addresses hacked the software vendor that makes the system. They were then able to access the vendor’s database of usernames and passwords, and used the stolen credentials for remote access to the SCADA system’s network. These vendors keep records of their customer’s access information for maintenance and upgrading the systems.

Two to three months before the discovery of the hack, operators noticed “glitches” in the remote access to the SCADA system. “They just figured it’s part of the normal instability of the system,” said Joe Weiss, cybersecurity expert and managing partner at Applied Control Solutions, who obtained a copy of the report. “But it wasn’t until the SCADA system actually turned on and off that they realized something was wrong.”

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New Malware Brings Cyberwar One Step Closer

From: MIT
A newly discovered piece of malicious code dubbed Duqu is closely related to the notorious Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s nuclear-enrichment centrifuges last year. Although it has no known target or author, it sets the stage for more industrial and cyberwar attacks, experts say.

“This is definitely a troubling development on a number of levels,” says Ronald Deibert, director of Citizen Lab, an Internet think-tank at the University of Toronto who leads research on cyberwarfare, censorship, and espionage. “In the context of the militarization of cyberspace, policymakers around the world should be concerned.”

Indeed, the spread of such code could be destabilizing. The Pentagon’s cyberwar strategy, for example, makes clear that computer attacks on industrial and civilian infrastructure like chemical factories or power grids as well as military networks could be regarded as equivalent to a conventional bombing or other attack, if civilians were endangered.

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Iranian hackers obtain fraudulent HTTPS certificates

From: EFF

Iranian hackers obtain fraudulent HTTPS certificates: How close to a Web security meltdown did we get?

On March 15th, an HTTPS/TLS Certificate Authority (CA) was tricked into issuing fraudulent certificates that posed a dire risk to Internet security. Based on currently available information, the incident got close to – but was not quite – an Internet-wide security meltdown. These events show why we urgently need to start reinforcing the system that is currently used to authenticate and identify secure websites and email systems.

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RSA compromise: Impacts on SecurID

From: Dell SecureWorks

RSA SecurIDRSA is the security division of EMC software, best known for the popular SecurID two-factor authentication tokens used in high-security environments including some government networks. RSA announced that a cyberattack resulted in the compromise and disclosure of information “specifically related to RSA’s SecurID two-factor authentication products”. The full extent of the breach remains publicly unknown. RSA states that “this information could potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack.” Organizations that make use of SecurID should be alert for attempts at circumventing their authentication infrastructure, though no specific attacks are known to be occurring at the time of this publication.

RSA’s breach disclosure

On March 17, 2011, RSA announced [1] that a cyberattack on its systems was successful and resulted in the compromise and disclosure of information “specifically related to RSA’s SecurID two-factor authentication products”. While the full extent of the breach remains publicly undisclosed, RSA states that “this information could potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack.”

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