Kudos to the Chinese authorities for shutting down an online hacker training operation known as the Black Hawk Safety Net. The Black Hawk operation, which provides Trojan software and lessons in cyberattack techniques, comprises 12,000 paid subscribers and another 120,000 free members. Three people who run the Black Hawk’s website have been arrested, and the site has now been blocked from access. The police also seized nine servers, five computers... 

Although intelligence analysts may differ as to al Qaeda’s strength, influence and operational status, there is one thing most agree on, al Qaeda is still very dangerous and poses a great threat to the US. The Washington Post has more. In the past six weeks, Americans have witnessed two jarringly different but completely accurate views of al-Qaeda’s This story comes to us via Homeland Security – National Terror Alert. National... 

Swedish investigators are probing a hacker U.S. authorities accuse of unlawfully intruding into Cisco Systems, NASA’s Ames Research Center and NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Division, the authorities said Monday. Philip Gabriel Pettersson, known in the hacking world as “ Stakkato ,” allegedly seized computer code that controls internet traffic. After the 2004 breach of Cisco, the proprietary source code for Cisco’s... 

Interesting research: Target prevalence powerfully influences visual search behavior. In most visual search experiments, targets appear on at least 50% of trials. However, when targets are rare (as in medical or airport screening), observers shift response criteria, leading to elevated miss error rates. Observers also speed target-absent responses and may make more motor errors. This could be a speed/accuracy tradeoff…  Read More →

We saw a pretty PDF file today (md5: 116d92f036f68d325068f3c7bbf1d535). It looks like this: Nice flowers. Unfortunately, when viewing the file, it uses an exploit against Adobe Reader and drops and runs a file called 1.exe . This executable is a Poison Ivy backdoor. It calls home to a host called cecon.flower-show.org . Whoever controls the computer  Read More →

Clinton told CNN’s “State of the Union” that there is “a continuing threat” from Al-Qaeda on the American people and US officials were only able to contain so far since “over the last six months, we have seen attacks foiled, people arrested and charged, so that you have to be constantly vigilant. And that is This story comes to us via Homeland Security – National Terror Alert. National Terror Alert is America’s... 

A 26-year-old man accused of throwing fire bombs at two police stations, a school, a house and one that destroyed a truck was arrested early Sunday after a high-speed freeway pursuit that started in Del Mar Heights and ended in Temecula. Edward Batties of San Diego was taken into custody on Interstate 15 about 5:30 This story comes to us via Homeland Security – National Terror Alert. National Terror Alert is America’s trusted source... 

Sen. Chuck Schumer is protesting an Obama Administration plan to eliminate an anti-terrorist Coast Guard unit that keeps watch over the city’s harbor. “They are our eyes and ears,” Schumer said of the elite, 90-member Coast Guard unit established after 9/11. The unit provides terror-related surveillance and security for waterfront events like the Fourth of July This story comes to us via Homeland Security – National Terror... 

I was not surprised to read China’s hawks demand cold war on the US in the Times Online. [A]lmost 55% of those [in China] questioned for Global Times, a state-run newspaper, agree that “ a cold war will break out between the US and China ”… An independent survey of Chinese-language media for The Sunday Times has found army and navy officers predicting a military showdown and political leaders calling for China to sell more arms to... 

At FSE 2010 this week, Dmitry Khovratovich and Ivica Nikolic presented a paper where they cryptanalyze ARX algorithms (algorithms that use only addition, rotation, and exclusive-OR operations): “Rotational Cryptanalysis of ARX.” In the paper, they demonstrate their attack against Threefish. Their attack breaks 39 (out of 72) rounds of Threefish-256 with a complexity of 2252.4, 42 (out of 72) rounds…  Read More →

Some of you may remember me mentioning the 2008 SANS WhatWorks in Incident Response and Forensic Solutions Summit organized by Rob Lee. I provided the keynote and really enjoyed listening to the presentations, which Rob has graciously made available at http://files.sans.org/summit/forensics08/ . One of the presentations, by Mandiant consultant Wendi Rafferty and then-Mandiant consultant (now GE-CIRT incident handler) Ken Bradley, was titled... 

Amazon.com just posted my five star review of The Book of Xen by Chris Takemura and Luke S. Crawford. From the review : The Book of Xen (TBOX) is a great book for Linux system administrators who want to deploy Xen. The authors ground their recommendations in over four years of experience running Xen to support Internet-facing virtual private servers. I found their writing style to be very engaging; it reminded me of reading any  Read More →

Interagency interrogation teams have started to question key terrorism suspects under a classified charter approved last week, but authorities have been slower to resolve pressing issues that emerged since Christmas — including how to draw the line between gathering intelligence and building a legal case, according to federal officials and experts following the process. The High-Value This story comes to us via Homeland Security – National... 

British authorities today warned drug users that heroin in London was highly likely to be contaminated with anthrax, after a first confirmed case there and following nine deaths in Scotland. “While public health investigations are ongoing, it must be assumed that all heroin in London carries the risk of anthrax contamination,” said Dr. Brian McCloskey, who This story comes to us via Homeland Security – National Terror Alert. National... 

There’s equal reason to support or object to the proposed Google Books settlement. Creating a digital catalog of the worlds’ words might be the Holy Grail of intellectual empowerment. Yet building that library in the clouds would be allowed without the rights-holders’ consent — which the Justice Department and others contend is a complete and fundamental alteration of copyright law . The Authors Guild is backing the settlement...