Cybersecurity

The Government’s Do Not Pay Portal, Predicting Gun Crimes, and More

The Office of Management and Budget and the Department of the Treasury launched the Do Not Pay site, an online portal to stop payments for individuals or organizations that have defrauded the government or are ineligible to receive government money. More here. The proposed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) has been attacked byRead… Read more »

The (Dis)Illusion of Control

[Editor’s note: This post from Michael Tanji of Kyrus-Tech first appeared at the highly respected national security blog Haft of the Spear. Follow Tanji online at http://twitter.com/mtanji -bg] Conventional wisdom is telling us that “assumption of breach” is the new normal. Some well-respected names in computer security would have you believe that the appropriate responseRead… Read more »

Weekly Round-up: April 13, 2012

Gadi Ben-Yehuda Collaborative Consumption. The Sharing Economy has come to government, at least in the form of car sharing. Alex Howard has a great article that not only details two cities’ experiences in car sharing (Boston and DC), but has some great links to other resources on the general topic of collaborative consumption. A DifferentRead… Read more »

Cybersecurity Gaps Across Government, New Monitoring Tool, and More

This month, the Department of Energy, in working with the White House, Department of Homeland Security, and power companies, will test a voluntary reporting model to discover cybersecurity gaps in electricity delivery systems. More here. A researcher at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has developed a cyber sensor to track how networkRead… Read more »

CTO Security Report

600,000+ Mac Computers Infected While this kind of activity wouldn’t rouse much attention from those esconced in WinTel (Windows and Intel) architechures, it is much less common for Mac users to be impacted by infections on this scale so quickly. The infection, called Flashback, is installed via a Java vulnerability (CVE 2012-0507) which was patchedRead… Read more »

FOSE Cloud Keynote: Cloud Security – A Business Transformation Nirvana or Security Nightmare?

I attended the cloud conference keynote by Ryan Berg, a Senior Architect for Security Research at IBM. The presentation, titled “Cloud Security – A Business Transformation Nirvana or Security Nightmare?” examined the move towards the cloud and the associated implications and opportunities for security. Berg began his presentation by looking at the environment in whichRead… Read more »

Hacking the hacktivist: The inside scoop on how Anonymous works

Hacking the hacktivist: The inside scoop on how Anonymous works by GovLoop Insights 2011 may very well be the year of Anonymous — the hactivist group took down the Justice Department website, Stratfor, mastercard, defense contractor Vanguard and even the Vatican. Their reach is impressive…and even more so when you consider how Anonymous runs. TheRead… Read more »

Into the Unknown: What an Anonymous attack looks like

Hacktivist collective Anonymous has been a persistent pain to government agencies and private companies alike for the past few years; after a 2011 full of attacks, that trend doesn’t appear to be slowing. To learn more about how Anonymous works, we spoke with Rob Rachwald, Director of Security Strategy at Imperva. Attacks by Anonymous areRead… Read more »

GovBytes: Experts Suggest Dropouts could help Cybersecurity Efforts

In order to have a strong cyber-security team, government agencies need experts with the skills and education that are up to the task, right? Not so, said several panelists at the AFCEA Homeland Security Conference in Washington, D.C. Olivia Carroll, Director of the Cybercrime Lab for the U.S. Department of Justice said she believes thatRead… Read more »