Lifeboat Foundation

The European Commission is getting ready to propose new legislation to protect machines from cybersecurity breaches, signalling the executive’s growing interest in encouraging traditional European manufacturers to build more devices that are connected to the internet.

A new plan to overhaul EU telecoms law, which digital policy chiefs Günther Oettinger and Andrus Ansip presented three weeks ago, aims to speed up internet connections to meet the needs of big industries like car manufacturing and agriculture as they gradually use more internet functions.

But that transition to more and faster internet connections has caused many companies to worry that new products and industrial tools that rely on the internet will be more vulnerable to attacks from hackers.

Continue reading “Commission plans cybersecurity rules for internet-connected machines” »

Smart viruses holding hospital equipment to ransom. Malware that impersonates people you know. Data-altering software that can destroy corporations. Get ready.

Ww.geekwire.com/2016/iot-genetics-self-driving-ships-space-travel-darpa-chief-arati-prabhakar-tours-agencys-landscape/

The Internet of Things so widely predicted as the Next Big Thing in computing is full of promise but presents a correspondingly large vulnerability to cyber attacks, said Arati Prabhakar, director of DARPA, at the 2016 GeekWire Summit in Seattle today.

IoT offers “a huge value, but then with every advance comes more attack surface,” said Prabhakar during an interview with Alan Boyle, GeekWire’s aerospace and science editor. “Provably secure embedded systems is part of the answer.”

Continue reading “DARPA chief Arati Prabhakar on self-driving ships, space travel, IoT, genetics, and more” »

As I have continued for over a year to repeat that for any company or government entity to not include QC in their 5+ yrs future state roadmap is truly enabling their company or government to be easy pickings for hackers.

Quantum scientist Michele Mosca will discuss security in the coming quantum age during a live Webcast tonight at 7 P.M.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity has launched a multi-year research and development effort to create new technologies that could provide an early warning system for detecting precursors to cyberattacks. If successful, the government effort could help businesses and other targets move beyond the reactive approach to contending with a massive and growing problem.

IARPA, part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, says the three-and-a-half year program will develop software code to sense unconventional indicators of cyber attack, and use the data to develop models and machine learning systems that can create probabilistic warnings.

Current early warning systems are focused on traditional cyber indicators such as activity targeted toward IP addresses and domain names, according to IARPA program manager Robert Rahmer. The first stage, lasting 18 months, will examine data outside of the victim network, such as black market sales of exploits that take advantage of particular software bugs. The second and third phases, 12 months each, will examine internal target organization data and look for ways to develop warnings and transfer any tools that emerge from the research from one organization to another, he said.

Continue reading “IARPA To Develop Early-Warning System For Cyberattacks” »

Ouch!!!

National Security Agency says tools left exposed by mistake — and dumping by presumably Russia-backed hackers Shadow Brokers.

An FBI investigation into the public dumping of hacking tools used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to uncover security flaws in some networking vendor products is looking at how the tools were exposed on a remote computer, a Reuters report says, quoting people close to the investigation.

Continue reading “FBI Probes Dumping Of NSA Hack Tools On Public Site” »

This is definitely something that we should all be aware of, and watching for.

“Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet,” according to a blog post by security expert Bruce Schneier.

Continue reading “Someone is learning how to take down the Internet” »

When the project started, a “Red Team” of hackers could have taken over the helicopter almost as easily as it could break into your home Wi-Fi. But in the intervening months, engineers from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had implemented a new kind of security mechanism — a software system that couldn’t be commandeered. Key parts of Little Bird’s computer system were unhackable with existing technology, its code as trustworthy as a mathematical proof. Even though the Red Team was given six weeks with the drone and more access to its computing network than genuine bad actors could ever expect to attain, they failed to crack Little Bird’s defenses.

“They were not able to break out and disrupt the operation in any way,” said Kathleen Fisher, a professor of computer science at Tufts University and the founding program manager of the High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems (HACMS) project. “That result made all of DARPA stand up and say, oh my goodness, we can actually use this technology in systems we care about.”

The technology that repelled the hackers was a style of software programming known as formal verification. Unlike most computer code, which is written informally and evaluated based mainly on whether it works, formally verified software reads like a mathematical proof: Each statement follows logically from the next. An entire program can be tested with the same certainty that mathematicians prove theorems.

Edward Snowden has warned people not to use Google’s new chat app, because it lets the company read everything that they say.

Google has finally released its new chat app after showing it off over the summer. It comes with a robot that watches everything people say and then stores it for later analysis, using that data to improve the app itself.

But that also means that chats are stored on Google’s servers indefinitely, and are able to be read by it. The company had initially indicated that the messages would only be stored temporarily, limiting the possible impact of any data breach and retaining some privacy for users.

Continue reading “Google’s new chat app should be deleted and never used, says Edward Snowden” »