Tag: CYBER SECURITY

Despite improvements made in recent years, the U.S. is still highly vulnerable to cyber-attacks, the head of the military's cyber-forces warned yesterday. "To put it bluntly, we are very thin, and a crisis would quickly stress our cyber forces," General Keith Alexander told the House Armed Services Committee. Alexander noted that the Pentagon is working on building up its network defenses, ...

Share To get a look at the world of cyber-security from an insider, Switched turned to noted and notorious hacker Jeff Moss, a.k.a Dark Tangent. Moss got his start hacking the phone system before founding DefCon, the long-running annual hacker convention in Las Vegas, in 1992. He then took his l337 skillz to big industry by founding the network security consultancy firm Black Hat. Moss's ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... The Lady Gaga spectacle has evolved into a full-fledged phenomenon, as the eccentric and eclectic performer has accomplished an amazing Web milestone. According to tracking service Visible Measures, the Lady has astoundingly drawn more than 1 billion total views just for three videos, making her the "most watched franchise in ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... CTIA has released the results of its semi-annual wireless survey, and every usage statistic continues to escalate. The most astronomical figure, of course, relates to text messaging, as carriers reported an incredible total of 1.5 trillion text messages sent during 2009. That breaks down to 5 billion texts per day. [From: CTIA] ...

A new Zogby poll on cyber security and education reveals that, while 90-percent of administrators believe it's important to teach kids basic Web safety, a vast majority offer no such lessons. The study, commissioned by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and Microsoft, found that only 27-percent of teachers offered any instruction on safe social networking, and less than 20-percent ...

Last week, the U.S. Cyber Challenge, a nationwide recruiting venture for America's digital army, was wrapped up when 21-year-old Chris Benedict, of Nauvoo, Illinois, was crowned, in CNN's words, "king of the hacker hill." The series of three competitions, which pitted hackers from around the country against one another and included an electronic version of Capture the Flag, was launched this July ...

Two months after delivering a speech that outlined sweeping cybersecurity plans, President Barack Obama and his staff are still struggling with just how to protect the country from electronic terrorists and spies. With the resignation of the woman many people thought could take the reigns, things won't get any easier, either. Melissa Hathaway, who led a cybersecurity review in April, resigned ...

digg_url ='http://www.switched.com/2009/07/29/u-s-cyber-challenge-recruits-hackers-and-geeks-into-government/'; Sometimes it's nice to see the government admitting weakness -- and even better when it does something about it. Following President Obama's announcement in May that the U.S. was "not as prepared" as it should be against mass Internet attacks, the Partnership for Public Service ...

On July 4th, as U.S. citizens celebrated the War of Independence, unknown cybercriminals launched a concentrated attack on several Federal Web sites. According to Associated Press reports, the unusually sophisticated attack affected Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and Transportation Department Web sites. Sources familiar with the situation believe the ...

The White House is preparing to create a new office that would coordinate cyber defense and offense, the New York Times reported yesterday. The new office would report to both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council and would manage a multi-billion dollar effort to safeguard governmental computer networks from attack. In addition to protecting government equipment, the ...

It's no secret that the state of U.S. cyber security is pretty sad. But experts have stepped up their rhetoric recently and started hurling words like, "broken," "child-like," and "embarrassing" at U.S. security infrastructure. People like Tim Mather (RSA), Alan Paller (SANS Institute), and Benjamin Jun (Vice-President of Technology at Cryptography Research), told the BBC that the U.S. is at a ...

A significant question is currently weighing on the minds of many in the federal government: Are we ready for a cyber-emergency? Paul Kurtz, a security official under Presidents Clinton and Bush, and a member of the Obama transition team, posed that question to a crowd during the Black Hat DC computer security conference Wednesday. "Is there a FEMA for the Internet?" he asked. While the U.S. ...

The White House has tapped cyber consultant Melissa Hathaway to conduct an extensive review of US Internet security. She will now be tasked with analyzing the effectiveness of programs she helped foster as the point person of former President George W. Bush's effort to check an increase in breaches of military and government sites in early 2007. The nascent Obama administration's unprecedented ...

A new report from a committee of cyber-security experts strongly urges the Obama administration to create an office explicitly for dealing with cyber-attacks on the U.S. The report suggests additional steps to secure America's cyber-borders as well, including the creation of data warrants that could be used in place of traditional search warrants, which are less practical in the event of a ...