Tag Archives: Cyber Warfare

Kaspersky Labs preps its own OS to guard vital industry against cyberwarfare

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Kaspersky Labs preps its own OS to guard industry against cyberwarfare

Kaspersky Labs' namesake Eugene Kaspersky is worried that widely distributed and potentially state-sponsored malware like Flame and Stuxnet pose dire threats to often lightly protected infrastructure like communication and power plants -- whatever your nationality, it's clearly bad for the civilian population of a given country to suffer even collateral damage from cyberattacks. To minimize future chaos and literally keep the trains running, Kaspersky and his company are expanding their ambitions beyond mere antivirus software to build their own, extra-secure operating system just for large-scale industry. The platform depends on a custom, minimalist core that refuses to run any software that isn't baked in and has no code outside of its main purposes: there'll be no water supply shutdowns after the night watch plays Solitaire from an infected drive. Any information shared from one of these systems should be completely trustworthy, Kaspersky says. He doesn't have details as to when the OS will reach behind-the-scenes hardware, but he stresses that this is definitely not an open-source project: some parts of the OS will always remain confidential to keep ne'er-do-well terrorists (and governments) from undermining the technology we often take for granted.

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Kaspersky Labs preps its own OS to guard vital industry against cyberwarfare originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Oct 2012 13:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Next Web  |  sourceEugene Kaspersky, Securelist  | Email this | Comments

Iran claims to have been hit by ‘heavy’ cyber attack, pins slowdowns on coordinated hacking campaign

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Iran claims to have been hit by 'heavy' cyber attack, pins slowdowns on coordinated hacking campaign

Whatever you think of Iran's politics, it's hard to deny that the country has frequently been the target of internet-based attacks that sometimes go beyond the originator's plans. If you believe High Council of Cyberspace secretary Mehdi Akhavan Behabadi, the pressure is only getting worse. He tells Iranian media that the nation is under "constant" digital bombardment and was just hit with a major assault on Tuesday that bogged down local internet access. Behabadi unsurprisingly contends that the attacks are deliberate efforts to undermine Iran's data, nuclear and oil infrastructures, with a finger implicitly pointed westward. While it's no secret that the country's enemies want to slow down what they see as a rush towards nuclear weapons, it's difficult to know how much of the accusation is serious versus bluster: we've seen individual smartphone users who consume more than the "several gigabytes" of traffic that reportedly caused national chaos in the most recent incident. No matter the exact nature, it's likely that residents stand to lose as Iran fences off the internet to keep outside influences, hostile and otherwise, from getting in.

[Image credit: Amir1140, Wikipedia]

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Iran claims to have been hit by 'heavy' cyber attack, pins slowdowns on coordinated hacking campaign originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Oct 2012 01:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceReuters  | Email this | Comments

Security researchers dissect Flame’s handling program, find three new viruses ‘at large’

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Security researchers dissect Flame's handling program, find three new viruses 'at large'

It seems that there's more than two out-of-control computer viruses roaming around the Middle East. Security researchers think that a further three could be operating "at large," with one positively identified on machines in Iran and Lebanon. Teams from Symantec and Kaspersky have separately found that the Flame malware had the electronic equivalent of a "handler," a program called NEWSFORYOU, which is also in charge of three viruses that are code-named SP, SPE and IP. The two teams have been unsuccessful in finding a sample of the trio for analysis and despite finding a cache of data on a command-and-control server, decoding it is "virtually impossible." While both security companies have declined to point a finger as to their origin, Reuters' sources suggest the United States, while The Washington Post has been told that the project was a joint-enterprise with Israel -- in keeping with the existing narrative that the pair were behind Stuxnet.

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Security researchers dissect Flame's handling program, find three new viruses 'at large' originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Sep 2012 13:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceReuters, Kaspersky, Symantec  | Email this | Comments