Items tagged with cyber-attacks
In an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein and intimidate the enemy, United States military forces conducted a shock and awe campaign that saw a barrage of bombs dropped on Baghdad and other parts of Iraq over a decade ago. Fast forward to today and the U.S. is still dropping bombs on enemies, albeit instead of explosives they're now of cyber variety.It's not that the U.S. military lacks explosives, but the landscape is different now, and so is the target. The Islamic jihadist militant group known as ISIS conducts much of its effort online, and that's where they're perhaps most vulnerable. So in addition to using traditional weapons, the U.S. military's six-year-old Cyber Command is for the first time...
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President Obama signed an executive order today that declares cyberattacks from foreign soil to be a national emergency and gives the United States new powers for defending against them. The executive order, titled “Blocking The Property Of Certain Persons Engaging In Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities” gives the federal government the power to hit foreign hackers with freezes on their U.S. funds and property. “Starting today, we’re giving notice to those who pose significant threats to our security or economy by damaging our critical infrastructure, disrupting or hijacking our computer networks, or stealing the trade secrets of American companies or the personal information of American...
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Apparently still fuming over a recent report by an American cyber security company blowing the whistle on Chinese government-sponsored hacking groups, China's Ministry of Defense says its military sites are frequent targets of attack originating from the U.S. It also said that Mandiant's report is "full of loopholes" and adamantly denied (again) that the Chinese government has ever supported any hacker activity. Like the U.S., China claims that it too is is facing serious cyberattacks. The Defense Ministry said that it recorded an average of 144,000 hacker attacks per month last year, and that 62.9 percent of them came from the U.S. In other words, China is accusing the U.S. of being responsible...
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According to new research sponsored by HP, the cost and frequency of cybercrime has increased for the third straight year. The third-annual Cost of Cyber Crime Study shows the occurrence of cyberattacks has more than doubled since 2010. The cost of the attacks has increased by nearly 40 percent over the same three year period. The study was conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by HP. The 2012 Cost of Cyber Crime Study took a look at a sample of U.S. organizations and found that the average annualized cost of cybercrime was $8.9 million. The study also shows a 42 percent increase in the number of cyberattacks. On average, organizations experienced about 102 successful attacks per week....
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The web is a dangerous place, and one of the threats that emerged in 2011 was that of malnets, or malware networks, which are just what they sound like. These infrastructures are designed to last beyond a single attack and allow cybercriminals to adapt to new vulnerabilities and launch malware attacks over and over again. Malnets grew in popularity last year, and so far in 2012, they're the leading cause of cyber-attacks. So claims Blue Coat, a provider of web security and WAN optimization solutions. According to Blue Coat, malnets are attractive to the web's seedier characters because they're adept at infecting many users with little added investment. Malnets are sometimes comprised of thousands...
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