26 July 2012

Iran nuclear facilities struck down by midnight 'thunder'


Iran's nuclear program has been hit by a cyber virus that has shut down key computerised functions at two facilities and played music by the rock band AC/DC at loud volumes, according to a report on internet security website F-Secure............
The website earlier this week said that it was informed of the cyber attack by a scientist working at the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI), who sent F-Secure an email detailing the breach............

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Anonymous hacks Australian ISP AAPT to demonstrate data retention problems


Australian ISP AAPT has been hacked in an effort to demonstrate the problems with proposed laws that would require telecommunications companies to store user data for two years. The file accessed by the intruder was a 40GB database containing user information.
SC Magazine says that a hacker contacted them to take responsibility, claiming to be a part of Anonymous.
They claimed the hack was not malicious in nature, but intended to demonstrate the real problems involved with storing so much information about users. Though the privacy problem is somewhat irrelevant to the security of ISP servers, it is an issue that plays a part..........

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Cybercrime flourishes in new areas


China has experienced a sharp rise in cybercrime and is seeing a new breed of Internet criminals as illegal sales of weapons and porn flourish online.......
Gu Jianguo, director of network protection for the Ministry of Public Security, said cases of cybercrime have increased by an average of 30 percent each year since 2008.
Authorities are seeing a new kind of criminal behavior in cyberspace, with an increase in the online sale of firearms and ammunition, wiretapping devices and fake professional certificates. Online gambling and pornography distribution are also on the rise. While traditional online crime, such as hackers stealing personal data, has gradually become less common.........


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Careless and casual, Internet users don’t see abusive content as crime

While many people knowingly commit crime in cyberspace, there are many others who don’t realise that using the Internet to settle scores by sending abusive or obscene or misleading content is a crime for which they can be arrested. Data with the National Crime Records Bureau has revealed sexual harassment is the second biggest cyber crime in Maharashtra, after fraud. Of the 393 cyber crimes registered in the state in 2011, 96 pertained to fraud and 74 to harassment..........
People don’t realise that in the process of creating a fake profile or sending abusive/ obscene content through email ids created in someone else’s name, they are committing a crime under the Information Technology Act..............

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Cyberbullying: 1 in 2 victims suffer from the distribution of embarrassing photos and videos

Embarrassing personal photos and videos circulating in the Internet: researchers at Bielefeld University have discovered that young people who fall victim to cyberbullying or cyber harassment suffer most when fellow pupils make them objects of ridicule by distributing photographic material. According to an online survey published on Thursday 19 July, about half of the victims feel very stressed or severely stressed by this type of behaviour. 1,881 schoolchildren living in Germany took part in the survey conducted by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence (IKG) and commented on their experiences with cyberbullying as a victim, offender or witness........ 


Cyberbullying is the term used for attacks by one or more persons through the Internet or by mobile phone - where Facebook or an instant messenger, for instance, are used to denigrate or humiliate someone or harm their social relationships.............. 


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25 July 2012

India tops the list of spam-relaying nations: Sophos


Earlier in April, Trend Micro had released a report stating that about 20 percent of spam originates from India. Now, Sophos has revealed its own report stating that India tops the world list in spam-relaying nations despite only 5.3 percent of the world’s Internet users reportedly living in India.......... 
India tops the list


 
It is believed that a vast majority of spam comes from home computers that have been compromised by hackers and commandeered into a botnet. These remote hackers can send spam from recruited computers and are also capable of potentially stealing information or installing other malicious code........

The report also points out that first-time internet users in growing economies are said to be easy targets. They become an easy target as no appropriate measures are taken to block the malware infections in their PCs that spew spam. With an increase in Internet and PC penetration in India and probably lack of appropriate safety measures, users in developing countries like India become easy targets..........


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Japanese government hit by TWO YEAR Trojan

The Japanese government has uncovered an advanced Trojan attack which may have lain undiscovered on its networks leaking confidential data for over two years........


However, the infections were only discovered last week as part of an on-going security audit of the ministry’s IT systems begun by a contracted firm in May. So far, 2,000 machines have been checked and a disconcertingly high number – 123 – were found to be infected by Trojan........


The Trojan was apparently undetected by the anti-virus software installed on the government PCs and lay undetected for a long period of time – hallmarks of a more sophisticated advanced persistent threat-style attack........


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24 July 2012

Scots sysadmin waits to hear if he'll face NASA hacking charges in the US


The UK Home Secretary is due to decide by mid-October whether or not to order Gary McKinnon's extradition to the US, a hearing at the High Court heard on Tuesday.

The hearing followed a decision by McKinnon and his legal team to decline to undergo a Home Office medical test by a doctor, Professor Thomas Fahy, whom McKinnon's legal team said lacked specialist skill in assessing the mental state of people with Asperger's. Experts in autism, including Doctor Jan Vermeulen who carried out a face-to-face assessment of McKinnon, have warned that McKinnon is at severe risk of committing suicide if faced with the prospect of a US trial on computer hacking charges


An assessment of his suicide risk will be a key factor in the deliberations of Home Secretary Theresa May.


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Anonymous hits Australia: State government web sites defaced and taken down over data retention policy

The Twitter handle @Op_Australia makes the claim in this tweet. A webchat channel at anonops.com named opAustralia referenced in other tweets is active, and offers a link to newswire story about the government's proposed data retention policies. Those policies would see the government able to store and access up to two years worth of data about individuals and businesses, and enjoy easier access to social networks without user consent, in the name of national security.



Anonymous has claimed responsibility for the defacements in an email sent to News.com.au, which reports the attack was timed to coincide with the appearance of Prime Minister Julia Gillard in a Google+ Hangout. A Facebook page named Anonymous Australia links to that story and lists web sites the group says it defaced.
None of the websites Anonymous says it has defaced were still damaged at the time of writing, but createitmakeitliveit.qld.gov.au/ and smartawards.qld.gov.au/ each returned a redirect loop error and would not load.


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Russian Hacker 'Dmitry Zubakha' Arrested For DDoS Attacks on Amazon, eBay & Priceline

A twenty five years old hacker from Russia get arrested for allegedly perforimg two massive DDoS (Denial-of-Service) attacks on one of the most popular online shopping site Amazon.com and eBay in 2008.Dmitry Olegovich Zubakha also known as "Cyber bandit" in most of the hacker's underground community was indicted in 2011, but he was just arrested in Cyprus on Wednesday. The arrest of Zubakha took place under an international warrant and  currently he is in custody pending extradition to the United States. According to the indictment unsealed on Thursday said- Zubakha, with the help of another Russian hacker planned and executed DDoS attacks against Amazon.com, eBay, and Pricelinein the middle of 2008. Zubakha and his co-conspirator launched the attack with the help of a DDoS botnetto generate a large number of traffic which interrupts the normal service of those online shopping sites. According to a press release by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the attacks made it "difficult for Amazon customers to complete their business on line."

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Hackers loot German gaming site Gamigo of 8m passwords


More than eight million passwords have been stolen from German gaming website Gamigo and published online more than four months after hackers broke into the network.
The hashed passwords were dumped on crypto-cracking forum InsidePro, the same site where users last month posted a cache of some 6.5 million LinkedIn user logins.
A forum user appeared to have defeated the one-way hash and claimed to have decrypted 94 percent of passwords.
Data breach monitoring service PwnedList tipped off Forbes to the booty and discovered it contained a whopping 8.2 million unique email addresses.
Three million of the addresses came from the United States, 2.4 million from Germany, and 1.3 million from France.
The breach is among 2012's largest reported data leakage incidents.


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23 July 2012

Somalia: Hackers target Somali giant Dahabshiil


A group claiming to be the cyber hacker or hacktivist group Anonymous has threatened Dahabshiil an international funds transfer company and the leading bank in Somalia, Garowe Online reports. 

The group alleged it was the hacktivist group Anonymous, and threatened to destroy Dahabshiil within two months if the company did not stop what the group alleged as supporting terrorist organizations and terrorists in Somalia and across the world.........


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Cyber-threat ‘most serious’ challenge for US: Obama

US President Barack Obama has expressed concerns over increasing cases of cyber-attacks, calling it the ‘most serious economic and national security’ challenge that America faces. 

In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Obama pointed out that the US had to do more to put essential defences in place to avoid the debilitating effects of an attack..........


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DHS issues warning on widely used industrial control system software


The Homeland Security Department issued July 13 an alert warning of security problems with widely used industrial control system software.
The Tridium Niagara AX Framework software platform integrates systems and devices for online management, according to the alert (.pdf), from the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team.
More than 300,000 Niagara AX Frameworks are installed worldwide in applications that include energy management, building automation and telecommunications.


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Fighting back against Anonymous, LulzSec and the global cyber insurgency

By Gery Menegaz for Between the Lines |


“If you do not talk to me I will crash your server!”
One of the system administrators had come to me to show me that there was someone in one of our new servers. We had just returned from the first Linux conference in North Carolina and had installed a new distribution of Linux on one of our systems.
It was the late ‘90s. Like many small firms of the day we were excited to try something new, but did not have a sandbox. I recall pulling the network cable and then going to work to ensure that none of the other systems had been compromised. We were lucky, they only had access to the one machine.
We did a reverse look up and found the domain from which the attacking IP had originated, and crossed our fingers that they had not gone through an anonymizer. Again we got lucky and were able to track the IP address to an ISP in Croatia.
......


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Telecom firm says "No" to FBI surveillance demands


FILED UNDER: FeaturedLaw & orderMobilePrivacy
Woman using phone in shadows. Image from ShutterstockA minor miracle occurred early last year when the FBI tried to shake down a phone company for customer records during an investigation: the company said no.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the affair has been dragged to court and is tightly cloaked in secrecy.
The phone company's lawyer declined to identify which phone company he's representing, while the telecom employee who received the FBI's national security letter (NSL) demanding customer records has been legally barred from acknowledging either the resulting court case or the letter's existence to just about anyone beyond the company's lawyers.


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HACK BACK - WHEN A CYBER ATTACK VICTIM TURNS 'DIGITAL VIGILANTE'

By Ulrich Clauß
DIE WELT/Worldcrunch 
BERLIN - What with malware able to easily cancel out whatever security measures are in place on a computer, the cyber-crime phenomenon is in full developmental swing.
That's the word from a new report on the dark side of the information technology revolution in the current issue of "Bundeslagebild Cybercrime," published by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office. Meanwhile, the UK’s domestic intelligence service MI-5 says Internet crimes have now reached “industrial-scale” proportions.
What we know is that cyber attacks are aimed at both businesses and governments; they threaten both public and private sector data; and research and academic facilities are hardly spared. "The extent of what is going on is astonishing," says MI-5 head Jonathan Evans.



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Former government deputy CIO slams UK cyber security


Former government deputy CIO Bill McCluggage has hit out at the way the government approaches cyber security, referring to the pace of change as "glacial".

At a time when cyber security is high on the international agenda, with sophisticated and possibly state-sponsored malware attacking critical national infrastructure around the world, it appears as the government is not doing enough to ensure the UK's security............



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The Best Hacking Film You Haven't Seen (Yet)

When was the last time you saw a good documentary about the origins of computer hacking? Well, Code 2600, a new documentary film from a young filmmaker named Jeremy Zerechak comes really close to being both accurate and entertaining while at the same time scaring the pants off anyone who doesn’t yet know that computer data is eternal and can be stolen by the wrong people if we’re not careful. So it is fitting that the documentary, which is only available in limited release right now, will be shown next Friday at DefCon, the world’s largest hacker conference and this year also celebrating its 20th anniversary.


Also reboot will be screened.


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UK's Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report for 2011-2012 focuses on Cyber Security


.......
16. The Committee has previously welcomed the Government’s acknowledgement that
cyber attacks represent a Tier One risk to the UK. In October 2010, the Government set
out its plan to transform the UK’s cyber security skills and capabilities by 2015 through
the National Cyber Security Programme (NCSP) and accordingly allocated additional
funding to the Agencies and other government departments. The Committee has therefore
been keen to ascertain what specific outcomes have been achieved thus far.
17. In terms of defensive capabilities, it is clear that the provision of security advice to
Government, businesses and individuals will generate the greatest improvement in UK
cyber security. Although the Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG) and
the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI), among others, continue to
provide an invaluable service in this regard, we believe that education and basic security
measures should be given greater priority in the NCSP. Given the importance of CESG’s
work in this area we are disappointed that, despite our recommendation last year, a longerterm funding model has still not been established.
18. We note that GCHQ and the other Agencies have made some progress in developing
cyber capabilities. However, the Committee is concerned at the lack of progress since the
publication of the NCSP: more needs to be done if we are to keep ahead in this fast-paced
field.

......

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20 July 2012

Cybersecurity the Agile Architecture Way


Identity theft, password breaches, viruses and worms, phishing attacks, Stuxnet—the more we rely upon technology in our increasingly connected world, the greater the risk that we’ll be hacked. Even worse, it seems that the rate at which hacking stories come across the wire is actually increasing, in spite of all the hard work at all the various security organizations, both commercial and governmental. The frightening truth is, perhaps the hackers are actually winning.
The root cause of our vulnerability, of course, is the Internet itself. When the essential elements of the Internet first rolled out—TCP/IP, HTTP, and DNS, to name the most flagrant offenders—no one had any idea how important security would become or just how flawed these enabling technologies were when it came to protecting ourselves from increasingly dedicated and persistent malefactors. Today, that horse has long since left the barn. Maybe we can close the door, sure, but it might not matter anymore.........

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Cyber Security Challenge Not Interested In Offensive Skills


Cyber Security Challenge director says the focus is on defence skills, not offensive expertise....


The government-backed Cyber Security Challenge will not be looking for those with cyber attack skills, despite MPs calling on intelligence services to increase their offensive work.......

Offensive capabilities include things like network penetration and malware creation, skills which are in demand from government contractors,  but the Challenge, which was launched two years ago in a bid to fill the growing skills gap in the security industry, will solely look at identifying and nurturing defensive skills.......

Our focus is on ensuring that the talent pool for those employing cyber security experts to defend our systems is well stocked. There is an urgent need to attract more skilled professionals into the cyber security profession. A purely offensive skills set is not something the Challenge was set up to identify..........

The  perspective of Cyber Security Challenge is to find more informed defenders. We focus on the  skills needed to spot vulnerabilities, defend networks, and extract and analyse complex forensics information..........


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Cybersecurity Isn't a Border-Based Threat, it's a Viral Threat


Much like Moore's Law has provided a reliable pattern to chart the steady growth of computing capacity and decline in prices, the same precept could apply to the tools of weaponry in the digital age.........
In a presentation that touched on the evolving nature of cyber threats here at the Brookings Institution, Hammersley contended that the traditional notion of warfare among nation-states is rapidly becoming obsolete as acts of kinetic aggression are being replaced by online crimes and other disruptions that can be perpetrated by individuals or small groups.
Moreover, high-end technologies that originate in government labs or the military eventually become commodities, a process of democratization that figures to significantly broaden access to tools like drones or biological synthesis applications, just as the code to launch a denial of service attack can easily be downloaded online.............

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Obama appeals Congress to pass cyber security bill


United States President Barack Obama has urged the Congress to pass cyber security legislation, which according to him "is a key step forward in securing the country against increased cyber threat."

Today we can see the cyber threat to the networks upon which so much of our modern American lives depend. We have the opportunity and the responsibility to take action now and stay a step ahead of our adversaries............

More recently, hackers penetrated the networks of companies that operate our natural-gas pipelines. Computer systems in critical sectors of our economy including the nuclear and chemical industries are being increasingly targeted........


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19 July 2012

Fake Facebook photo tag ruse smears malware on PCs


Spam emails have attempted to trick Facebookers into visiting virus-stuffed web pages by claiming users have been tagged in photos..........

The counterfeit messages appear to have been sent by the dominant social networking website, but the "From" address is misspelled as "Faceboook.com" among other mistakes. The emails feature clickable links to a website hosting malicious code, including the infamous Blackhole kit, which tries to gain control of users' systems when visited..........


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18 July 2012

One in ten UK businesses have suffered from cybercrime


Research by Hiscox reveals that one in ten small businesses in the UK have experienced a data hack.

The study also revealed that 90% of small businesses don't have a cyber crime insurance policy. While four in ten SME's are worried about their computer systems being hacked only one in four are confident about their security measures against attacks.

Cyber crime is costing the UK economy around £11bn a year and while the media is reporting a growing number of high profile data breaches, some small businesses may also be a popular target for hackers because the systems are usually easier to get into and the breach may not be found out for a good few weeks..............


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17 July 2012

Cyber-Criminals Craft Malware Kits to Zero in on Java Flaws

The Blackhole exploit kit, a framework that helps attackers infect victims' computers, adds another way to compromise systems through weaknesses in Java..........

Because most PC users and companies can take months to update third-party software, the exploit will like remain effective for some time to come..............

Several characteristics of the Java software platform have made it a favorite of attackers. Java is popular and runs on a large number of operating systems giving attackers a potentially large base of victims. Moreover, the software update mechanism is not automatic by default and frequently leaves older—and vulnerable—versions on many systems...........

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16 July 2012

Militants want Pak, India war: MaliK

Advisor to the Prime Minister on Interior Affairs Rehman Malik has said that Pakistan and India are both victims of cyber crime, adding that extremists from India were involved in five terrorist attacks in India, adding that Pakistan and India should stop blame game against each other.
Terrorists kept using internet and social media for many days during the Mumbai attacks, he added.
Talking to representatives of Pak-India social media Malik said that if the IT specialists of the two countries had carried out their obligations rightly incident like Mumbai attack could had been averted...............

Militants on both sides of the border want to fuel a war between Pakistan and India, he said. However, social media could play its role to help eradicate the atmosphere of hatred and bias between Pakistan and India...........
Malik said that terrorists were using the internet for communication claiming that if Internet Service Providers (ISP) were wiser and had certain tools, the Mumbai attacks would not have taken place.............
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More than third of cyber attacks are directed towards SMBs: Symantec


The most targeted sector is Defense industry with an average of 7.3 attacks per day.

Small and Medium Businesses are increasingly becoming vulnerable to cyber attacks as 36% of the total targeted attacks are targeted towards organisations with less than 250 employees during the last six months, according to a new report by Symantec..........


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13 July 2012

450,000 passwords compromised as Yahoo Voices hacked


A previously unknown hacker group has posted online the details of 450,000 user accounts and passwords it claims to have taken from a Yahoo server.

The Ars Technica technology news website reported that the group, which calls itself D33DS Company, hacked into an unidentified subdomain of Yahoo's website where they retrieved unencrypted account details.

The affected accounts appeared to belong to a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service called Yahoo Voices, which runs on Yahoo's instant messenger.............


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Navy plans dedicated cadre of cyber sea warriors

After robust sea, air and underwater combat arms, the Navy now wants a dedicated force for the virtual front as well. The force has begun the process to recruit information technology (IT) engineers and graduates as short-service commissioned officers. 

The Navy's drive to induct IT officers, as part of its main executive branch, comes in the backdrop of cyber warfare emerging as a potentially crippling form of waging covert wars as well as Chinese and Pakistani online espionage agents continuing with their incessant attempts to hack into Indian computer networks............ 

The Navy has  been facing mounting cyber-attacks in recent years.............


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12 July 2012

Cybersecurity and the intelligence community's nefarious purposes


The issue of cybersecurity makes difficult demands on those of us who wish to understand it. It is not only complex, but growing quickly – more so as the "internetization" of mankind proceeds apace – and as new opportunities for conflict, crime, oppression, and revolution are conceived and executed by states and individuals acting on motivations that are themselves similarly complex, and occasionally even justifiable. Complexity aside, it is an issue that still eludes popular understanding, in part because certain parties do not wish it to be understood.
John Arquilla, the US Naval Postgraduate School professor who coined the term "cyberwarfare" having long sought to educate the public and influence policy-makers.......... 
In this week's interview, he described the unusual vigor with which the US has prosecuted hackers to be "ridiculous", citing missed opportunities and a "poisoning" of the relationship between the state and the hacker community, which might represent missed opportunities. Going further, he proposes that the US government relax any restrictions that might prevent masterful hackers with criminal histories from being recruited by the military and intelligence communities...................

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Nationwide cyber-security system 'needed'


As cyber attacks become increasingly bold and sophisticated, it is important that Singapore builds strong nationwide cyber-security systems, said a former cyber coordinator of the White House Mr Howard Schmidt, who is also the former special assistant to United States President Barack Obama..........
Singapore should build a stronger mechanism to manage passwords and a more robust system to manage cyber-security vulnerabilities that stretch across the public and private sectors.............

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Cyber cops busy like never before


The number of cyber crime complaints received by Crime Investigation Department (CID) has been annually registering a sharp rise over the last five years. So far in 2012, 43 cases have already been filed as against the 76 complaints it took up in 2011.

The number of online harassment cases, especially those against the fairer sex, had already surpassed what was recorded in 2011. In 2012, up to June, 19 cases have been registered against 17 in the previous year. Last Saturday, a Delhi IIT student was arrested by CID officials for allegedly harassing a girl by posting objectionable content online............

Of the 43 cases this year, 19 pertain to online harassment, eight to fraud originating out of Nigeria wlong with five cases each of phishing, credit card fraud and obscene content.........


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10 July 2012

Hackers who cracked CERN's computer system train Indian officials

Two cyber security experts, who claimed to have cracked the security code of IT systems involved in the discovery of 'God Particle', today conducted training sessions for Indian government officials.

"The projections show there is going to be lot of manufacturing in the India. Lot of software will be involved in it. We are here to create awareness among people on probable vulnerabilities in the cyber system," ethical hacker Chris Russo told PTI..............

Next era of wars is not going to be of bomb, gun and shells. It will be led by cyber warfare where most attack will be on nation's secret data. The idea to conduct such program evolved after seeing increase in cyberattack on India...............


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NSA Chief: Cybercrime constitutes the "greatest transfer of wealth in history"

The loss of industrial information and intellectual property through cyber espionage constitutes the "greatest transfer of wealth in history," the nation's top cyber warrior Gen. Keith Alexander said Monday...............


U.S. companies lose about $250 billion per year through intellectual property theft, with another $114 billion lost due to cyber crime...........
But the real threat on the Internet will come when cyber attacks become militarized, a threat the U.S. must deal with now................
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Malicious software shuts down computers worldwide

Malware is the cause for many people’s frustration Monday as they found they were without the Internet. The malware affected computer users worldwide. This is a hassle for those who depend on the technology for so much. The Charlotte FBI estimated those without internet access was about 85,000..............


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09 July 2012

Oz gov cyber-safety unit mislays user information


In an outstanding example of data-loss stupidity, a DVD containing user IDs of Austrlia’s Stay Smart Online Alert service has gone astray in the mail during a handover between contractors.

An e-mail sent to subscribers on 6 July and passed on to The Register by a reader states “the Department has been advised by a former external contractor that a DVD which included information provided by Stay Smart Online Alert Service subscribers was lost in Australia Posts’ system, after being posted on 11 April 2012..............


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06 July 2012

Virus could black out nearly 2.5 lakh computers


About a quarter-million computer users around the world are at risk of losing Internet access on Monday because of malicious software at the heart of a hacking scam that US authorities shut down last November.
Some blogs and news reports hyped the risk of an outage, warning of a potential "blackout" and describing the Alureon malware as the "Internet Doomsday" virus...........

As of this week, about 245,000 computers worldwide were still infected by Alureon and its brethren, according to security firm Deteque. That included 45,355 computers in the United States.

The viruses were designed to redirect Internet traffic through rogue DNS servers controlled by criminals.........


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Cheats cash in on e-trade boom


A 39-year-old businessman regularly buys and sells shares online. But on returning from his brief visit to Thailand, Sunil Agarwal was horrified to find he came back and to his horror found that his demat account hacked and all his shares sold............
Of late, an t a time when an increasing number of net savvy shopaholics of the city are choosing to buy goods at the click of a mouse than off the shelves, making the game all the more easier for the fraudsters. The cyber frauds have left city police on tenterhooks and they have fallen back on a team of internet to decode the intricate cases..............

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If Hackers Didn't Exist, Governments Would Have to Invent Them


The hackers who dominate news coverage and popular culture -- malicious, adolescent techno-wizards, willing and able to do great harm to innocent civilians and society at large -- don't exist........

The perceived threat landscape is a warped one, which directs attention and resources to battling phantoms, rather than toward preventing much more common data-security problems. According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the loss or improper disposal of paper records, portable devices like laptops or memory sticks, and desktop computers have accounted for more than 1,400 data-breach incidents since 2005 -- almost half of all the incidents reported............

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a survey which showed that 71 percent of IT managers and executives believe insider threats present the greatest risk to their companies. And the recent high-profile security breach at LinkedIn shows that one of the greatest risks to our personal security is ourselves...

But these more serious threats don't seem to loom as large as hackers in the minds of those who make the laws and regulations that shape the Internet. It is the hacker -- a sort of modern folk devil who personifies our anxieties about technology -- who gets all the attention. The result is a set of increasingly paranoid and restrictive laws and regulations affecting our abilities to communicate freely and privately online, to use and control our own technology, and which puts users at risk for overzealous prosecutions and invasive electronic search and seizure practices...........


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05 July 2012

Cybercrime hits 1 in 3


Cyber crime affected one-in-three companies in the financial services, the public sector, manufacturing and IT in the past year.
The latest Irish Information Security and Cyber crime survey has found that the cost of each major incident was €41,875 on average and that 42pc of respondents suffered a loss of productivity as a result of cybercrime attacks.
Hacking was the most common method used to break through security for the majority of the companies surveyed.
But just 45pc of respondents indicated that cybercrime was a priority in terms of risk to the organisation..........

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04 July 2012

International cyber crime agreement a long way off


An international agreement on cyber security is a long way off, according to John Lyons, chief executive of the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance…………...


Speaking at the National Security 2012 Conference held in London, Lyons said there are simply too many barriers in the way, such as nations prioritising their own cyber security and the issue of some nations being more advanced than others…………..

If we accept for a moment that the vast majority of attacks on our government, businesses and citizens are orchestrated and carried out by groups outside our jurisdiction, then presumably you will also accept that working together internationally on the identification, investigation and disruption of cyber attacks must be a key part of defending our national security interests…………..


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New Malware Strain Poses Serious Threat to Facebook and Gmail Users


ThreatMetrix, the fastest-growing provider of integrated cybercrime prevention solutions, announced a new strain of Zeus malware that puts Facebook and Gmail users at high risk for cybercrime. This new variant steals credit card information by posing as the typical login pages for Facebook and Gmail and then asking users to enter credit card credentials.
ThreatMetrix identified this strain as a new variant of the peer-to-peer (P2P) version of the notoriousZeus Trojan. It poses intensified risk for Facebook and Gmail users due to its unusually cunning behavior, catching victims off-guard by waiting to attack until after a website's login page appears to be functioning normally................

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