Ex-CIA Chief Gates Warns on Cyberterror
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Cyberterrorism could be the most devastating weapon of mass destruction yet and could cripple the U.S. economy, former CIA Director Robert Gates said at a terrorism conference Saturday.
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Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she cannot recall then-CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaida attack in the United States, as a new book claims he did two months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
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WASHINGTON - The government's cybersecurity chief has abruptly resigned from the Homeland Security Department amid a concerted campaign by the technology industry and some lawmakers to persuade the Bush administration to give him more authority and money for protection programs.    Amit Yoran, a former software executive from Symantec Corp., made his resignation effective Thursday as director of the National Cyber Security Division, giving a single's day notice of his intention to leave...
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Proposed job cuts could hit the UK's intelligence performance, former top security officials warn.
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On his first day as defense secretary, Robert Gates warned Monday that failure in Iraq would be a "calamity" that would haunt the United States for years. Underscoring eroding security there, a Pentagon report said the number of insurgent and sectarian attacks had risen to the highest level in years.
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The nation's former cybersecurity czar agrees to advise the government's incident response team.
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BRITISH business is open to the threat of terror attack unless it works more closely with the Government to assess and counter active security risks, a former intelligence chief will tell the CBI today.
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The CEO of a Web hosting vendor whose data center in Chicago was violently robbed last fall by two masked men says the incident should serve as a warning to other companies.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS)Â CIO was on the hot seat Wednesday on Capitol Hill after an independent audit found that a database that screens U.S. visitors lacked security controls. The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee called on DHS CIO Scott Charbo to explain why he should keep his job after persistent cybersecurity problems at the agency. "What happened to leadership?" Representative Bennie Thompson, the committee chairman and a Mississippi Democrat, said during a hearing of the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science, and Technology. "What happened to accountability?" Lawmakers also said they were concerned that the agency reported 844 cybersecurity incidents in 2005 and 2006. "Although we still have a ways to go, we've made measurable improvements in the management of information security at the department," Charbo said. "Certainly, we need to increase our vigilance to ensure that such incidents do not happen again." Many of the 844 incidents were minor, and the agency has taken major steps to fix past cybersecurity issues, Charbo said. Many of the reported cybersecurity incidents related to problems like lost laptops that did not result in data breaches, he added. The subcommittee did not have a breakdown of the incidents Wednesday. Asked about reports of bots installed on DHS computers that could send information out to hackers, Charbo said he had "no evidence" that the bots caused a breach. Thompson's comments came as the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report saying DHS continues to have "significant weaknesses in computer security controls that threaten the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of key ... systems." GAO investigators found no security controls on the US-VISIT database, the system that screens people who want to visit the U.S. for potential terrorists and criminals. Lawmakers are concerned whether terrorists could get into the database "and change or alter their names to allow them access to this country, and we wouldn't even know that they're doing it," said Representative Bob Etheridge, a North Carolina Democrat. A contractor provides IT security for US-VISIT, but DHS has its own security controls in place to protect the database, Charbo said. He didn't disclose specific security measures. The GAO doesn't have evidence that the US-VISIT database was breached, said Keith Rhodes, chief technologist and director of the GAO's Center for Technology and Engineering. "I did not see controls in place that would prevent it," Rhodes said. "I did not see defensive perimeters, and I did not see detection systems in place whether it had or had not [been breached]." GAO started a cybersecurity review of DHS a year ago but curtailed its efforts because it kept finding "more and more" problems, Rhodes said. "If we had continued to this day, I would argue we'd still be finding things," he said. "The problems were pervasive. The problems were systemic." Charbo outlined recent measures DHS has taken to improve cybersecurity there. The agency is collapsing multiple legacy WANs into a single WAN, and it is standardizing all e-mail and directory services onto a single platform, he said. The agency had 13 separate e-mail systems when it was formed out of 22 U.S. agencies in 2002, he said. DHS also is combining multiple data centers into a shared center, he said. Thompson asked how DHS officials can preach cybersecurity practices to other agencies and private companies while continuing to have its own problems. Among the incidents DHS reported were employees sending out classified documents on unclassified networks and contractors attaching unauthorized laptops to the DHS network, he said. "How can the Department of Homeland Security be a real advocate of sound cybersecurity practices without following some of its own advice?" he said. "What the department is doing on its own network speaks so loud that the message isn't getting across to anyone else."
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Microsoft&#39;s chief executive believes it&#39;s naive to suggest the software giant can eliminate all security vulnerabilities in its various
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Stoopid human Improved technology and design alone will not be enough to keep Windows Vista and Office 2007 users safe from hackers and identity thieves, according to Bill Gates.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has warned U.S. banks and financial institutions of a threatened cyberattack by the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. The group called on allies to attack the Web sites of U.S. financial institutions in December in retaliation for the U.S. holding suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison camp, according to a U.S. government source. US-CERT, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), sent out the alert Thursday, but it has "no information to collaborate the threat," said Joanna Gonzalez, a DHS spokeswoman. The alert was "really sent out of an abundance of caution," she added. Such alerts are "not uncommon," Gonzalez said, although she declined to give details about how often US-CERT issues the alerts. Asked if al-Qaeda has the ability to carry out such a threat, Gonzalez said she didn't have that information.
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DECEMBER 07, 2004 (REUTERS) - Computer security experts, including former government officials, urged the Bush administration today to devote more effort to strengthening defenses against viruses, hackers and other online threats.
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Computer-security experts, including former government officials, urged the Bush administration on Tuesday to devote more effort to strengthening defenses against viruses, hackers and other online threats. -Reuters
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On a European tour, the CEO weighs in on threats ranging from Linux and EU regulators to music pirates and "bad people out there in cyberspace."
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(InfoWorld) - Security managers have to keep their cool and clearly communicate with chief information officers (CIOs) during a crisis affecting company networks, a top security official with Microsoft said Wednesday. Otherwise, trying to educate CIOs in a panic mode will complicate how an attack is countered, said Greg Galford, Microsoft security architect, who gave a presentation at the EuSecWest 2007 security conference in London on Thursday. Galford was a technical lead during a massive attack on Microsoft's network in 2000 that prompted the company to make many changes to its networks and its response approach. He now works with Microsoft's Security Response Center, which handles new vulnerabilities and exploits affecting the company's software. The hacking attack in 2000 wasn't a huge surprise, since Microsoft was using much of its own newly developed software that had security faults, Galford said. At the time, the company wasn't nearly as vigilant as it is now about security, he said. Microsoft had a huge web of insecure connections leading to its corporate network, including employees who worked from home and connections security officials were unaware even existed, Galford said. The company also mistakenly made public much information on how its own corporate networks were constructed, which likely aided hackers. One network engineer had even made most of the information on his hard drive available over the Internet, he said. "We shot ourselves in the foot," Galford said. During its response, Microsoft learned hard lessons in how to communicate developments up the chain of command. Technical people have to be separated from management. CIOs need to be told regularly when they will be briefed again after receiving an update, Galford said. "We had executives coming down to the offices of people that were doing the actual technical work," Galford said. Ideally, management should be briefed before a crisis, so they know how the response will proceed, Galford said. Also, security managers need to know how to communicate in nontechnical terms for CIOs who may not have the same background, he said. CIOs "are always worried about what's going on," Galford said.
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SAN FRANCISCO - In his swan song to an annual gathering of 15,000 computer security experts here Tuesday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said the software giant has made giant strides in security. But he acknowledged that threats from malicious computer code and the proliferation of devices connected to the Internet have made security a moving target.