The embattled government of Syrian PresidentBashar al-Assad has pulled no punches in holding on to power throughout the country's months-long uprising.
First, street thugs beat back the protesters. Then, tanks. Now, Assad has apparently turned to an army of mostly anonymous propagandists to sway public opinion in his favor on the Facebook pages of Western media organizations.
We've seen this Syrian Electronic Army, as it's been dubbed, firsthand.
But the Comodohacker also said that he was unable to hack into StartCom Certification Authority, despite managing to access its network and a hardware security module (HSM). "I already connected to their HSM, got access to their HSM, sent my request, but lucky Eddy . . . was sitting behind HSM and was doing manual verification," according to a Comodohacker post.
Google is directly contacting users in Iran, who may have been compromised by a rogue SSL certificate, to recommend measures to secure their accounts.
While Google's internal systems were not compromised, it is directly contacting possibly affected users and providing information on securing their accounts because its top priority is to protect the privacy and security of its users, Eric Grosse, vice president of security engineering, said in a blog post late Thursday.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/oGhFih
More than a week after a DigiNotar hack that prompted Google (NSDQ:GOOG), Mozilla andMicrosoft (NSDQ:MSFT) to blacklist hundreds of fraudulent secure socket layer certificates, Apple(NSDQ:AAPL) users are still without a security update protecting them from spoofs and man-in-the-middle attacks stemming from the bogus certificates.
But while alarming, Apple's failure to issue an update protecting its customers from hundreds of compromised SSL certificates issued by Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar is not entirely surprising given the company's longstanding history regarding security, security solution providers said Thursday.
Read full article: http://bit.ly/nOcUnEThis was a couple years back. Since then we're seeing the accelerated ramp-up of U.S. defenses against potential cyberattacks, complete with a raft of new legislation. Conversely, headlines are starting to pop up about attacks with "state-sponsored fingerprints" all over them. We've seen attempts at cooperation across national lines to track agile, cross-border criminals. Companies are ramping up their defenses and wrestling with their security posture and policy to fight things like advanced persistent threats (APT) and other emerging threats. So, let's say we posed the same question again, two years later: How would the United States do in a large-scale cyberattack?"
A case of criminal irony: Tools built to help hackers break into Facebook accounts have been found hiding malware that infects the computers of the would-be criminals who download them.
The security firm Bitdefender detected three separate tools in the past two days, all of which promise fledgling Facebook fraudsters an easy and free way to steal people's passwords and gain access to their photos.
Link: http://bit.ly/pLPcr7
