U.S. electric utilities are becoming more realistic about risks to the nation’s power grid from cyber attacks – hackers turning off the lights and much else – Security magazine reports. “From a cyber-attack perspective,” it notes, “this year has been a watershed year for the electric and critical infrastructure industry. “After generally resisting the notion of […]
Human resources departments have a new challenge reports NakedSecurity.Sophos.com: Disenchanted employees are harassing current and former employers “using e-tools such as cloud storage sites or remote access to a company’s computer network,” says the FBI. “Such workers,” the report has it, “are using cloud storage tools such as Dropbox to steal trade secrets or […]
James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, has issued “the third iteration” of the National Intelligence Strategy for the United States over the next four years. “We have seen a great deal of success in integrating intelligence in the five years since our most recent NIS,” Clapper writes, “with both high-profile operational achievements and […]
Bruce Schneier is tired of electronic surveillance – he’s a security guy, and bemoans the fact that the NSA and its like have opened the world to pervasive eavesdropping. “We have one infrastructure,” Schneier writes. “We can’t choose a world where the US gets to spy and the Chinese don’t. We get to choose a world where […]
Time to get a little sociological in security terms. Want to get a sharper idea of who might be approaching your entry points? Maybe not, but maybe some methodology is worth considering. Like Social Identity Theory, as explained and promoted in this post on Homeland Security Watch. Christopher Bellavita writes that “Two of my […]
Yesterday, you may have noticed, was “Internet Slowdown Day,” a day when prime Internet companies banded together to show what a slowed down Internet might be like if proposals to have different classes of Internet use – the end of “net neutrality” – prevail. May they not. Among its functions, the Internet is a key […]
The strength of Internet passwords is getting renewed attention, Bruce Schneier notes, because of the hacking of celebrity accounts on Apple’s iCloud servers. “The attack didn’t exploit a flaw in iCloud,” he writes, “the attack exploited weak passwords.” Schneier, thereby, reenforces his longstanding advice to computer users: Rely on a well-regarded password manager to create and store your passwords. […]
A barrier world friend of ours thinks there’s “Sure a lot of doom and gloom” in our posts and suggests, “Every now and then post a cute kitty photo for a little psychic relief.” Well, there aren’t enough kitties to ward off the gloom when you see a post reporting that “Sony’s PlayStation Network was disabled […]
Time to start getting – and staying – jittery over the security of electronic networks. IEEE Spectrum advises that “a briefcase-size radio weapon could wreak havoc in our networked world.” “Electromagnetic (EM) attacks, it adds, “are not only possible – they are happening.” “Our infrastructure increasingly depends on closely integrated, high-speed electronic systems operating at low internal […]
Another day, another hacking story. Krebs on Security reports that “Multiple banks say they are seeing evidence that Home Depot stores may be the source of a massive new batch of stolen credit and debit carts that went on sale this morning in the cybercrime underground.” Would that it isn’t so. But the current IT […]