Hacking

Regardless of how this turns out, at least they nailed the name. Google is launching about 30 superpressure balloons that will beam Internet access back to the ground. With equal parts brevity and self-deprecation, the effort has been dubbed "Project Loon." Taking flight from New Zealand, the balloo...

Google announced it has been tracking and disrupting "multiple email-based phishing campaigns" in Iran. The campaigns, which have been going on for nearly three weeks, are targeting the accounts of tens of thousands of Iranian users. Google posits that the phishing is related to the Iranian presiden...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Cybersecurity Tops the Agenda in U.S.-China Weekend Talks

Among the issues on the agenda for the talks over the weekend between China's President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Obama were cybersecurity and attacks on U.S. targets by hackers based in China. Even if China had the will to act against hackers within its territory, doing so wouldn't be easy. "Th...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Hack Reports Fly Ahead of China, US Presidents' Meeting

Numerous new accusations have kept cyberespionage firmly in the media spotlight in the run-up to President Barack Obama's meeting this week with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Within 24 hours, two separate stories broke about Chinese hackers pinching the designs for some of Uncle Sam's critical weap...

SoftBank has reached a national security agreement with U.S. authorities, perhaps clearing the way for the Japanese company to purchase Sprint Nextel. U.S. officials have expressed concerns about potential ties between SoftBank and Chinese telecommunications firms like Huawei. Chinese telecoms drew ...

Chinese hackers were accused of stealing the designs for more than two dozen U.S. military weapons systems in a press account appearing Monday. The system designs reportedly pinched by the hackers were for systems critical to the country's missile defenses and its combat aircraft and war ships. The ...

TECH TREK

China to Conduct Digital War Games

President Obama will definitely have something to talk about. Beijing announced that China will conduct its first "digital war games," a proclamation that will likely do nothing to allay United States concerns about China's propensity for hacking and cyberespionage. The timing of the announcement is...

Twitter has announced it is deploying a long-awaited security measure: two-factor verification. The move comes about a month after The Associated Press' Twitter account was hacked. Twitter is late to the game with this security tactic. A number of companies already feature it. However, the company m...

After a three-month lull, China's People's Liberation Army has resumed hack attacks against United States companies and government agencies. Despite a ballyhooed February report from private security firm Mandiant, and despite public complaints from the Pentagon, Unit 61398, the PLA group made famou...

What next, Antarctica? Citing illegal subsidies, the European Commission is considering trade duties against Chinese telecommunications equipment makers Huawei and ZTE. This is but the latest headache for Huawei and ZTE. Between them, the U.S., Canada, Australia and India have all publicly voiced co...

Police in Beijing arrested 11 suspects believed to be involved with a major high-definition downloading ring. The website, silu.com, was running what has been called an "unprecedented" operation. It reportedly boasted more than 400,000 registered members and offered under-the-table downloads for nea...

A zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 let hackers compromise a U.S. Department of Labor website linked to a database used by former Energy Department employees who had worked with nuclear weapons or uranium. That database was also used by Labor Department claims examiners. Security firm In...

Hamza Bendelladj, an Algerian national known by his alias "Bx1," appeared in an Atlanta court last week, where he faced a 23-count indictment stemming from his alleged participation in the cybercrime consortium responsible for hacking software known as "SpyEye." Bendelladj, 24, was the target of a t...

Police in Australia have arrested a 24-year-old who claims to be a high-level member of the international hacking collective Lulzsec. The IT worker was charged with two counts of unauthorized modification of data and one count of unauthorized access to/modification of restricted data. In other words...

State-sponsored cyberespionage incidents in 2012 tripled over the previous year, according the 2013 Verizon Data Breach Report. 96 percent of those attacks were attributable to East Asia. Verizon's study, which analyzed 47,000 security incidents, expanded its contributors this year to 19, including ...

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