11 Jun 15. IBM, Selex ES to Combine Tech for Cybersecurity Competence Center. IBM has partnered with Finmeccanica‘s Selex ES company to form a virtual cybersecurity competence center that will deliver their combined technologies to combat cyber crime. Selex said Monday the center will work to provide services for the defense of both private and public information technology infrastructure, as well as intellectual property.
The company added that the competence center will serve as a hub for the companies’ cyber efforts and leverage IBM’s “X-Force” team and the IBM X-Force Exchange threat-sharing platform, as well as Selex’s threat prevention and cyber operations experience. According to Selex, it will also exchange knowledge with IBM on cyber threat intelligence, security operations centers and further cyber research and investments. (Source: Executive Biz/Hawker Chase)
10 Jun 15. Kaspersky Lab cybersecurity firm is hacked. One of the leading anti-virus software providers has revealed that its own systems were recently compromised by hackers. Kaspersky Lab said it believed the attack was designed to spy on its newest technologies. It said the intrusion involved up to three previously unknown techniques. The Russian firm added that it was continuing to carry out checks, but believed it had detected the intrusion at an early stage. Although it acknowledged that the attackers had managed to access some of its files, it said that the data it had seen was “in no way critical to the operation” of its products.
“Spying on cybersecurity companies is a very dangerous tendency,” said the company’s chief executive Eugene Kaspersky.
“The only way to protect the world is to have law enforcement agencies and security companies fighting such attacks openly.
“We will always report attacks regardless of their origin.”
Kaspersky Lab said that it had detected the breach in the “early spring”, and described it as “one of the most sophisticated campaigns ever seen”. The malware does not write any files to disk, but instead resides in affected computers’ memory, making it relatively hard to detect. Kaspersky linked the attack to the unidentified creators of an earlier Trojan named Duqu, which made headlines in 2011 after being used in attacks on Iran, India, France and Ukraine. As before, the hackers are said to have exploited Microsoft software to achieve their goal. Last time they made use of a flaw in Word. This time, Kaspersky said, the malware was spread using Microsoft Software Installer files, which are commonly used by IT staff to install programs on remote computers.
“This highly sophisticated attack used up to three zero-day [previously unknown] exploits, which is very impressive – the costs must have been very high,” commented Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky Lab’s global research and analysis team.
He warned that the firm had evidence “Duqu 2.0” attacks had also been made on other targets, including several venues used for talks between Iran and the West about Iran’s nuclear programme. The chief research officer of a rival computer security firm said he had had only a brief chance to look into the allegations, but added that it did appear to be a “big deal”.
“Duqu 2.0 seems to be the biggest [cybersecurity] news of the year so far – it’s major new malware from a major source,” said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure.
“But we have previously seen security companies used as a way to reach other targets.
“The prime example of this was RSA, which got hacked four years ago, when we believe the target was a defence contractor in the US, which used RSA’s technology.” (Source: BBC/Hawker Chase)
05 Jun 15. Unplugged: What the End of Metadata Collection Means for Intelligence. The future of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection program is in serious doubt, which raises the questions: how useful is it to the intelligence community, and what will they do if it goes away?
Recently President Obama endorsed a bill to en