Government

February 20, 2017

Following a July ruling against medical testing laboratory LabMD (which is now out of business), the Federal Trade Commission has emerged as a central regulator of cybersecurity practices for U.S. businesses. The FTC’s mandate to act on “unfair or deceptive” business practices that could harm consumers is being interpreted in a way that means any ...

February 20, 2017

State governments are jostling to win a major cyber security investment from the multibillion-dollar Israeli government-owned electricity company, as the business implications of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first Australian visit begin to take shape. Ofer Bloch, chief executive of the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC), was in Australia with the Prime Minister’s accompanying delegation of business leaders ...

February 14, 2017

Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Committee on Science, Space and Technology today, Gregory C. Wilshusen, Director, Government Accountability Office (GAO) Information Security Issues, warned GAO “has consistently identified shortcomings in the federal government’s approach to ensuring the security of federal information systems and cyber critical infrastructure, as well as its approach to protecting ...

February 14, 2017

The Queen was shown how hackers could target the UK’s electricity supply as she opened a centre to protect the nation from cyber attacks. The National Cyber Security Centre – part of intelligence agency GCHQ – started work in October as part of a £1.9bn five-year strategy. Staff in Victoria, central London, will be joined by experts ...

February 14, 2017

Security researchers say a new trend in privateering is gaining traction among nation states, which are increasingly contracting with private companies to carry out state-sponsored attacks. Typically APT attacks have been the work of internal government spy apparatuses, but outsourcing allows nation states to shift risk, dodge attribution claims and take advantage of more sophisticated APT ...

February 5, 2017

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with world leaders this month, strengthening cybersecurity ties will figure high on the agenda. “What you see today is going to get a lot worse in the future if we don’t band together,” Netanyahu said at a cyber conference in Tel Aviv last week. “That’s why I intend to ...

February 1, 2017

The U.S. Department of Defense could be at risk of being attacked by hackers quite easily, one security researcher warns. According to ZDNet, who cites Dan Tentler, founder of cybersecurity firm Phobos Group, several misconfigured servers run by the DoD could allow hackers easy access to internal government systems. That includes foreign actors eager to find ...

January 30, 2017

January 30, 2017 President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order on cyber security on Tuesday, two sources familiar with the situation said, marking the first action to address what he has called a top priority of his administration. The order is expected to commission several different reviews of the government’s offensive and defensive cyber ...

January 23, 2017

The director of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, has decided to step down early for what he described as personal reasons, the intelligence agency has announced. Hannigan took over at GCHQ in November 2014 to oversee a more open approach after the agency was forced on the defensive the previous year by the Edward Snowden revelations of mass ...

January 19, 2017

The Trump Presidency’s new cyber tsar, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has had his passwords leaked online along with a whole host of top officials Trump’s proposed ‘cyber tsar’ and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has been hacked. A Channel 4 Investigation has revealed that the passwords of Trump’s cyber-security adviser and 13 ...

January 18, 2017

A new online campaign that’s making the rounds these days calls for users to “occupy whitehouse.gov on inauguration day” as a form of protest against Donald Trump’s presidency. Published on Protester.io, the protest is basically a call for an old-school DDoS attack that would render the White House website completely useless due to overloading with too ...

January 16, 2017

It’s not always necessary to break into your computer or smartphone to spy on you. Today all are day-to-day devices are becoming more connected to networks than ever to add convenience and ease to daily activities. But here’s what we forget: These connected devices can be turned against us because we are giving companies, hackers, and ...

January 16, 2017

President Obama last week approved a change in the way the National Security Agency shares raw signals intelligence data with the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, a shift that privacy experts worry will erode the civil liberties of Americans. An unclassified document released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence spells out how ...

January 16, 2017

It’s not always necessary to break into your computer or smartphone to spy on you. Today all are day-to-day devices are becoming more connected to networks than ever to add convenience and ease to daily activities. But here’s what we forget: These connected devices can be turned against us because we are giving companies, hackers, and ...

January 13, 2017

In a recent interview with CNN, the Director of the Secret Service noted that his organization is increasingly focusing on the cyber security of the physical facilities visited by the President of the United States as part of its duty to protect him. This raises the fascinating question of just how much cybersecurity will become ...

January 12, 2017

Mr Giuliani, once a leading contender for secretary of state, said Mr Trump would meet the team on a regular basis. He was selected because of his private sector cybersecurity expertise, a Trump transition team statement said. Mr Trump has said he plans to create a cybersecurity team within his first 90 days in office. Mr Giuliani’s appointment ...

January 10, 2017

The Shadow Brokers who previously stole and leaked a portion of the NSA hacking tools and exploits is back with a Bang! The hacking group is now selling another package of hacking tools, “Equation Group Windows Warez,” which includes Windows exploits and antivirus bypass tools, stolen from the NSA-linked hacking unit, The Equation Group. For those unfamiliar ...

January 9, 2017

God save the queen’s emails. The United Kingdom wants to make sure it can’t be hit with a cyberattack like the one that affected the US 2016 presidential election. On Monday, Britain’s Joint Committee on National Security Strategy announced that it’s reviewing the nation’s cybersecurity. “The national security implications of the leap to cyber are a matter ...

January 6, 2017

The National Guard’s role in cybersecurity began in 1999 thanks to the uncertainty created by Y2K. With concerns of potential computer chaos looming when dates on systems turned over to 2000, the National Guard was given a new force structure called a computer network defense team. Renamed Defensive Cyber Operations Elements, the eight-to 10-person teams are ...

January 5, 2017

A hacker yesterday claimed to have hacked the FBI’s website running on Plone CMS, but it seems it wasn’t hacked using any zero-day vulnerability in Plone. We contacted Plone security team and updated this story (see below) with official statements.A hacker, using Twitter handle CyberZeist, has claimed to have hacked the FBI’s website (fbi.gov) and ...