• Worries in the U.K. over Chinese-made phone equipment

    BT is engaged in a massive upgrade of its 21CN network backbone; trouble is, at the core of this upgrade is equipment acquired from Chinese networking giant Huawei, a company Western intelligence services have long suspected of being a front for Chinese intelligence; fear of an undetectable “kill switch” that could disable critical communications

  • Motorola: Cellphones could offer a unified disaster alerts broadcasts

    Motorola envisages using cellphones for emergency alerts even if most of a cellphone network is down; a new generation of cellphones that can rapidly form a peer-to-peer network when an emergency alert is broadcast

  • Obama creates cyberczar post

    Czar will be in charge of coordinating efforts to secure government networks and U.S. critical infrastructure; president says the new White House cybersecurity office would include an official whose job is to ensure that the government’s cyber policies do not violate privacy and civil liberties

  • Internet's root zone to be secured

    NTIA announced it would sign the Internet’s root zone digitally by the end of the year; VeriSign and ICANN to share DNSSEC duties

  • Obama's emphasis on IT security a boon to Michigan companies

    Focus on cybersecurity technology offers Michigan IT companies chance to grow; the state has been quietly building a respectable range of network security companies

  • Anti-U.S. hackers break into U.S. Army servers

    InformationWeek reports that Defense Department investigators subpoena records from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo in connection with ongoing probe of Turkish hackers who broke into U.S. Army servers

  • Obama to call for better security for computers

    President Barack Obama today will outline his administration’s plans to bolster U.S. cybersecurity; the president will announce the creation of a cyber czar position

  • EU to rely on advanced network technology to bolster resilience

    EU security agency recommends greater use of advanced networking technologies such as IPv6, DNSSec, and MPLS to strengthen the resilience of communication networks

  • ABI Research: DHS a "potential goldmine" for wireless kit providers

    Obama’s stimulus package earmarks $6.8 billion for wireless communications upgrades and new deployments; the health care and education market will receive some of it, but the real money is in selling wireless equipment to DHS and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a new ABI Research report says

  • Aussie government to make Great Australian Firewall optional

    The Australian government proposed to create a firewall which would protect Australians from disagreeable Web contents such as child pornography; when the proposed blacklists were leaked, however, they were shown to include content like poker sites, Wikipedia pages, religious sites, ordinary pornography, and business sites

  • U.S. will create cybersecurity czar

    President Obama is set to name a cyber security czar; announcement to be timed with the release of the administration’s much-anticipated cybersecurity review; the czar would have two bosses — the national security adviser and the White House economic adviser — in order to strike a balance between homeland security and economic concerns

  • Cobham acquires Argotek

    The trend of large defense contractors acquiring smaller companies specializing in IT security continues; the latest: U.K.-based Cobham buy U.S. specialist Argotek; Cobham says Argotek’s expertise will be in demand for upcoming projects such as the U.S. Comprehensive National Cyber Initiative

  • U.S. military developing simple-to-use cyber attack devices

    Most soldiers are not IT specialists, so DARPA is looking to develop simple-to-use cyber warfare gadgets which would allow nonspecialists to penetrate satellites, VoIP networks, and supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA)

  • Wanted: high school hackers, crackers, and other digital deviants

    The Pentagon is looking for a few good high-school hackers; in an effort to counter sustained Chinese and Russian hacking of U.S. government and industry networks, the Pentagon is launching a new military-funded program aimed at leveraging an untapped resource: the U.S. population of geeky high school and college students

  • SCADA more vulnerable than ever

    Modern SCADA networks are more vulnerable than ever because they use open networking standards (such as TCP/IP), are now deployed under less secure operating systems (Windows), are connected to other networks (including Internet), and cannot be easily updated and rebooted