Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff says the U.S. government is working on the equivalent of the “Manhattan Project” to defend federal networks and national-security interests from large-scale cyber attacks. During a keynote presentation at RSA Conference, Chertoff painted a gloomy picture of the government’s readiness for a determined attack on critical communication networks and said the recent creation of a new National Cyber Security Center would be crucial to finding early signs of hacker activity.
Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users. The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which runs the forum, briefly closed the site Sunday to purge the offending messages and to boost security.
by Chris Soghoian, Blogger, Surveill@nce St@te, CNET
Hackers have turned their attention to Facebook’s hundreds of independent applications. The results are not terribly surprising, but do not tell a good tale: App developers don’t seem to know a thing about basic security, and are putting private user information at risk. As a result, malicious hackers are able to access and change what should be private user data managed by the application providers.
To the long list of objects vulnerable to attack by computer hackers, add the human heart. The threat seems largely theoretical. But a team of computer-security researchers plans to report that it had been able to gain wireless access to a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker. They were able to reprogram it to shut down and to deliver jolts of electricity that would potentially be fatal–if the device had been in a person. In this case, the researchers were hacking into a device in a laboratory.
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