Tag Archives: Protect
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon has been slow to protect major weapon systems from cyber attacks and routinely found critical vulnerabilities that hackers could potentially exploit in those systems, a federal government report said on Tuesday.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), a watchdog unit of Congress, said in a 50-page report that the Pentagon found “mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities in systems” under development.
“Using relatively simple tools and techniques, testers were able to take control of systems and largely operate undetected, due in part to basic issues such as poor password management and unencrypted communications,” the report said.
Some program officials told GAO that the weapon systems were secure and discounted some test results as “unrealistic.”
While the Pentagon plans to spend about $ 1.66 trillion to develop major weapon systems, the report found, it had only recently taken steps to improve cyber security.
Cyber security has been receiving increasing attention among U.S military and intelligence officials.
Last week, Western countries issued coordinated denunciations of Russia for running what they described as a global hacking campaign, targeting institutions from sports anti-doping bodies to a nuclear power company and the chemical weapons watchdog.
In some of the strongest language aimed at Moscow since the Cold War, Britain said Russia had become a “pariah state.”
The United States said Moscow must be made to pay the price for its actions. Their allies around the world issued stark assessments of what they described as a campaign of hacking by Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency.
“Due to this lack of focus on weapon systems cybersecurity,
(Department of Defense) likely has an entire generation of systems that were designed and built without adequately considering cybersecurity,” the report said.
Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by David Gregorio
Twitter is working to shield Parkland, Fla. students from bots and trolls on the platform. Many of the high schoolers are organizing in the wake of the shooting at their school on Feb. 14 that left 17 dead.
As Marjory Stoneman Douglas students continue to speak out about gun control and their follower counts on Twitter rise, there are more instances of online abuse and conspiracy theories about these teenagers.
The claims that students are “crisis actors” paid to take advantage of the tragedy to further political agendas have spread on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube.
Students like Emma Gonzalez and Cameron Kasky, who have been some of the most vocal in the wake of the shooting, seem to be taking the disinformation in stride.
Meanwhile, Twitter is takings steps to protect these teens. The company moved quickly to verify some students’ accounts and says it is “actively working on” addressing reports of harassment and abuse.
Twitter is also using its anti-spam tools “to weed out malicious automation” targeting Parkland survivors and the conversation they’ve started.
Directly after the shooting, bots and users linked to the Russian influence campaign began pushing both sides of the gun control debate.
These announcements from Twitter come in the midst of an effort to purge bots from the site that also affected some real people. Many of the users locked out of their accounts were conservative voices on the platform, leading to calls of political bias, which the company denounced.
Users have called for Twitter to take action to combat abuse and harassment repeatedly, and the demands for better management of the platform and the community intensified after the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
In an oddly ironic turn of events, security researchers from Google have uncovered a vulnerability in Mac antivirus software that – contrary to its purpose – exposed your system to malicious interceptions. Curiously, the app was developed by the same company that discovered this cheeky Pornhub malware. Googlers Jason Geffner and Jan Bee found the flaw in ESET’s Endpoint Antivirus 6 for macOS built specifically to “eliminate all types of threats, including viruses, rootkits, worms and spyware” as per the the company’s own description. As it turns out though, the protective software was riddled with kinks that made users susceptible to hackings. According to…
This story continues at The Next Web
Or just read more coverage about: Google
The Apple smart speakers are said to have cameras that recognize individual people.
"Personally I’ve been hosting my website with BlueHost for two years now and never had a problem with them."