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Practice raises alarm after Navy IG report confirms hacking vulnerabilities in mapping apps
Special operators and other troops must stop taking their unsecured personal tablets and smart phones into combat after an internal Navy investigation found that mapping applications can be hacked by hostile actors, cybersecurity experts warn. Continue reading
According to a new Defense Department study conducted by the drone surveillance startup Dedrone, drones are increasingly flying over military installations in the U.S. without authorization.
The contractor conducted a 56-day drone-detection pilot test demonstration at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, located just four miles away from the White House in Washington, D.C, as part of an Army effort to develop counter-drone security measures. The test revealed 95 instances of “previously undetectable” drone activity above the installation. Continue reading
Last week I was privileged to attend the 10th Asymmetric Threat Symposium. It’s not the first of these I’ve attended but was clearly the best. Maybe the participants felt less restrained by politics and thus spoke more directly to the issues we truly face. Or maybe the quality of experts is rising. For whatever reason, the event was candid and sobering, even for me. The event was held near our nation’s capitol and was sponsored by CACI International, the Center for Security Policy, and ISW (Institute for the Study of War). The title: What Does It Take to Protect America? Combatting Global Asymmetric Threats.
While the rules of the event require that comments be shared without attribution, I’m pleased to offer a recap for our readers. You can read the agenda and see information about prior versions at www.asymmetricthreat.net. The speakers and panelists were impressive. In fact, I counted 36 stars on the shoulders (Admirals and Generals) of about a dozen participants, both active and retired, not to mention academic and civilian experts.
There were many important points covered and I’ll recap just a few:
First, the question was asked and answered. Are we already at war? Continue reading
If the Iran nuclear deal fails, U.S. companies will suffer never-before-seen security breaches thanks to Tehran’s “hacker army.”
This particular cyber militia has been honing its skills and expanding since 2013. That’s when then-Iranian President Hassan Rouhani increased the country’s cybersecurity spending 12-fold, Business Insider reported in 2015. Rouhani allocated roughly $19.8 million to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Tehran’s military) to up its cyber capabilities. Continue reading
Soldiers are thought to be combining traditional weaponry with electronic warfare
Vladimir Putin is thought to be testing tools for warfare in the field as he adopts a confrontational foreign policy stance – representing something of a “return to form” reminiscent of the Cold War days.A leaked British Army document reveals that Russian forces are improving their ability to combine their mighty tanks, artillery and other heavy weaponry with sophisticated electronic warfare.
Specifically they are honing their skills to jam enemy radio signals and render equipment like drones unusable.
With future combat likely to occur in cyberspace and space as well as on land, sea and air, the potential for nuclear-miscalculation is greater than at any time since the worst days of the Cold War, said Singer, a strategist with the New America think tank.
“You may now not do certain things, because you need to signal to the other side, ‘Yeah, we’re at war, but we’re not in that kind of war,’” Singer told a group Monday at the Air Force Association’s annual Air and Space Conference outside Washington, D.C. “This also applies to how we think about deterrence and cyber conflict.” Continue reading
On Friday, we highlighted a “secret” NSA map which purports to show every Chinese cyber attack on US targets over the past five years. “The prizes that China pilfered during its ‘intrusions’ included everything from specifications for hybrid cars to formulas for pharmaceutical products to details about U.S. military and civilian air traffic control systems,” intelligence sources told NBC, who broke the story.
The release of the map marked the culmination of a cyber attack propaganda campaign which began with accusations that North Korea had attempted to sabotage Sony, reached peak absurdity when Penn State claimed Chinese spies had taken control of the campus engineering department, and turned serious when Washington blamed China for what was deemed “the largest theft of US government data ever.” “Whether all of this is cause for the Pentagon to activate the ‘offensive’ component of its brand new cyber strategy remains to be seen,” we said yesterday. Continue reading
A review of the source code of the main page that appears at PlannedParenthood.org shows that as of 9:30 a.m. today, the page is listed as a “Campaign” and uses a specific template named “Site Down Tempalte” (the typo is theirs). The same page then directs visitors to the Facebook page of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the political fundraising arm of the nation’s largest abortion provider. The web page for PPAF–which can be accessed via both plannedparenthoodaction.org and ppaction.org–repeats the same hacking claims and contains the exact same source code and template used on the PlannedParenthood.org page. Continue reading
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis had developed a covert emergency payment system that would work by hacking into government servers in the event of bank closures forced by the European Central Bank (ECB), local media reported Sunday, citing a recorded conversation they obtained.
ATHENS (Sputnik) – Varoufakis allegedly disclosed the so-called parallel payment system in a July 16 teleconference between hedge fund leaders organized by former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont. Continue reading
If the White House can be hacked as well as other governmental agencies such as the OPM where 21 million federal employees had their information compromised (FBI/CIA, etc… included), it’s only a matter of time…
Government IT systems have taken a beating lately, with the recent Office of Personnel Management’s breach exposing some 21-plus million federal employee records being just the cherry on top of what’s been a cybersecurity sundae from hell for most agencies.
But coincidentally, none of these breaches involved cloud systems.
Federal cloud security standards, governed by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management program, have been hugely successful thus far in ensuring cloud service providers that serve government customers aren’t bringing knives to gun fights. Continue reading
Just when you think that the depravity of the United States cannot possibly get any worse, something else comes along to surprise us. Many of the things that you are about to read about in this article are incredibly disturbing, but it is important that we face the truth about how far this nation has fallen. There are times when I will be having a conversation with someone else about the state of our country, and the other person will say something like this: “Wow – America is really going down the toilet.” At one time, I would have totally agreed with that. But at this point I would have to say that we have already circled the bowl and have made it all the way through to the other end. Our society is absolutely addicted to entertainment (most of which is utter trash), tens of millions of us are hooked on drugs (both legal and illegal), and we have murdered more than 56 million of our own babies. Our financial system is consumed with greed, we treat our military veterans like human garbage, and most of our “leaders” in Washington D.C. are deeply corrupt. In America today, 64 percent of all men view pornography at least once per month, it is estimated that one out of every four girls is sexually abused before they become adults, and we have the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the entire industrialized world. We like to think that we are an “example” to the rest of the world, but the only example that we are setting is a bad one. The following are 11 signs that America has already gone down the toilet… Continue reading
Although officially it’s been called a “glitch”, the NYSE on Wednesday (as this article mentions) was glitched out of service with a whole other host of businesses, which brings the suspicion up another notch. Another theory could be that it wasn’t a glitch or hacker, but a suddenly imminent crash in the markets and the NYSE staff had simply pulled the plug out of the socket to halt trading and stem the tide. Of course, none of this is official but we shouldn’t be surprised to hear any of this should the word get out. “Glitch” just doesn’t fit the description.
(NaturalNews) Demonstrating America’s extreme vulnerability to activist-driven hackers who are trying to make a point, the New York Stock Exchange was shuttered for most of the day yesterday, stalling out hundreds of billions of dollars in trades.
The lying mainstream media, of course, has rolled out a pathetic (yet hilarious) cover story on all this, claiming there was no hack. Instead, the NYSE is just wholly incompetent and can’t run its own computer systems reliably, we’re told. Continue reading
Indeed, our modern western financial and banking system with its massive dependency on single interface websites, servers and the internet faces serious risks that few analysts have yet to appreciate and evaluate.We previously referred to Russian Prime Minister Medvedev’s allusion to cyber warfare when he stated the Russia’s response to U.S. attempts to have it locked out of the SWIFT system that the Russian response “economically and otherwise – will know no limits.”
Dormant malware, apparently of Russian origin had previously been discovered buried in the software that runs the Nasdaq stock exchange according to Bloomberg.
Given that a military confrontation is not desired by Russia it is likely that cyber-warfare will be part of Russian arsenal in any confrontation with the U.S. and NATO countries. Continue reading
A security researcher kicked off a United Airlines flight last month after tweeting about security vulnerabilities in its system had previously taken control of an airplane and caused it to briefly fly sideways, according to an application for a search warrant filed by an FBI agent.
Chris Roberts, a security researcher with One World Labs, told the FBI agent during an interview in February that he had hacked the in-flight entertainment system, or IFE, on an airplane and overwrote code on the plane’s Thrust Management Computer while aboard the flight. He was able to issue a climb command and make the plane briefly change course, the document states.
“He stated that he thereby caused one of the airplane engines to climb resulting in a lateral or sideways movement of the plane during one of these flights,” FBI Special Agent Mark Hurley wrote in his warrant application (.pdf). “He also stated that he used Vortex software after comprising/exploiting or ‘hacking’ the airplane’s networks. He used the software to monitor traffic from the cockpit system.” Continue reading
Washington: Two years ago, the Obama administration announced a new strategy to curb online espionage.
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The White House said it would increase public awareness of the threat, encourage the private sector to increase its defences, focus diplomacy on protecting trade secrets overseas, improve trade secret theft legislation and make investigations and prosecutions of corporate and state-sponsored trade secret theft a top priority.
Since then, public awareness is up and so is spending. But the hacking continues. Continue reading
Global Geopolitics 