A 50-year-old man has been arrested after an undercover FBI agent posed as a vendor on dark web market AlphaBay.
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Category: cybercrime/malcode – Page 206
Hmmm; Chinese antitrust regulators are investigating Microsoft, and Huawei has been shut out of the U.S. telecommunications-equipment market over concerns it might be a front for cyberspying.
Alleged Chinese hacking of American companies may have diminished since tensions over the issue came to a head during Xi Jinping’s state visit to the U.S. last year. At Lawfare, however, security technologist Bruce Schneier describes a recent series of attacks which appear to show “someone […] learning to take down the internet.” “The data I see suggests China,” he writes, “an assessment shared by the people I spoke with.”
Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses.
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So, here is the real question we in the US should start raising is how does all of this look for the US to its allies, frienemies, etc. with US filling the headlines with statements like this one. No wonders allies and others are expanding their partnerships with Russia.
WASHINGTON (AP) — CIA Director John Brennan warned on Sunday that Russia has “exceptionally capable and sophisticated” computer capabilities and that the U.S. must be on guard.
When asked in a television interview whether Russia is trying to manipulate the American presidential election, Brennan didn’t say. But he noted that the FBI is investigating the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails, and he cited Moscow’s aggressive intelligence collection and its focus on high-tech snooping.
“I think that we have to be very, very wary of what the Russians might be trying to do in terms of collecting information in a cyber realm, as well as what they might want to do with it,” he told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
CHANTILLY, Va., Sept. 13, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Vencore Labs Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Vencore Inc., announced today that it has been awarded two prime contracts for the Rapid Attack Detection, Isolation and Characterization Systems (RADICS) program led by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The contracts have a total value of $17M and work is slated to begin in August of this year.
The objective of the RADICS program is to develop technologies for detecting and responding to cyberattacks on critical U.S. infrastructure, with an ultimate goal of enabling cyber and power engineers to restore electrical service within seven days in the event of a major attack. Vencore Labs, a leader in smart grid security and monitoring, will conduct research and deliver technologies in three of five technical areas (TA).
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China hasn’t kept it a secret for many months now about the Chinese government desire to have an unbreakable quantum communication networks which is why they launched their Quantum Satellite (the QSS program) last month. What the real story is how QSS is enabling the military to have a leading edge through technologies such as the Quantum Radar capabilities, or using Quantum communications to prevent hacking of their systems while having the ability to hack others. And, this is what has actually been published publically to boot.
Hacked recently covered the efforts of the Chinese government to build unbreakable quantum communication networks. According to analysts, quantum communications networks are so expensive that they could have a “recentralizing effect,” enabling states to recover the ground that they have lost to decentralizing digital technologies. But what if ultra-secure quantum cryptography could be made available to everyone at low cost?
European researchers at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), Institució Catalana de Recerca (ICREA), and other research labs, have developed a fast random number generator based on a quantum mechanical process that could deliver the world’s most secure encryption keys in a package tiny enough to use in a mobile device.
“We’ve managed to put quantum-based technology that has been used in high-profile science experiments into a package that might allow it to be used commercially,” says ICFO researcher Carlos Abellan in a press release of the Optical Society of America (OSA). “This is likely just one example of quantum technologies that will soon be available for use in real commercial products. It is a big step forward as far as integration is concerned.”
I am glad that more folks are beginning to start to understand the magnitude and depth of the risk & exposure that QC presents even within the next 4 to 5 years. However, what about everyone else? Folks need to understand that the transformation to QC in the infrastructure alone is a substantial investment and timeline. So, as I have highlighted many times; I hope folks have baked in QC into their future state architectures & investments because a transformation (depending on company size and complexity) could span many, many years.
The study purports there is a 50 per cent risk that many of the cybersecurity tools used by financial institutions, online retailers and government agencies will be obsolete by 2031.
September 6, 2016 by Canadian Manufacturing.com Staff.
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Additional insights on QSS planned efforts; and (as with any government program) there is more to this program than these insights.
While China’s quantum science satellite (QSS) project is part of the Strategic Priority Programme on Space Science, the country’s first space exploration programme intended purely for scientific research, its experiments have significant military implications.
By Michael Raska
On August 16, 2016 China launched the world’s first quantum communications experiment satellite into orbit from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert. The small satellite, recently named Micius after an ancient Chinese philosopher, is tasked to establish a hack-proof communication line – a quantum key distribution network, while performing a series of quantum entanglement experiments in space for the first time.
This one makes me to want to dig more into the reason especially since just last week Russia announced its distrust of Chinese tech being used to hack into Russia’s governmental systems, etc. And, one thing about Russia and China is their protection and involvement in commerce and financials.
New trade routes are expanding between Russia and China. That’s according to Russia’s Far East Development Fund, which said an agreement has been made with Chinese technology company LeEco to develop an eCommerce platform focused on increasing food exportation to China.
LeLive, the name of the new platform, will broaden and increase sales of Russian agricultural items and products in the Chinese market. Facilitated by LeEco’s online platform — called “Le Ecosystem,” which has a monthly connection with more than 800 million users — the goal of the platform is to meet Chinese customers’ needs. Russian goods that will be available through the platform range from basics, like flour, butter and honey, to assorted beverages, sweets, canned meats and nuts.
China’s LeEco originally began as a digital content provider and recently acquired Vizio. Some have nicknamed LeEco the “Netflix of China.” Over time, LeEco expanded further into digital offerings, from music streaming, to mobile phones, to cloud storage, to film distribution.
Internet pioneer Vint Cerf sees a secure future for the network of networks he helped create four decades ago as the co-developer of TCP/IP, the protocol that facilitates internet communications.
“We’re much more conscious of the need to make the system more secure than it has been,” Cerf, Google’s chief internet evangelist, says in an interview with Information Security Media Group. “And there’s a lot going on in the Internet Engineering Task Force [an international community of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers] to achieve that objective. And I anticipate in the course of the next decade or so that we will actually see a lot more mechanisms in place in order to enhance security and privacy and safety.”
But if internet security isn’t improved, Cerf says, “people will decide it’s not an environment they find worthy of trust, in which case they’ll look for something else. Maybe, something will replace the internet that’s more secure than it is today.”
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A very old story and one that myself and others have raised many times. However, worth repeating due to the current advancements in BMI.
A vulnerability of brain implants to cyber-security attacks could make “brainjacking”, which has been discussed in science fiction for decades, a reality, say researchers from the University of Oxford. Writing in The Conversation, an Australia-based non-profit media, Laurie Pycroft discussed brain implants as a new frontier of security threat.
The most common type of brain implant is the deep brain stimulation (DBS) system. It consists of implanted electrodes positioned deep inside the brain connected to wires running under the skin, which carry signals from an implanted stimulator.
The stimulator consists of a battery, a small processor, and a wireless communication antenna that allows doctors to programme it. In essence, it functions much like a cardiac pacemaker, with the main distinction being that it directly interfaces with the brain, Pycroft explained.