Malicious software that gets updates from a domain belonging to the Eurasian state of Georgia? This unusual behavior caught the attention of an analyst in ESET's virus laboratory earlier this year, leading to further analysis which revealed an information stealing trojan being used to target Georgian nationals in particular. After further investigation, ESET researchers were

Yesterday’s announcement by the US Department of Justice that the operators of file-sharing site Megaupload had been indicted for operating a criminal enterprise that generated over $175 million by trafficking in over half a billion dollars of pirated copyrighted material has sent shockwaves across the Internet.  The accuracy of those figures may be questionable, but

In a scathing and far-reaching US Congressional report released recently the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was characterized in these unflattering terms: “Since its inception, TSA has lost its focus on transportation security. Instead, it has grown into an enormous, inflexible and distracted bureaucracy, more concerned with human resource management and consolidating power, and acting reactively

SCADA, a network-enabled setup for controlling infrastructure, is hitting the headlines in force for falling victim to cyber scammers. There have been several incidents of unauthorized access to Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems recently, from guessing simple passwords, to full-on spear phishing attacks against a hardware vendor, which were then used to access

Awhile back we noticed signals from the US Pentagon that they were considering the possibility of a traditional military response to cyber attacks on US physical infrastructure. Basically, a cyber attack on infrastructure could be considered an act of war. We now see the official report released, confirming this. The report states, “When warranted, we

Months back a rather vocal series of micro-hacktivist groups formed a somewhat larger, more vocal pseudo-organized non-organization ruled essentially democratically via IRC (among other things), attempting to cast light on perceived misdeeds by the large corporation (or government organization) du-jour they thought had behaved badly. The idea was to hack an organization, parade them around

On the heels of the recent activity with Stuxnet, the industrial process control computer worm that targeted Iranian nuclear centrifuges, a Blackhat talk by Thanassis Giannetsos explains how to hack yet another commonly used family of controllers. We have mused that this trend, targeting critical infrastructure nodes, is but a shade of things yet to

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) newly formed Cyber Attack Task Force will “consider the impacts of a coordinated cyber attack on the reliability of the bulk power system”, in a proactive effort to increase providers’ readiness for new waves of potential nastiness. Recently, there has been a flurry of activity surrounding efforts to

Or so the latest report from DEBKAfile states, claiming the Stuxnet worm broke numerous Iranian centrifuges by forcing them to overspeed, causing damage and prompting the replacement of some 5,000-6,000 units. They cite “intelligence sources” as the source of information. Whether or not this will be confirmed, it seems malware authors clearly are targeting political

On Wednesday we heard additional documents had been leaked from the Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS). “Will this ever end?” has to be the most commonly-asked question in Arizona nowadays at the DPS. The original attacks last week were claimed by the group LulzSec, which was making the rounds exposing private information through hacking