It's
just the Chairman, checking his US investments...
"The Wall Street Journal said
Thursday its
computers were hit by Chinese hackers, the latest U.S. media
organization citing an effort to spy on its journalists covering
China. The Journal made the announcement a day after The
New York Times said hackers, possibly connected to China's
military, had infiltrated its computers
[Interesting
phrase from journalists who write accurately... Bob]
in response to its expose of the vast wealth amassed by a top
leader's family. The Journal said
in a news article that the attacks were 'for the apparent purpose
of monitoring the newspaper's China coverage' and suggest
that Chinese spying on U.S. media 'has become a widespread
phenomenon.'"
(Related)
Can we wage war without drones? (Is this what all the “digital
Pearl Harbor” posturing was about?)
U.S.
weighs retaliation to alleged Chinese cyberattacks
The Obama administration is considering
further action after the failure of high-level talks with Chinese
officials over cyberattacks against America, according to the
Associated Press.
The AP reports
that two former U.S. officials say the administration is currently
preparing a new National Intelligence Estimate -- a governmental
assessment of concerns relating to security -- in order to better
understand and analyze the persistence of cyberattacks that come from
China.
Once this is complete, it will
apparently be possible to better address the security threat, as well
as justify actions to defend both the general public and national
security.
At
least they weren't Chinese...
"Amazon.com, the multi-billion
online retail website, experienced an outage
of unknown proportions on Thursday afternoon. Rumblings of an
Amazon.com outage began popping up on Twitter at about 2:40 PM ET.
Multiple attempts to access the site around 3:15 PM ET on Thursday
were met with the message: 'Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.' By 3:30
PM ET the site appeared to be back online for at least some users.
How big of a deal is an hour-long Amazon outage? Amazon.com's latest
earnings report showed that the company makes about $10.8 billion per
quarter, or about $118 million per day and $4.9
million per hour."
Update: 01/31 22:25 GMT by T
: "Hackers
claim credit."
[From the update:
The group went on
detail how it knocked the front door down (only Amazon.com's front
page was offline), with a large "botnet" or network of
thousands of computers working together.
…
Amazon.com averages $100,000 per minute in sales according to the
Seattle Times.
“The gateway
page of Amazon.com was offline to some customers for approximately 49
minutes,"
Your Computer
Security managers should be able to explain each of these...
Security threats have increasingly come
from new directions and that isn’t looking set to change in 2013.
There are new risks you should be aware of, exploits of popular
applications, increasingly sophisticated phishing attacks, malware,
and scams targeting our love of social networks and photo sharing,
and threats associated with viewing online videos.
Honest,
this is not my Ethical Hackers retaliating for the New York Times
hack. I know the lawyers at the Sturm College of Law (University of
Denver) are looking at Mobile Apps for a March 15th
seminar, perhaps we can get them to include a few malware Apps like
this one...
"A new discovered malware is
potentially one of the most costly viruses yet discovered. Uncovered
by NQ Mobile, the 'Bill Shocker' (a.expense.Extension.a) virus has
already impacted 620,000 users in China
and poses a threat to unprotected Android devices worldwide. Bill
Shocker downloads in the background, without arousing the mobile
device owner's suspicion. The infection can then take
remote control of the device, including the contact
list, Internet connections and dialing and texting functions. Once
the malware has turned the phone into a "zombie," the
infection uses the device to send text message to the profit of
advertisers. In many cases, the threat will overrun the user's
bundling quota, which subjects the user to additional charges."
(Related) Some of these depend on
users having Smartphones.
FTC’s
$50,000 Robocall Challenge nets 744 ideas to shut down robocallers
The Federal Trade Commission today said
the submission period for its Robocall Challenge had ended and it got
744 new ideas for ways to shut down the annoying automated callers.
Now
there is an eye catching headline! (I can't yet confirm this, but I
am dilligently viewing as many porn sites as possible...)
"The popular belief is that
security risks increase as the user engages in riskier and shadier
behavior online, but that apparently isn't the case, Cisco found in
its 2013 Annual Security report. It can be more
dangerous to click on an online advertisement than an adult content
site these days, according to Cisco. For example, users
clicking on online ads were 182 times more likely to wind up getting
infected with malware than if they'd surfed over to an adult content
site, Cisco said. The highest concentration of
online security targets do not target pornography, pharmaceutical, or
gambling sites as much as they affect legitimate sites such as search
engines, online retailers, and social media. Users
are 21 times more likely to get hit with malware from online shopping
sites and 27 more times likely with a search engine
than if they'd gone to a counterfeit software site, according to
Cisco's
report (PDF). There is an overwhelming perception that people
get compromised for 'going to dumb sites,' Mary Landesman, senior
security researcher at Cisco, told SecurityWeek."
I
forget. Are we here in Oceania at war with Eastasia or Eurasia?
"Leading privacy expert Caspar
Bowden, warned European citizens not to use cloud services hosted
in the U.S. over spying fears. Bowden, former privacy adviser to
Microsoft Europe, explained at a panel
discussion hosted at the recent Computers,
Privacy and Data Protection conference in Brussels, that a
section in the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act 2008 (FISAAA)
permits U.S. intelligence agencies to access data owned by non-U.S.
citizens on cloud storage hosed by U.S. companies, if their activity
is deemed to affect U.S. foreign policy. Bowden claimed the Act
allows for purely political
spying of activists,
protesters and political groups. Bowden also pointed out that
amendments to the EU's data protection regulation proposal, introduce
specific loopholes that permit
FISAAA surveillance. The president of Estonia,
Toomas
Hendrik Ilves (at a separate
panel discussion) commented that, "If it is a US company
it's the FBI's jurisdiction and if you are not a US citizen then they
come and look at whatever you have if it is stored on a US company
server". The European
Data Protection Supervisor declined to comment but an insider
indicated that the authority is looking into the matter."
Pop
quiz material for my students!
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