Yes, I was hit last week. Forensics are in progress. I got doxxed, too.It has made me realize that most of systems security is an illusion. Here are my favorite alternate realities:1. Everything is safe behind the firewall.Ever heard of UBFWI—as in User’s Been Fooling With It? While IPD/IPS and firewall networked-technology has improved so vastly, there’s nothing like a user with an infected laptop to bring in a lulu.2. Obscure operating systems never get hit. Hackers only go for the gold with Windows.Here, let me laugh out loud and roll on the floor. Mine was an obscure server version on an obscure branch of an obscure BSD limb. Listen to the sound of lunch getting eaten: mine. Chomp, chomp, burp.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of Kaspersky Lab, ripped into Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior in Windows 10, the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) opened a case against Microsoft for “abusing dominance.”Microsoft claimed to have a “long history of cooperation” with Kaspersky and that it is “committed to work in full compliance with Russian law.”Yet, Russia has already decided to block Microsoft-owned LinkedIn since the law requires Russian citizens’ personal data to be stored on servers within its country. In the past, Microsoft made LinkedIn censorship changes to cater to China, as opposed to being blocked like Google and Facebook. It remains to be seen if Microsoft will localize Russian users’ data as the country’s law demands. The New York Times added that it was unclear why LinkedIn was targeted, “rather than any other major social networking site,” but that is a “sign of growing tensions for American tech companies operating” in Russia.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of Kaspersky Lab, ripped into Microsoft for anticompetitive behavior in Windows 10, the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) opened a case against Microsoft for “abusing dominance.”Microsoft claimed to have a “long history of cooperation” with Kaspersky and that it is “committed to work in full compliance with Russian law.”Yet, Russia has already decided to block Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, since the law requires Russian citizens’ personal data to be stored on servers within its country. In the past, Microsoft made LinkedIn censorship changes to cater to China, as opposed to being blocked like Google and Facebook. It remains to be seen if Microsoft will localize Russian users’ data as the country’s law demands. The New York Times added that it was unclear why LinkedIn was targeted, “rather than any other major social networking site,” but that is a “sign of growing tensions for American tech companies operating” in Russia.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A U.K. official has ordered the extradition of a British man to the U.S. on charges of hacking government computers belonging to NASA and the Department of Defense.
Lauri Love, a 31-year-old hacktivist, has been fighting his extradition, but on Monday, U.K. Home Secretary Amber Rudd signed the order.
"Mr. Love has been charged with various computer hacking offences which included targeting U.S. military and federal government agencies," the U.K. Home Office said in a statement.
The U.S. originally charged Love in 2013 for allegedly stealing confidential data from thousands of government employees, including Social Security numbers and credit card details. U.S. investigators accuse Love and his accomplices of causing millions of dollars in damages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If your IT department isn’t already worried about staff retention, some new stats might change that. A new poll finds 37% of IT pros plan to begin searching for a new employer in 2017, and 26% plan to accept a new job.Many factors are driving people’s desire for a job change, according to Spiceworks’ 2017 Tech Career Outlook. The most frequently cited reasons are: to advance my IT skills (cited by 69%); to get a more competitive salary (64%); to work at a company that makes IT more of a priority (40%); I’m burnt out at my current job (40%); to find a better work-life balance (38%); to get better benefits (401k, healthcare) (33%); to work with a more talented IT team (26%); to get better work-from-home options (24%); to get a better job title (22%).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Recent headlines suggest that blockchain technology is revolutionizing financial services. JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, Commonwealth Bank, Wells Fargo and several other leading banks are using the digital ledger technology to conduct equity swaps, cross-border trades, and other transactions.You might think that blockchain has gone mainstream. Not so fast, says former UBS CIO Oliver Bussmann, who claims it may take banks two years to run blockchain in production due to regulatory hurdles, a lack of standards and other stumbling blocks. “This is real, this will come but in a very regulated environment. We will go through a lot of validation,” says Bussmann, who jumpstarted blockchain efforts when he was leading IT at the Swiss bank last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At a time when the size of distributed denial-of-service attacks has reached unprecedented levels, researchers have found a new attack technique in the wild that allows a single laptop to take down high-bandwidth enterprise firewalls.The attack, dubbed BlackNurse, involves sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets of a particular type and code. ICMP is commonly used for the ping network diagnostic utility, and attacks that try to overload a system with ping messages -- known as ping floods -- use ICMP Type 8 Code 0 packets.BlackNurse uses ICMP Type 3 (Destination Unreachable) Code 3 (Port Unreachable) packets instead and some firewalls consume a lot of CPU resources when processing them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the latest episode of Security Sessions, CSO Editor-in-Chief Joan Goodchild chats with Michel Bruemmer from Experian Data Breach Resolution about its annual data breach response guide. The guide offers tips and process improvements for companies putting together a plan of attack when breaches occur.
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.NetCrunch 9.3Key features: Version 9.3 of the NetCrunch network monitoring system introduces an overhauled GUI, live up/down traffic on physical segments, new views for smaller networks, and integration with JIRA, ConnectWise and more. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over 412 million accounts on dating and entertainment network FriendFinder Networks have reportedly been exposed, the second time that the network has been breached in two years, according to a popular breach notification website.The websites that have been breached include adultfriendfinder.com, described as the "world's largest sex and swinger community," which accounted for over 339.7 million of the 412 million accounts exposed, LeakedSource said Sunday.Other network sites that had user accounts exposed were cams.com with 62.6 million exposed, penthouse.com with 7 million, stripshow.com with 1.4 million, icams.com with about 1 million and an unidentified website adding 35,372 users whose accounts were exposed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An attacker doesn’t need an IoT botnet or massive resources for a denial of service attack to knock large servers offline; researchers warned that all it takes is one laptop for a “BlackNurse” attack to bring vulnerable Cisco, SonicWall, Palo Alto and Zyxel firewalls to their knees.Danish researchers at the Security Operations Center of telecom operator TDC described BlackNurse as a low bandwidth Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) attack that “is capable of doing a denial of service to well-known firewalls.”In their report (pdf), the researchers wrote:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you are like me, you were pretty convinced that Secretary Clinton was poised to be the President elect. Confidence in this opinion was based on reviewing numerous big data analytics models from the fivethirtyeight.com, the New York Times, Princeton, etc. The lowest percentage gave Mrs. Clinton roughly a 65% chance of winning on November 8. So, what happened? Every database jockey recognizes the old maxim of garbage in/garbage out. In other words, killer algorithms and all the processing power in the world are rather useless if your model is built on the back of crappy data. Obviously, all the brainiacs building these models made a critical mistake in not gathering data from disenfranchised white voters in rural areas. The result? A stunning election result and lots of eggs on ivy league elitist faces.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you are like me, you were pretty convinced that Secretary Clinton was poised to be the President elect. Confidence in this opinion was based on reviewing numerous big data analytics models from the fivethirtyeight.com, The New York Times, Princeton, etc. The lowest percentage gave Mrs. Clinton roughly a 65 percent chance of winning on November 8. So, what happened? Every database jockey recognizes the old maxim of garbage in/garbage out. In other words, killer algorithms and all the processing power in the world are rather useless if your model is built on the back of crappy data. Obviously, all the brainiacs building these models made a critical mistake in not gathering data from disenfranchised white voters in rural areas. The result? A stunning election result and lots of eggs on Ivy League elitist faces.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The demand from Internet of Things, automotive networking and video applications are driving changes to Ethernet technology that will make it more time-sensitive.Key to those changes are a number of developing standards but also a push this week from the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory to set up three new industry specific Ethernet Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) consortiums – Automotive Networking, Industrial Networking, and ProAV Networking aimed at developing deterministic performance within standard Ethernet for real-time, mission critical applications.+More on Network World: IEEE sets new Ethernet standard that brings 5X the speed without disruptive cable changes+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hours after Donald Trump won the presidential election, a suspected Russian cyberespionage team was blamed for targeting several U.S. think tanks with phishing emails designed to fool victims into installing malware.On Wednesday, the phishing emails landed in the inboxes of dozens of targets associated with U.S. think tanks and non-governmental organizations, said security firm Volexity.A hacking group called APT 29 or Cozy Bear was behind the attack, according to Veloxity. This is one of the same groups that security experts say was also responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee and is allegedly tied to the Russian government.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google said it will deal with website recidivists that have dodged the company's punishments for spreading malware and spawning email scams.When Google flags sites for hosting malicious code or unwanted software, or running some kind of scam, users see warnings in Chrome and other browsers. The alerts appear as long as Google believes the site poses a threat.But after making changes to align their sites with Google's "Safe Browsing" terms, webmasters may ask Google to lift the virtual embargo.Not surprisingly, some took advantage of the mechanism for lifting the warnings. Sites would cease their illicit practices, but only long enough to get back into Google's good graces. Once Google gave the all-clear, the once-dirty-then-clean site would have a serious relapse and again distribute malware or spew phishing emails.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Pragmatic approachImage by ThinkstockData and document security with today’s mobile workforce can be a difficult challenge. This is not a “one-size-fits-all” problem; one needs to weigh the risks to ensure that you are operating within a tolerable risk level or the opposite in which you put significant controls around devices, hamper productivity for no benefit. Take a pragmatic approach – you want the ability to clearly and justly answer the organization's question of, “Why is this security measure necessary?” As security leaders, we want to allow your teams to move as fast as possible and not deploy a policy or technology because someone touts it as the best way to do something. Security vendor Conga provides these tips for that healthy balance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a perfect example of how public wireless networks can be dangerous for privacy and security, an Israeli hacker showed that he could have taken over the free Wi-Fi network of an entire city.On his way home from work one day, Amihai Neiderman, the head of research at Israeli cybersecurity firm Equus Technologies, spotted a wireless hotspot that he hadn't seen before. What made it unusual was that it was in an area with no buildings.It turned out that the hotspot he saw, advertised as "FREE_TLV," was part of the citywide free Wi-Fi network set up by the local administration of Tel Aviv, Israel. This made Neiderman wonder: How secure is it?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Technology trade groups are already pushing out their policy priorities for President-elect Donald Trump's administration, even though his campaign rarely touched on IT issues.With Silicon Valley largely opposed to Trump during the campaign and his tech policy agenda paper thin, policy recommendations from tech trade groups may be an exercise in wishful thinking. Still, several tech groups congratulated Trump on his unexpected victory and expressed optimism about this presidency.One point of optimism for the tech industry was the Trump campaign's last-minute addition of telecommunications networks to a long list of infrastructure projects he hopes to fund. Other infrastructure projects on Trump's list include roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, railroads, ports, pipelines, and the electricity grid, and it's unclear how he plans to pay for the plan, given that Trump also has promised large tax cuts, and whether telecommunications networks would be a priority. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Regulations to protect people from falling drones moved a little closer to takeoff at the European Parliament on Thursday.Ensuring drone safety took on a new urgency this week, with GoPro's recall of its Karma drone after unexplained mid-air power failures caused a number of them to drop out of the sky.Under the European Union's proposed regulations, drones will have to be registered so that their owners can be identified. While that won't in itself stop drones from falling, it could lead pilots to take their responsibilities more seriously, legislators hope.A 1-kilogram drone like the Karma falling from as little as 11 meters (around three stories) could kill even someone wearing a safety helmet, according to a calculator developed by the Dropped Object Prevention Scheme, which promotes safety in the oil and gas industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here