HACKS THAT CAUSE physical destruction are so rare they can be counted on one hand. The infamous Stuxnet worm was the first, causing physical destruction of nuclear centrifuges in Iran in 2009. In 2014, Germany reported the second known case of physical destruction involving a furnace at a steel mill. Both of these attacks required…
Category: Cyber-Crime
Calculating your “Threat Score”
As technology advances in our society, those sci-fi movies that everybody thought were outlandish and far-fetched will start being seen as harbingers. After reading this article, watch a few minutes of the movie “Minority Report”. “Psychic Technology” is nothing more now than an advanced algorithm. -SF FRESNO, Calif. — While officers raced to a recent…
Surveillance is the Business Model of the Internet
The Internet of Things That Talk About You Behind Your Back SilverPush is an Indian startup that’s trying to figure out all the different computing devices you own. It embeds inaudible sounds into the webpages you read and the television commercials you watch. Software secretly embedded in your computers, tablets, and smartphones pick up the…
U.S. Voter Database Mysteriously Appears Online in the Open
A misconfigured database has provided users of the World Wide Web access to 191 million voter records. White hat hacker Chris Vickery happened upon the leaky system and sent CSO’s Steve Ragan his personal voter record to prove it. “It was current based on the elections listed. My personal information was accurate too,” Ragan writes….
This article Will NOT Boost Your Confidence in American Cyber-Defense Capabilities
Iranian hackers infiltrated the control system of a small dam less than 20 miles from New York City two years ago, sparking concerns that reached to the White House, according to former and current U.S. officials and experts familiar with the previously undisclosed incident. The breach came amid attacks by hackers linked to Iran’s government…
A Case Study Why Government “Encryption Back Doors” are a BAD Ideal
ENCRYPTION BACKDOORS HAVE been a hot topic in the last few years—and the controversial issue got even hotter after the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, when it dominated media headlines. It even came up during this week’s Republican presidential candidate debate. But despite all the attention focused on backdoors lately, no one noticed that…
Merry Christmas America! Congress secretly Slips CISA into Budget Bill
Update 12/18/2015 12pm: The House and Senate have now passed the omnibus bill, including the new version of CISA. Privacy advocates were aghast in October when the Senate passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act by a vote of 74 to 21, leaving intact portions of the law they say make it more amenable…
Computer Security: Email Hygiene Tips
Anti-phishing and Email Hygiene Journalists and newsrooms are increasingly the victims of hacking and malware, and often hackers target them through their email. Virtually every “sophisticated” hack of an individual reporter or entire newsroom starts with a relatively simple attack: phishing and spear phishing. Phishing is a social-engineering attack where an adversary crafts an email…
How to Find out if your Netflix Account was Hacked-And Fix It
Netflix lets multiple people use an account at the same time, and this feature is great when it allows you to mooch off a friend’s account without inconveniencing them. But one problem with this policy is that it has inadvertently created a black market for “access” to stolen Netflix accounts. A recent report by McAfee Labs revealed you…
Intel Tradecraft: Geo-Tagging and Identifying a Picture by it’s Background (Similar Image Search)
In the most recent episode of Homeland, Carrie while trying to figure out what direction to go in searching a stolen laptop for intel, is distracted by the computer’s screen saver which is a picture that shows the suspect in a beachfront bar in what appears to be a tropical location. Thinking back, Carrie remembers…