Archive for the 'Infrastructure' Category
Japan to Probe Active Faults Under Nuclear Plants
July 19th, 2012Via: AFP: Japan’s nuclear safety watchdog on Wednesday ordered a probe into claims the country’s only working nuclear power station sits on an active tectonic fault. The order came as Kansai Electric Power Company (KEPCO) readied to refire a second reactor at the Oi plant, western Japan, just weeks after the first unit was restarted, […]
Drone Hijacking? That’s Just the Start of GPS Troubles
July 7th, 2012Via: Wired: On the evening of June 19, a group of researchers from the University of Texas successfully hijacked a civilian drone at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico during a test organized by the Department of Homeland Security. The drone, an Adaptive Flight Hornet Mini, was hovering at around 60 feet, locked […]
Mid Atlantic: Three Million Without Power
July 1st, 2012Via: CBS: Utility crews untangled downed power lines and tree limbs Sunday, working to get the electricity turned back on for millions of people facing a second day of 100-degree temperatures without modern conveniences like air conditioning and refrigeration. On Saturday, many people flocked to places like malls and movie theaters in the hope the […]
U.S., Israel Developed Flame Computer Virus
June 20th, 2012Via: Washington Post: The United States and Israel jointly developed a sophisticated computer virus nicknamed Flame that collected intelligence in preparation for cyber-sabotage aimed at slowing Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, according to Western officials with knowledge of the effort. The massive piece of malware secretly mapped and monitored Iran’s computer networks, sending […]
Flame Uses Sneakernet Functionality Against Targets on Airgapped Networks
June 16th, 2012Via: Forbes: The program known as Flame has fascinated the cybersecurity industry with its sophistication and versatility as a Swiss-Army knife of cyberspying. Now researchers have discovered another unexpected tool in its data-stealing arsenal: You. Malware analysts at the security firm Bitdefender say they’ve found a unique capability within Flame’s code that would potentially allow […]
Could U.S. Cyberspies Have Moles Inside Microsoft?
June 16th, 2012Another possibility is that this is blowback from Microsoft’s recent collaboration with NSA. Via: PCPro: US government officials could be working under cover at Microsoft to help the country’s cyber-espionage programme, according to one leading security expert. The warning comes in the wake of the Flame virus that targeted key computers in the Middle East, […]
Several Pentagon Contractors Recruiting for Offensive Cyberwarfare Jobs
June 16th, 2012Via: Forbes: Over the past few months, Hypponen has been periodically visiting the “careers” section of defense contractors’ websites and online job listings, particularly those targeted at candidates with secret clearances, and searching for words like “exploit,” “offensive,” and “vulnerability.” And the positions he’s been seeing show a new recruiting focus–or newly explicit focus–among the […]
Flame and Stuxnet Share Common Origin
June 12th, 2012Via: Threat Post: Researchers digging through the code of the recently discovered Flame worm say they have come across a wealth of evidence that suggests Flame and the now-famous Stuxnet worm share a common origin. Researchers from Kaspersky Lab say that a critical module that the Flame worm used to spread is identical to a […]
Cryptanalist Discovers New MD5 Attack Variant in Flame
June 7th, 2012Via: CWI: Using our forensic tool, we have indeed verified that a chosen-prefix collision attack against MD5 has been used for Flame. More interestingly, the results have shown that not our published chosen-prefix collision attack was used, but an entirely new and unknown variant. Therefore it is not unreasonable to assume that the particular chosen-prefix […]
Japan: Millions of Tons of Radioactive Rubble
June 5th, 2012Via: The Atlantic: Disposing the more than 20 million tons of rubble caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami is proving to be a difficult problem for Japan, not least because much of the rubble has been irradiated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The government’s plan — to destroy 4 million tons of potentially […]
