• Russia’s corruption, influence “a matter of national security”: U.K. Parliamentary panel

    “Dirty” Russian money is undermining Britain’s efforts to stand up to the Kremlin and supports President Vladimir Putin’s campaign “to subvert the international rules-based system,” a British parliamentary report says. “The scale of damage that this ‘dirty money’ can do to U.K. foreign-policy interests dwarfs the benefit of Russian transactions in the City,” Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Tugendhat said today (21 May) ahead of the release of the report. “Over the years, Moscow has turned from being a corrupt state to an exporter of instability. Russian corruption and influence has become a matter of national security,” he added.

  • Read this before you invest in cryptocurrency

    We’ve all heard the headline stories about cryptocurrencies – they’re millionaire-makers and dream-destroyers. They’re part of a decentralized market that supports criminal activity, yada yada yada. But how do you separate facts from fiction? Here are six cryptocurrency myths you need to get on top of.

  • Students win Alabama hackathon with cryptocurrency prototype app

    Two University of Arkansas at Little Rock students are looking to make a name for themselves in the world of hackathons. The two won the hackathon for their project, Tweety Wallet, a multicurrency cryptocoin wallet which can hold any type of cryptocurrency, but which is configured for Bitcoin, Zcash, Ethereum, and Litecoin.

  • Putin’s doctrine blends “bare-face lying,” “social media disinformation,” and “criminal thuggery”: MI5 Director

    In a speech on Wednesday, MI5 Director General Andrew Parker discussed the security challenges the West is facing, chief among them the threat from Russia. Parker said the threat from Russia is a “hybrid threat,” as Russia is a practitioner of a doctrine “blending media manipulation, social media disinformation and distortion with new and old forms of espionage, high levels of cyberattacks, military force, and criminal thuggery.” Parker added: “Our democracies, our societies and our bonds of partnership are strong. But we must not be complacent about the longer-term potential impact of this [Russian] activity on the international rules-based order that supports our security and prosperity.”

  • Bolstering government vehicle telematics cybersecurity

    Vehicle telematics refers to embedded systems on a vehicle that tracks the vehicle and combines wireless and internet communications to send, receive and store vehicle information. As the use of vehicle telematics technologies rapidly grow, so do the cybersecurity security vulnerabilities and the need to safeguard the vehicle telematics data from cyberattack.

  • White House eliminates Cyber Coordinator position

    Rob Joyce, the White House Cyber Coordinator, left his position Friday to return to the National Security Agency (NSA), and the White House, instead of replacing him, has decided to eliminate the position. Gary Kasparov, Russian chess champion and critic of President Vladimir Putin, said that doing away with that job as the United States is still trying to cope with the impact of Russia’s 2016 election interference, and as it faces ongoing and mounting cyberthreats and attacks, is “[l]ike eliminating the Navy after Pearl Harbor.”

  • Kaspersky to move data center from Russia to Switzerland

    Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based anti-virus maker will open a Swiss data center after allegations that Russian hackers exploited the company’s software to spy on customers. The said the new location would help it “rebuild trust.”

  • The Facebook ad dump shows the true sophistication of Russia’s influence operation

    The massive trove of Facebook ads House Intelligence Committee Democrats released last Tuesday offers a breathtaking view of the true sophistication of the Russian government’s digital operations during the 2016 presidential election. Many stories have already been written about the U.S. intelligence community’s investigation of the hacking operation Russian intelligence services carried out to influence the election in favor of then-candidate Donald Trump. Derek Hawkins writes that the more than 3,000 “incredibly specific and inflammatory” Russian ads released last week allow us for the first time to “have a swath of empirical and visual evidence of Russia’s disinformation campaign.”

  • Vulnerabilities found in PGP-encrypted emails, users urged to take immediate action

    A group of European security researchers have released a warning about a set of vulnerabilities affecting users of PGP and S/MIME. These vulnerabilities pose an immediate risk to those using these tools for email communication, including the potential exposure of the contents of past messages.

  • Russia conducted "unprecedented, coordinated" attacks on U.S. voting systems in 2016: Senate Intelligence Committee

    Hackers affiliated with the Russian government conducted an “unprecedented, coordinated” campaign against the U.S. voting system, including successfully penetrating a few voter-registration databases in 2016, the Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded. The cyberattacks targeted at least eighteen states, and possibly three more. “Russian actors scanned databases for vulnerabilities, attempted intrusions, and in a small number of cases successfully penetrated a voter registration database,” the committee said in an interim report releaed Tuesday.

  • Georgia governor vetoes controversial computer crime bill

    Georgia Governor Nathan Deal, recognizing the concerns of Georgia’s cybersecurity sector, has vetoed a bill which would have threatened independent research and empowered dangerous “hack back” measures. The bill could have given prosecutors the discretion to target independent security researchers who uncover security vulnerabilities, even when they have no criminal motives and intend to disclose the problems ethically.

  • Cryptojacking spreads across the web

    Right now, your computer might be using its memory and processor power – and your electricity – to generate money for someone else, without you ever knowing. It’s called “cryptojacking,” and it is an offshoot of the rising popularity of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

  • Keeping Big Data safe

    NIST has announced the Unlinkable Data Challenge, created to help the public safety community conduct research using data gathered with personal digital devices and taken from large databases such as driver’s license and health care records. Much of this data includes personal information that can be used to identify its source. Exposing this data risks those individuals’ privacy, but the inability to share it impedes research in many fields, including thwarting crime, fighting fires and slowing the spread of epidemics.

  • Critical industrial software flaws left U.S. infrastructure vulnerable to hackers

    Tenable Research, a Maryland-based cybersecurity firm, has discovered vulnerabilities in two applications widely used by manufacturers and power plant operators. These vulnerabilitiers may have given hackers a foothold in U.S. critical infrastructureg.

  • Hackers steal bitcoin from air-gapped wallets

    Researchers have found a way to exfiltrate bitcoin wallets even when they that are airgapped—meaning they aren’t connected to the internet or to any other devices. The research is significant because it shows that even when devices are not connected to the internet, attackers may still successfully steal the information.