Topic: SECURITY - on January 20, 2012 at 12:39:00 PM CET
Defense Ministry to Invest 5 billion rubles in Drones
The Defense Ministry has invested about 5 billion rubles ($158 million) with state-owned holding Russian Helicopters to develop three types of pilotless aircraft, unnamed sources told Gazeta.ru on Tuesday.
The first test models are expected to appear in 2015.
Russia has invested in drone technology before but has been largely unsuccessful in its attempts to create advanced models.
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Topic: SECURITY - on January 20, 2012 at 12:38:00 PM CET
Miami-Dade Police Department's Drones Ready To Fly
The Miami-Dade Police Department finally stands ready to launch their two micro air vehicles, or MAVs, the next time a shooting standoff or hostage situation could use a bird's eye boost, more than two years after getting the drones.
"It has no weapons," said Sergeant Andrew Cohen, one of the county's 12 pilot officers. "It's just a camera, basically a flying camera."
About the size of an office waste-basket, the drones can fly as high as 300 feet, snapping still pictures and capturing video to send back to its remote operators on the ground.
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Topic: SECURITY - on January 20, 2012 at 12:37:00 PM CET
Drones Over Alaska: Why Good Use Is Always On Thin Ice
Ask anyone in Nome, Alaska right now how they feel about surveillance drones and you’ll likely get unequivocally high praise. Had a remotely-piloted surveillance aircraft not been monitoring Bering Sea ice flows over the past week an emergency shipment of 1.3 million gallons of oil may not have reached the iced-in, snow-drifted town as soon as it did.
Don’t get the wrong idea. The drone, which was launched from Nome’s shores by University of Alaska – Fairbanks Geophysical Institute researchers, isn’t the sort of eye-in-the-sky most often associated with the U.S.’s various hulking, 40-foot wing-spanning reconnaissance planes that are cruising over the Middle East to keep tabs on suspected terrorists. The Aeryon Scout micro unmanned aerial vehicle resembles a “smoke detector with wings and legs,” according to the Anchorage Daily News, and is part and parcel of a rapidly expanding fleet of mid- to micro-sized sky robots being flown domestically for all manner of tedious or risky intelligence gathering gigs.
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Topic: SECURITY - on January 20, 2012 at 12:25:00 PM CET
Army Foresees Expanded Use of Drones in U.S. Airspace
The Army issued a new directive last week to govern the growing use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) or “drones” within the United States for training missions and for “domestic operations.”
“The Army’s unmanned aircraft systems represent emerging technology that requires access to the National Airspace System,” wrote Army Secretary John M. McHugh in a January 13 memorandum.
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Topic: SECURITY - on January 19, 2012 at 1:18:00 PM CET
Feds: Ex-NSA analyst had top-secret-plus info on home computers
Computers seized from a retired National Security Agency analyst's home in 2007 contained information that is classified at a level beyond "top secret," officials said in court filings Tuesday.
A prosecutor and a senior NSA official made the claim to a federal court in Baltimore in response to a motion ex-NSA analyst Kirk Wiebe filed in November, demanding that the Federal Bureau of Investigation return items seized from Wiebe's Westminster, Md. home four-and-a-half years ago.
"Documents [found on hard drives in Wiebe's home] contain information that is currently and properly classified TOP SECRET//SI/REL to USA, FVEY," the deputy chief of staff for signals intelligence policy and corporate issues in NSA's Signals Intelligence Directorate wrote in a declaration. The NSA official who signed the declaration (posted here) gave his name solely as "Steven E. T.," in keeping with an NSA policy of not publicly identifying most of its employees.
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Topic: SECURITY - on January 19, 2012 at 11:19:00 AM CET
European Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference (EISIC) 2012 August 22-24, 2012
Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI) research is an interdisciplinary research field involving academic researchers in information technologies, computer science, public policy, bioinformatics, medical informatics, and social and behavior studies as well as local, state, and federal law enforcement and intelligence experts, and information technology industry consultants and practitioners to support counterterrorism and homeland security missions of anticipation, interdiction, prevention, preparedness and response to terrorist acts. The annual IEEE International ISI Conference series (isiconference.org) was started in 2003.
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Topic: SECURITY - on January 18, 2012 at 12:25:00 PM CET
Hackers Steal $6.7M In Bank Cyber Heist
A perfectly planned and coordinated bank robbery was executed during the first three days of the new year in Johannesburg, and left the targeted South African Postbank — part of the nation's Post Office service — with a loss of some $6.7 million. The cyber gang behind the heist was obviously very well informed about the post office's IT systems, and began preparing the ground for the heist a few months before, by opening accounts in post offices across the country and compromising an employee computer in the Rustenburg Post Office
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Topic: SECURITY - on January 15, 2012 at 1:24:00 PM CET
Virustotal Updated, Now Accept 32 Megabyte Files
The Virustotal online virus scanning service is one of the services that I use on a regular basis. Whenever I find a great looking software in a “not so great” location, I use the service to check the software out before I execute it on my system. This is for instance the case when software authors host their files on file hosting sites, and not on their own web space.
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Topic: SECURITY - on January 14, 2012 at 12:48:00 PM CET
Netzzensur per SSL-Tunnel aushebeln
Wer Zensurmaßnahmen per Tunnel zu externen Proxy-Servern umgehen will, kann dafür Protokolle nutzen, die immer zur Verfügung stehen – etwa HTTPS. Ein speziell konfigurierter Apache-Webserver dient als externer Proxy.
Viele Unternehmen sowie manche Länder gewähren nur gefilterten Zugriff auf das Internet. Einen Ausweg aus solchen Sperren bietet ein externer Proxy unter eigener Kontrolle. Wenn die Zugriffe auf ihn wie gewöhnlicher HTTPS-Datenverkehr aussehen, funktioniert das durch die meisten Firewalls hindurch und minimiert das Risiko einer Entdeckung.
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Topic: SECURITY - on January 14, 2012 at 12:47:00 PM CET
Malicious Software Attacks Security Cards Used by Pentagon
Chinese hackers have deployed a new cyber weapon that is aimed at the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and potentially a number of other United States government agencies and businesses, security researchers say.
Researchers at AlienVault, a Campbell, Calif., security company, said on Thursday that they had uncovered a new variant of some malicious software called Sykipot that targets smart cards used by government employees to access restricted servers and networks. Traces of Sykipot malware have been found in cyberattacks dating back to 2006, but AlienVault’s researchers say this is the first time Sykipot has compromised smart cards.
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Topic: SECURITY - on January 13, 2012 at 4:16:00 PM CET
‘Facebook Security’ Phishing Attack Steals Accounts and Makes Threats
Facebook members are advised to be on the lookout these days for a malicious operation that’s designed to take over their accounts by requesting the user to confirm his identity and provide sensitive information.
"Last Warning: Your Facebook account will be turned off Because someone has reported you. Please do re-confirm your account security by: [LINK] Thank you. The Facebook Team," reads the phony message.
Kaspersky Lab Experts came across this attack and analyzed it to find out how it works.
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Topic: SECURITY - on January 12, 2012 at 10:31:00 PM CET
Israeli, Saudi Hacker Battle Escalates
A war of words and website hacks is escalating in Israel over the purported hack of credit card data by a hacker from Saudi Arabia.
Last week, a hacker known as xOmar 0, who claimed to be part of the Saudi hacking group Group-XP, released credit card numbers and other sensitive information he'd stolen, saying it affected 400,000 Israelis. The Israeli banks affected, however, said the total number of people involved was only about 14,000.
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