Blog posts with "cyber terrorism"

I've obtained a copy of the temporary restraining order that Microsoft obtained to shut down the Waledac botnet (which I reported on earlier here). The temporary restraining order is viewable here. If there has been no further legal action, the temporary restraining order expired yesterday. I am working on obtaining access to the court file to confirm whether or not Microsoft has gotten an extension to the order or if there have been any changes, but the court file is behind the PACER paywall...

  This past Monday, an Alexandria, Virginia Federal court granted a request from Microsoft to allow Microsoft to take down tens of thousands of internet addresses that the company claims are linked to harmful hacking activities and botnets, specifically the Waladec botnet. Microsoft claimed the IP addresses listed in the request are involved in spam, virus propagation, and D-DOS attacks (distributed denial of service, an activity aimed at taking a server down by overloading it with countless...

Google's recent cyber-security problems, which lead the company to threaten to pull out of China if the Chinese government refused to lift internet censorship, may have been perpetrated by a few junior college and university students. According to the New York Times, experts investigating the incursion have pointed to the Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanziang Vocational School in the Shandong Province.   A few weeks ago the Jiaotong University won the international "Battle of the Bra...

In what's being labeled the biggest hacking bust in the history of China, police in the Hubei Province arrested three people and seized several computers and servers, a car, and 1.7 million yuan ($250,000). The three arrested were allegedly involved in a web site known as the Black Hawk Safety Net (www.3800hk.com) which sells courses in cybersecurity, aka hacking. According to officials, the site has made around $1 million since it started in 2005. It does not appear that the individuals arre...

At the recent conference Combating Cybercrime in Betting and Gaming 2010, a number of interesting topics were covered. Of particular interest to the author of this blog was the coverage of terrorist utilization of the internet for fundraising and money laundering. In an example of cyberterrorism, online gambling sites were used by three men, who were also accused of inciting terror, to launder millions of dollars that had been stolen through online check fraud and identity theft schemes. Appa...

After Obama's State of the Union Address, Brazilian hackers defaced around 50 U.S. government sites, placing expletive containing messages against Obama on each site. These sites primarily serve the House of Representatives, and were undergoing routine maintenance which briefly exposed the sites to attack. That was all the time these vandals needed to heckle these politicians.   One might wonder what the intentions of such an attack might be. Certainly there was a denunciation of Obama, but ...

The situation Google faces in China, with patriotic hackers (possibly even state sponsored) causing trouble for Google subscribers, some of whom are Chinese dissidents, presents a unique example of a synergistic interaction between cyber-criminals and government regulators. The United States has had similar groups emerge, such as vigilante anti-terror hackers, some of which still operate (for an interesting read, click here). Are we seeing some of the first acts of a new class of hackers? Cou...

After the prior Czar quit claiming that her decision was based upon the Administration's indecision, the Obama Administration has named Howard A. Schmidt, a former Bush cyber security advisor, as the cyber security chief last Tuesday, December 22, 2009. Schmidt, an accomplished cyber security expert, having worked for the Air Force, eBay, and Microsoft, has a lot of experience to offer. This nomination is part of President Obama's campaign promise to make cyber security a priority. Though the...

  Yesterday, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), a congressional advisory panel, released a joint analysis with Northrop Grumman reporting that the Chinese government is building up their hacking and cyber warfare abilities. The report is based on case studies of prior cyber attacks, People's Liberation Army releases, scholarly contributions from experts, and journals from the Chinese National Defense University and the Academy of Military Sciences.     According t...

Dyron Hart, a twenty year old former student of Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, Louisiana, was just convicted of communicating threats through interstate commerce by making racist death threats through a fictitious Facebook account. On November 5, 2008 Hart created a Facebook account with a fictitious name and used a picture of a white supremacist for the profile. Hart, an African American, used the profile to pretend to be a person upset about the election of President Obama and used t...