“We Aren’t Slaves”: Erdogan Says Russian S-400s A “Done Deal”, Hints At Future S-500 Upgrade

S-500 Air Defense System, which Erdogan said Turkey could upgrade to in the future, in defiance on Washington. Image via Military and Commercial Technology blog

 

“This is over” — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said this week as US Congress continues discussion and debate on holding up delivery of Lockheed-produced F-35 stealth jets purchased previously by Turkey due to Ankara’s intent to receive Russian S-400 anti-air defense systems from Russia.

Trump signs ‘Space Force’ directive

President Donald Trump signed an order Tuesday outlining his vision for a new “Space Force” that could one day become a separate military branch on an equal footing to the Army and Navy.

Trump wants to create a space force to protect satellites, tackle vulnerabilities in space and assert US dominance in orbit.

U.S. Weapons Systems Vulnerable to Cyberhacks, Report Warns

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Investigators ‘routinely found mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities’

Major U.S. weapons systems are increasingly vulnerable to hacking attacks, according to federal investigators who “routinely found mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities” in multiple critical systems operated by the Department of Defense.

The Defense Department has been caught flatfooted when it comes to protecting critical systems that oversee and run an increasing number of U.S. defense systems, according to a new Government Oversight Report that warns defense officials have little understanding of how to protect these systems from hacking attacks by foreign governments and other rogue actors.

SCADA malware discovered in European energy company

For more information on this vulnerability, please refer to the SCADA/SCADAs tags.

A new piece of industrial control malware has been discovered. Dubbed SFG, Sentinel One Labs discovered the piece on the information networks of a yet-unnamed European energy company.

It appears quite sophisticated. It not only collects information on the infected system but opens a backdoor through which a destructive payload could be launched, “to potentially shut down an energy grid”.

China has cyber capability to take down U.S. power grid, warns NSA

(NaturalNews) The U.S. is vulnerable to cyber attacks from China and other countries capable of shutting down the power grid and disabling vital infrastructure, according to Admiral Michael Rogers, head of both the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command.

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Cybersecurity firm Mondiant confirmed that China had hacked into U.S. utility systems and has the knowledge potential to exploit vulnerabilities and shut down or disrupt them. Rogers says this could allow Chinese hackers “to shut down very segmented, very tailored parts of our infrastructure that forestall the ability to provide that service to us as citizens.”

Nuclear power plants ‘could become more open to cyber attacks’ as police consider cloud storage

The Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), the armed police force tasked with guarding all of Britain’s nuclear plants, has previously refused to use the new storage technology given much of its information is classified as “sensitive”.

However the force has revealed it could start using cloud technology as early as April next year despite a series of high profile information breaches which raised questions about the software’s reliability.

Technology experts warned the move could be “unnecessary” and leave the force more exposed to foreign hackers.

Intel Assessment: Weak Response to Breaches Will Lead to More Cyber Attacks

“Response” is exactly what’s allowing this to happen. It’s the culture of reactionary ‘patch and pray” that continues to be the industry norm instead of proactive defense that is the issue. Reactionary means only reacting, therefore you have to wait for something to happen.

 

Obama administration’s diplomatic, legal response is encouraging more cyber attacks

The United States will continue to suffer increasingly damaging cyber attacks against both government and private sector networks as long as there is no significant response, according to a recent U.S. intelligence community assessment.

Disclosure of the intelligence assessment, an analytical consensus of 16 U.S. spy agencies, comes as the Obama administration is debating how to respond to a major cyber attack against the Office of Personnel Management. Sensitive records on 22.1 million federal workers, including millions cleared for access to secrets, were stolen by hackers linked to China’s government.

U.S. Power Grid Being Hit With ‘Increasing’ Hacking Attacks, Government Warns

One can only imagine how much more the threat is multiplied because of the “patch and pray” culture America was warned about as early as 1998. Nobody in the industry cares until after the problem happens, then they stick a band-aid on it.

 

Potential to ‘take down’ U.S. power grids, water systems and other critical infrastructure

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While experts have long signaled that the U.S. power grid and related systems are vulnerable to physical attacks by terrorists and other individuals, the U.S. government is now warning that sensitive computer systems that maintain the grid are increasingly being attacked, according to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report that was not made public until the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) disclosed it this month.

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These types of computer viruses are able to comb internal systems for private information in a clandestine manner; they can also be used to wrest control of certain computers away from their owners.

“In recent years, new threats have materialized as new vulnerabilities have come to light, and a number of major concerns have emerged about the resilience and security of the nation’s electric power system,” the report says. “In particular, the cyber security of the electricity grid has been a focus of recent efforts to protect the integrity of the electric power system.”

US Federal Reserve Bank Hit by Hackers

Hackers successfully attacked the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, redirecting users of its online research services to fake websites set up by the attackers, the bank said on Tuesday.

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The fake websites were designed to look like the web pages of services provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The attack compromised the Internet’s routing system, known as the domain name system (DNS).

Cyber attackers leaving warning ‘messages’: NSA chief

There’s been concern for quite some time now that Russia has already infected U.S. critical infrastructure with viruses but are yet to be activated and unleashed until there’s a need or the time is right.

 

Attackers hacking into American computer networks appear to be leaving “cyber fingerprints” to send a message that critical systems are vulnerable, the top US cyber-warrior said Thursday.

Admiral Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency and head of the Pentagon’s US Cyber Command, made the comments to a US Senate panel as he warned about the growing sophistication of cyber threats.

How and Why ISIS Will Use Texas to Enter the US If They Choose to Cross the Border

Please see the website source for more videos as there are too many to post here.

 

 

Despite tough rhetoric from national and Texas leaders, the vast majority of the U.S.-Mexico border remains unsecured. Areas with frighteningly insufficient security are of particular concern in the state of Texas, largely due to differences in the nature between the transnational criminal organizations that control Mexico immediately south of Texas and the organizations that control the border in New Mexico, Arizona, and California. To be specific, foreign terrorists would likely enter the U.S. through Texas because the behavior of the transnational criminal groups we more commonly call the Gulf cartel and the Zetas cartel routinely indicate that they are more interested in short-term gains and profit-making than long-term profit sustainability, unlike the various other transnational criminal groups that align themselves under the banner of the Sinaloa Federation. A willingness to accept a large sum of money from a terrorist or group, regardless of the fact that it would lead to a temporary shutdown of the U.S.-Mexico border in the area where the illegal crossing occurred, would be necessary on the part of a specific cartel in order for them to allow such a crossing — and crossings rarely occur unless a cartel allows it.

China seen targeting banks, military in Forbes web attack

A Chinese hacking group infiltrated the Forbes.com site in November and used it to launch targeted attacks against website visitors from U.S. banking and defense companies, a cybersecurity company said on Tuesday.

The attack took place over a period of several days, starting Nov. 28, and took advantage of unpatched vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, according to ISight Partners. The vulnerability was kept quiet until Tuesday, when Microsoft issued a patch to plug the security hole in its web browser. Adobe had previously published a patch for Flash.

How Russian Hackers Stole the Nasdaq

In October 2010, a Federal Bureau of Investigation system monitoring U.S. Internet traffic picked up an alert. The signal was coming from Nasdaq (NDAQ). It looked like malware had snuck into the company’s central servers. There were indications that the intruder was not a kid somewhere, but the intelligence agency of another country. More troubling still: When the U.S. experts got a better look at the malware, they realized it was attack code, designed to cause damage.

As much as hacking has become a daily irritant, much more of it crosses watch-center monitors out of sight from the public. The Chinese, the French, the Israelis—and many less well known or understood players—all hack in one way or another. They steal missile plans, chemical formulas, power-plant pipeline schematics, and economic data. That’s espionage; attack code is a military strike. There are only a few recorded deployments, the most famous being the Stuxnet worm. Widely believed to be a joint project of the U.S. and Israel, Stuxnet temporarily disabled Iran’s uranium-processing facility at Natanz in 2010. It switched off safety mechanisms, causing the centrifuges at the heart of a refinery to spin out of control. Two years later, Iran destroyed two-thirds of Saudi Aramco’s computer network with a relatively unsophisticated but fast-spreading “wiper” virus. One veteran U.S. official says that when it came to a digital weapon planted in a critical system inside the U.S., he’s seen it only once—in Nasdaq.

The October alert prompted the involvement of the National Security Agency, and just into 2011, the NSA concluded there was a significant danger. A crisis action team convened via secure videoconference in a briefing room in an 11-story office building in the Washington suburbs. Besides a fondue restaurant and a CrossFit gym, the building is home to the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), whose mission is to spot and coordinate the government’s response to digital attacks on the U.S. They reviewed the FBI data and additional information from the NSA, and quickly concluded they needed to escalate.

Has New York’s traffic light system been HACKED? Researcher claims to be able to control Manhattan traffic (and says the same technique will work around the world)

• Researcher claims to be able to control light patterns in Manhattan
• Say technique can be used in all major cities
• Uses special $4,000 router to control traffic sensors embedded in roads

A security expert claims to have uncovered a major flaw in the traffic system in in major cities around the world including London and New York.

Cesar Cerrudo, an Argentinian security researcher with IoActive, says he can control traffic lights and even reroute traffic.

This Is Not a Test: Emergency Broadcast Systems Proved Hackable

As was written in a book ahead of it’s time (1987), “Spetsnaz. The Story Behind the Soviet SAS”, has now come to fruition.

The following is a sample from the book:

I do not know how or when World War Three will start. I do not know exactly how the Soviet high command plans to make use of spetsnaz in that war: the first world war in which spetsnaz will be a major contributor. I do not wish to predict the future. In this chapter I shall describe how spetsnaz will be used at the beginning of that war as I imagine it. It is not my task to describe what will happen. But I can describe what might happen.

The last month of peace, as in other wars, has an almost palpable air of crisis about it. Incidents, accidents, small disasters add to the tension. Two trains collide on a railway bridge in Cologne because the signalling system is out of order. The bridge is seriously damaged and there can be no traffic over it for the next two months.

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On 12 August, at 0558 local time, a van comes to a halt on the vast empty parking lot in front of a supermarket in Washington. Three men open the doors of the van, roll out the fuselage of a light aircraft and attach its wings. A minute later its motor bursts into life. The plane takes off and disappears into the sky. It has no pilot. It is controlled by radio with the aid of very simple instruments, only slightly more complicated than those used by model aircraft enthusiasts. The plane climbs to about 200 metres and immediately begins to descend in the direction of the White House. A minute later a mighty explosion shakes the capital of the United States. The screaming of sirens on police cars, fire engines and ambulances fills the city.

Three minutes later a second plane sweeps across the centre of the city and there is a second explosion in the place where the White House once stood. The second plane has taken off from a section of highway under construction, and has a quite different control system. Two cars with radio beacons in them have been left earlier in the middle of the city. The beacons have switched on automatically a few seconds before the plane’s take-off. The automatic pilot is guided by the two beacons and starts to descend according to a previously worked-out trajectory. The second plane has been sent off by a second group operating independently of the first one.

It was a simple plan: if the first plane did not destroy the White House the second would. If the first plane did destroy the White House then a few minutes later all the heads of the Washington police would be near where the explosion had taken place. The second plane would kill many of them.

At 0606 all radio and television channels interrupt their normal programmes and report the destruction of the White House and the possible death of the President of the United States.

At 0613 the programme known as Good Morning America is interrupted and the Vice-President of the USA appears. He announces a staggering piece of news: there has been an attempt to seize power in the country on the part of the leaders of the armed forces. The President of the United States has been killed. The Vice-President appeals to everyone in the armed forces to remain where they are and not to carry out any orders from senior officers for the next twenty-four hours, because the orders would be issued by traitors shortly to be removed from their posts and arrested.

Soon afterwards many television channels across the country cease transmitting….

Article:

Several models of Emergency Alert System decoders, used to break into TV and radio broadcasts to announce public safety warnings, have vulnerabilities that would allow hackers to hijack them and deliver fake messages to the public, according to an announcement by a security firm on Monday.

The vulnerabilities included a private root SSH key that was distributed in publicly available firmware images that would have allowed an attacker with SSH access to a device to log in with root privileges and issue fake alerts or disable the system.