What does the New Year hold for information security, malicious software, consumer privacy and cybercrime? Questions of this mature are posed by journalists toward the end of every year and, beginning about November, answers from security specialists start to appear in print. Indeed, ESET researchers in Latin America published a 20-page white paper on this

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

I notice there’s a flurry of articles around the “Stuxnet anniversary” and “After Stuxnet” themes…

In fact, the real interest of the document lies in the extensive overview (12 closely-typed pages without graphics and such) of the DHS view of its own cybersecurity mission.

“Infrastructure Attacks: The Next Generation?” now includes the speaker notes, which hopefully makes it more interesting and useful.

Greetings, my faithful fans. Did you miss me? I've just had a restful week hiding from the Internet in a remote cottage in Devon, which is why I've been uncharacteristically quiet. Before that, though, I had an interesting and useful week in London mostly centred round the Infosec Europe expo, where apart from wall-to-wall meetings

Kelly Jackson Higgins in a Dark Reading article tells us that Malware Attacks Decline In SCADA, Industrial Control Systems, quoting a report published by the Security Incidents Organization drawing on its Repository of Industrial Security Incidents (RISI) database. One aspect that’s attracted attention on specialist lists is the mention of a large US power company

Added to the resources blog at http://blog.eset.com/2011/01/03/stuxnet-information-and-resources: Report of a Stuxnet-unrelated vulnerability in SCADA software A speculative cyberwar link Some links on Iranian post-Stuxnet "cybermilitia" recruitment. http://www.itworld.com/security/133469/iran-responds-stuxnet-expanding-cyberwar-militia http://blogs.forbes.com/jeffreycarr/2011/01/12/irans-paramilitary-militia-is-recruiting-hackers/?boxes=financechannelforbes David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP

…Eric Chien … tells us that “Stuxnet requires the industrial control system to have frequency converter drives from at least one of two specific vendors…”

In researching today’s SC Magazine Cybercrime Corner article “From sci-fi to Stuxnet: Exploding gas pipelines and the Farewell Dossier”, I came across this ‘Damn Interesting’ article which showcases the successful cyberwarfare compromise of a SCADA / pipeline control system nearly thirty years ago, an event which I had heard stories about in Navy circles but