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Thursday, February 13, 2014

Biggest Internet Attack Yet As Cybersecurity Bill Introduced in House

Expert declares “someone’s got a big, new cannon” and attack is start of “ugly things to come”

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
February 11, 2014

A huge denial of service attack occurred earlier today. It exploited a key vulnerability in the infrastructure of the internet, according to online experts, and presages things to come.

Government now announces it partakes in DDoS attacks against hacktivists.

Hackers took advantage of a weakness in the Network Time Protocol, a system designed to synchronize computer clocks. The exploit sent a massive amount of data to servers.

It was predicted this technology would be compromised and allow the introduction of malicious attacks, according to Cloudfare, a content delivery network and distributed domain name server service.

CEO Matthew Prince posted a response to the attack on Twitter. He said that “someone’s got a big, new cannon” and the attack was the “start of ugly things to come.”

The mysterious attack arrived several days after the National Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection Act worked its way to the House floor. The legislation has unanimous approval of Republicans and Democrats.

HR 3696 will codify into law the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, a public-private collaboration within the Department of Homeland Security. The center will offer real-time cyberthreat information sharing across critical infrastructure sectors, according to Bank Info Security.

“The emergence of complex, multistage exploits that quietly penetrate critical targets by leveraging vulnerabilities several links away from the target mean that it is difficult to be sure any system is effectively isolated. Because of this level of complexity and interconnectivity, it almost is impossible to find a system that might not be rated critical,” GCN, a website following public sector IT news, opined last month as HR 3696 emerged from a House subcommittee.

This article was posted: Tuesday, February 11, 2014 at 12:02 pm

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Biggest Internet Attack Yet As Cybersecurity Bill Introduced in House

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

U.S. retailers face pressure to raise cybersecurity spending

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Target Corp’s decision to speed up a $ 100 million program to adopt the use of chip-enabled smart cards is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to what retailers need to do to defend themselves against future cyber attacks, according to security experts and IT service providers.

Reuters: Top News

U.S. retailers face pressure to raise cybersecurity spending

Friday, November 22, 2013

U.S. government rarely uses best cybersecurity steps: advisers

By Alina Selyukh

WASHINGTON Fri Nov 22, 2013 1:43pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. government itself seldom follows the best cybersecurity practices and must drop its old operating systems and unsecured browsers as it tries to push the private sector to tighten its practices, technology advisers told President Barack Obama.

“The federal government rarely follows accepted best practices,” the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said in a report released on Friday. “It needs to lead by example and accelerate its efforts to make routine cyberattacks more difficult by implementing best practices for its own systems.”

PCAST is a group of top U.S. scientists and engineers who make policy recommendations to the administration. William Press, computer science professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Craig Mundie, senior adviser to the CEO at Microsoft Corp, comprised the cybersecurity working group.

The Obama administration this year stepped up its push for critical industries to bolster their cyber defenses, and Obama in February issued an executive order aimed at countering the lack of progress on cybersecurity legislation in Congress.

As part of the order, a non-regulatory federal standard-setting board last month released a draft of voluntary standards that companies can adopt, which it compiled through industry workshops.

But while the government urges the private sector to adopt such minimum standards, technology advisers say it must raise its own standards.

The advisers said the government should rely more on automatic updates of software, require better proof of identities of people, devices and software, and more widely use the Trusted Platform Module, an embedded security chip.

The advisers also said for swifter response to cyber threats, private companies should share more data among themselves and, “in appropriate circumstances” with the government. Press said the government should promote such private sector partnerships, but that sensitive information exchanged in these partnerships “should not be and would not be accessible to the government.”

The advisers steered the administration away from “government-mandated, static lists of security measures” and toward standards reached by industry consensus, but audited by third parties.

The report also pointed to Internet service providers as well-positioned to spur rapid improvements by, for instance, voluntarily alerting users when their devices are compromised.

To read PCAST’s report, see r.reuters.com/ryq84v

(Reporting by Alina Selyukh; Editing by Vicki Allen)