Neil MacFarquar – Moscow – “A sense of menace stirs right off the elevator on the fifth floor of Kaspersky Lab’s Moscow headquarters, where a small television screen displays cyberthreats occurring in real time around the world — a blinking, spinning, color-coded globebrimming with suspicious emails, malware and evil botnets that could be infecting a computer near you. That feeling of unease intensifies when Eugene V. Kaspersky — the stocky, garrulous, 50-year-old founder and chief executive of the global computer security company — begins to catalog possible threats: The computerized elevator you just left is vulnerable to cyberattacks, as are your smartphone and smartcar. Your bank, without question. Your electricity and water supplies could be at risk. Cybercriminals grow smarter, bolder and more elusive every year.
“We are living in the middle cyberage, the dark ages of cyber,” said Mr. Kaspersky, whose modest corner office with glass walls overlooks a stretch of canal and a boat club. He has longish salt-and-pepper hair, a trim beard and a ruddy, tanned complexion. “Right now, it is more functionality, more technology, more services, but not enough security.” Kaspersky Lab is most famous for being the home of the brainy geek squad that exposed Stuxnet and Flame, the American-Israeli cyberweapons that disrupted Iran’s nuclear program. Mr. Kaspersky and his company find themselves at the forefront of the battle against cybergangs, one of the largest emerging threats, for two rather simple reasons, he said: “Russian software engineers are the best; unfortunately Russian cybercriminals are the best, as well.” Hacking methods developed in the Russian-speaking world are going global, suggesting a thriving black market in malicious code. “They don’t just hack the victims, they trade the technology to other gangs,” he said. “Now there are hundreds of victims, in the United States and Asia.”….
[Roger] was a risk-taker, never afraid to challenge the status quo or make bold moves to get ahead. He was tough as nails, always prepared to get the job done and beat the competition. At the same time, he had a true love for our people and a passion for empowering them to reach their full potential. Roger devoted more than 30 years of his life to PepsiCo and his leadership was instrumental in making us the company we are today Roger Enrico: Maverick
Oracle Whistleblower Suit Raises Questions Over Cloud Accounting Slashdot
When Adrian
Ludwig describes the ideal approach to computer security, he pulls out an
analogy. But it’s not a lock or a firewall or a moat around a castle. Computer
security, he says, should work like the credit card business. A credit card
company, he explains, doesn’t eliminate risk. It manages risk, using data
describing the market as a whole to build a different risk profile (and a
different interest rate) for each individual. Computer security, Ludwig
believes, should work in much the same way. “The model of good and bad—white
and black—that the security community prescribes?” he says. “It’s going to be
all black unless we accept that there are going to be shades of gray.” This is
pretty much what you’d expect him to say. Ludwig works at Google, where he
oversees security for Android, a mobile operating system that always included
as many phone makers, apps, and people as possible. But he and his colleagues
aim to take this idea in a new direction. If the future of security lies in
managing risk, he explains, then the future of security is machine learning,
the same breed of artificial intelligence that has proven so successful in so
many other parts of the Google empire. We shouldn’t code hard-and-fast digital
rules that aim to stop all online attacks. As the internet grows more
complex—as it reaches more people—this would end up shutting everyone out.
Instead, we should build systems that can analyze the larger landscape and
learn to identify potential problems on the fly
The technologies of writing and printing allowed for new conceptions of moral and intellectual life. What kinds of illuminations does the internet offer? Morality
The technologies of writing and printing allowed for new conceptions of moral and intellectual life. What kinds of illuminations does the internet offer? Morality
How Hemingway became Hemingway. He gathered a group of friends, headed to Pamplona, and returned a middlebrow Revolutionary
A probe
into who discovered a years-long hack into background checks on U.S. national
security workers might not be case closed after all. Security vendor CyTech now
claims that during an April 21, 2015, product demonstration, its technology
uncovered, for the first time, malware siphoning off the data. This allegation
seems at odds with the side of the story that Oversight and Government Reform
Committee ranking Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., revealed last week in a
letter to the House intelligence panel. Staff at the hacked agency, the Office
of Personnel Management, already had discovered the malware using a tool from
another contractor, Cylance, on April 15, 2015, Cummings said. There seems to
be a disagreement over what the definition of "discover" is. CyTech
CEO Ben Cotton says, "I’ve been on [site at] a lot of breaches, and it is
extremely rare that you would allow malware to continue to exist inside of your
organization for a full week after you discovered it’s there." The three
pieces of malware were "actively executing in RAM" memory, he added.
Republicans on the oversight committee did not sign Cummings' May 26 letter.
The GOP members plan to release a more comprehensive report on the OPM incident
in June, a committee staffer told Nextgov on background.
Security
flaws in software can be tough to find. Purposefully planted ones—hidden
backdoors created by spies or saboteurs—are often even stealthier. Now imagine
a backdoor planted not in an application, or deep in an operating system, but
even deeper, in the hardware of the processor that runs a computer. And now
imagine that silicon backdoor is invisible not only to the computer’s software,
but even to the chip’s designer, who has no idea that it was added by the
chip’s manufacturer, likely in some farflung Chinese factory. And that it’s a
single component hidden among hundreds of millions or billions. And that each one
of those components is less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair. In
fact, researchers at the University of Michigan haven’t just imagined that
computer security nightmare; they’ve built and proved it works. In a study that
won the “best paper” award at last week’s IEEE Symposium on Privacy and
Security, they detailed the creation of an insidious, microscopic hardware
backdoor proof-of-concept.
America Excels in Business of Death Consortium News
America Excels in Business of Death Consortium News
Lloyds
Banking Group has seen an 80 to 90% drop in cyber attacks as online criminals
and fraudsters have switched their attention to other industries. Banks have
been under increasing pressure from hackers, driving even the Bank of England
to include cyber attacks in reports on the key risks to the financial sector.
Business group TheCityUK warned that 75% of fraud is now online, often through
malicious email scams, indicating the scale of fraud shifting into the digital
world. Yet Lloyds’ digital boss Miguel-Ángel Rodríguez-Sola said there has been
a sudden drop in cyber attacks on banks. “There had been an increase in the UK
in terms of cyber attacks, between June and February this year,” he said,
noting that denial of service (DDOS) attacks became particularly common.
“However, over the last two months I have had five-times less than at the end
of last year.”
Russian authorities have arrested about 50 people in connection with an ongoing investigation into a hacker group that's suspected of unleashing malware-enabled hack attacks against customers of major Russian financial institutions. The gang allegedly stole 1.7 billion rubles ($25.5 million) from accounts at multiple Russian financial services firms over a five-year period, Russia's federal security service, known as the FSB, says in a June 1 statement. It adds that Sberbank - the largest bank in Russia and Eastern Europe - assisted with its investigation, but didn't name any of the other victim banks.
IRS Employees Erased 422 Backup Tapes Containing 24,000 of Lois Lerner’s Emails. Government as criminal conspiracy
Russian authorities have arrested about 50 people in connection with an ongoing investigation into a hacker group that's suspected of unleashing malware-enabled hack attacks against customers of major Russian financial institutions. The gang allegedly stole 1.7 billion rubles ($25.5 million) from accounts at multiple Russian financial services firms over a five-year period, Russia's federal security service, known as the FSB, says in a June 1 statement. It adds that Sberbank - the largest bank in Russia and Eastern Europe - assisted with its investigation, but didn't name any of the other victim banks.
IRS Employees Erased 422 Backup Tapes Containing 24,000 of Lois Lerner’s Emails. Government as criminal conspiracy
After
slew of cyber-strikes, BDS movement points finger at Israel
Banks with the weakest cyber defences could be kicked off the Swift global bank payments system, its chief executive has warned as the organisation scrambles to restore faith in its security after several raids by hackers.
Banks with the weakest cyber defences could be kicked off the Swift global bank payments system, its chief executive has warned as the organisation scrambles to restore faith in its security after several raids by hackers.
Hacking
laws are generally intended to punish, well, hacking—not the digital equivalent
of destroying the office printer on the day you quit. But when IT administrator
Michael Thomas deleted a collection of files before leaving his job at the auto
dealership software firm ClickMotive in 2011, the 37-year-old Texan wasn’t
merely charged with destruction of property or sued by his ex-employer for
damages. Instead, he’s been charged with a felony count of violating the
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, (CFAA) a law passed in 1986 to prevent and
prosecute malicious hacking. The charges could carry up to 10 years in prison
and $250,000 in penalties—and have already led to the seizure of Thomas’s
proceeds from the sale of his house. And as Thomas’s trial begins today in the
Eastern District of Texas, his defense attorneys and some legal observers argue
that his case represents yet another new form of prosecutorial overreach based
on the CFAA’s long-controversial and overbroad measures.
EXPLORE THE DATA: U.S. MASS KILLINGS SINCE 2006 USA Today
Explore data Australia-China swap prisoner walks free
EXPLORE THE DATA: U.S. MASS KILLINGS SINCE 2006 USA Today
Explore data Australia-China swap prisoner walks free