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29 Aug 13. Israel is preparing for an array of cyber threats in the event that Syria and its Iranian backers make good on days of threats to lash out against the Jewish state should the West act militarily against the Bashar al-Assad regime. An IDF spokesperson told The Media Line that there are already hundreds of attempted cyber attacks on Israel every day, and that the number was expected to spike in the event of a military strike against Damascus. Pro-Syrian hacking groups have garnered renewed focus recently, including this week, for attacking Western websites. Israel’s cyber efforts are taking place alongside more concrete efforts to prepare for attacks by Syria and its allies. Two batteries of Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system have been deployed in northern Israel, and there is now an ongoing, two-day security exercise being held on Israel’s northern Golan Heights. Nearly five million gas masks have already been distributed to the Israeli population, against the backdrop of what is widely suspected to be the mass use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians by the Syrian regime. Syria has one of the world’s largest chemical weapons arsenals, containing roughly 1,000 tons of nerve agents. (Source: theisraelproject.org)
24 Aug 13. Britain runs a secret monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept large numbers of telephone calls, emails and internet traffic that it shares with intelligence agencies in the United States, the Independent newspaper has reported. The station is part of a £1bn($1.56bn) global eavesdropping project run by Britain to intercept digital communications, the paper said, citing leaked documents from former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. Snowden’s leaks have sparked a global surveillance scandal that has pitted US President Barack Obama against the Kremlin and prompted British Prime Minister David Cameron’s advisers to demand the return of secrets from the Guardian newspaper. The London-based Independent, which did not say how it obtained the information from the Snowden documents, said the British had tapped into the underwater fibre-optic cables which pass through the Middle East. Britain’s foreign ministry and a spokesman for Britain’s eavesdropping agency GCHQ declined comment. Data gleaned from the monitoring station, whose exact location the Independent said it would not reveal, is then passed onto GCHQ in Cheltenham, England, and shared with the US National Security Agency. Snowden’s leaks have embarrassed both Britain and the United States by laying bare the extent of their surveillance programmes. London and Washington say their spies operate within the law and that the leaks have damaged national security. Western intelligence agencies rushed to improve their monitoring of Middle East traffic after the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. (Source: ArabianBusiness.com)
26 Aug 13. The Internet, and many forms of online commerce and communication that depend on it, may be on the brink of a “cryptopalypse” resulting from the collapse of decades-old methods of shared encryption. The result would be “almost total failure of trust in the Internet,” said four researchers who gave a presentation at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas earlier this month. The two main algorithms are on the verge of being ‘cracked’ — proven vulnerable to attack — by academic mathematicNEWS.GNOM.ES. At the heart of the impending “cryptopalypse” are the Diffie-Hellman and Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) shared encryption algorithms, which were independently developed at Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1970s. Both algorithms are on the verge of being “cracked” — proven to be vulnerable to attack — by academic mathematic