09 Apr 15. Report claims Huawei doesn’t pose a risk to UK Security. Huawei is one of the UK’s largest providers of telecoms equipment, with deals in place to provide critical national infrastructure as well as the technology behind services from companies such as BT, EE, Virgin Media, O2 and Sky.
However, concerns have been raised in countries such as the US and Australia about potential links to the Chinese government and the People’s Liberation Army in spite of strong denials from the group.
A cyber security evaluation centre in Banbury UK was established in 2010 by Huawei to take apart the physical equipment and software used in the UK to mitigate risks to national security. In the report for the national security adviser, the centre’s oversight board said the “technical assurance” provided by Banbury was of “sufficient scope and quality to meet its obligations”. Huawei has also pledged further funds to expand the centre.
A management audit by Ernst & Young showed the centre was sufficiently independent from Huawei, which will address concerns about the centre and its staff being fully funded by the Chinese group. Three concerns were identified by the report, although these were rated as “low risk”. They included difficulties in recruiting staff owing to a lack of cyber security skills as well as the reluctance of potential new recruits to complete security clearance. Ernst & Young also found some staff working at the centre without developed vetting clearance, the most comprehensive type of security vetting, although this has now been reduced to just two.
(Source: Cyber Security Intelligence/FT)
09 Apr 15. How credible is the Anonymous threat to Israel? A warning has been issued for the state of Israel, allegedly from the hacking collective “Anonymous,” in a new video in which they threaten to “erase the country from cyberspace.”
Citing what the hackers called “continuous aggression, bombing, killing, and kidnapping of the Palestinian people,” the group vowed to unleash cyber “squadrons” that will launch what the video referred to as a “cyber holocaust” that the speaker announces will occur in April. The attack is scheduled to occur before Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day, known as Yom HaShoah, which takes place on April 16.
The volume of cyber attacks by hackers is on the rise in Israel – and surged during Operation Protective Edge (the 1.5 month-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict) last summer, when Isaac Ben-Israel of Tel Aviv University says cyber attacks grew by 900 percent. These attacks were attributed to anti-Israeli hackers among its Arab neighbors, operating under a hacking umbrella Israeli authorities referred to as Op-Israel – hackers who have been influenced by various Islamist organizations, according to the Times of Israel.
“Instead of the usual 100,000 attacks we get each day, we were now getting a million such attacks from all over the Arab and Muslim world,” he told the Israeli news website.
It should be noted that Anonymous hackers receive marching orders from no single authority. Fellow “Anons” have to strike a balance between maintaining their web identities and cyber footprints anonymous to authorities online, all while communicating operational messages to other hackers, according to Wired. In this case, the likely Arab hackers, according to Daniel Cohen, a research associate at the Israel Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) Cyber Warfare program, have been identified by Israeli cyber defense teams as hacking on behalf of Islamist interests.
The nature of “Anonymous” as a brand means that those hackers using the name vary widely in terms of their goals, targets, and location. David Kushner of the New Yorker wrote in his profile of the Anonymous, “There was no membership fee or initiation. Anyone who wanted to be a part of Anonymous—an Anon—could simply claim allegiance.”
And the relative unity the group enjoyed in the past may be fracturing. As The Christian Science Monit