Fliers' Data Left Exposed, Report Says
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A government Web site designed to help travelers remove their names from aviation watch lists was so riddled with security holes that hackers could easily have stolen personal information from scores of passengers, a congressional report concluded yesterday.
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An independent panel has alleged that the bank data-clearing agency SWIFT broke European privacy laws by giving the U.S. records of financial transfers to help anti-terrorism investigations, according to a news report Wednesday.
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The US government unveiled plans on Thursday for a revised computer-based program using personal information to identify airline passengers who may pose a threat to air travel.
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A computer glitch reveals a huge danger to airline investors.
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WASHINGTON - Information on passengers who took a commercial flight within the United States in June will be turned over to the government so it can test a new system for identifying potential terrorists.    People will have a chance to tell the government what they think about the plan during a 30-day comment period, federal officials said on Tuesday...
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The government on Tuesday asked airlines to turn over information they collected on passengers who traveled in June, the first step in a controversial plan to screen for terrorists.
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A wide-area network operated by an unnamed contractor has dozens of weaknesses that threaten data used in the government's Medicare and Medicaid programs, according to a report released Tuesday by the GAO.
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(InfoWorld) - Computers belonging to the U.S. government, contractors, and companies in the transportation industry were hit by a targeted computer attack in July that yielded password information for hundreds of Internet and intranet Web sites, a computer security vendor said Tuesday. The malicious code behind the attacks was first detected by computer intrusion prevention vendor Prevx on July 5. In total, the criminals were able to cull 200MB ofÂ information from about 500 computers, including password and login data, Prevx said. All but one of the computers was located in the U.S., and many of the computers that were infected were associated with air transportation, according to Mel Morris, CEO of Prevx. "This was a well-coordinated attack by someone wanting to get information on the related sites." PCs at the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), American Airlines, and DOT contractor Booz Allen Hamilton all were compromised, Morris said. If DOT systems were compromised, the department is unaware of the situation. "We haven't found any record of a problem," a DOT spokeswoman said Tuesday. Prevx obtained a sample of the Trojan used in the attacks on Friday of last week. By Saturday, it had tracked down a Web site, hosted by YahooÂ in Sunnyvale, California, where information from the compromised PCs was dropped. Because Prevx found a "massive amount" of job applications on the Web site used by the criminals, the company believes that victims may have downloaded the malicious software while thinking they were applying for a job. That Web site, which had probably been hacked by the criminals behind the scam, was shut down on Tuesday, Morris said. It hosted about 200MB of password information, and log-files on the server showed the IP addresses of the infected PCs. Victims of the Trojan, called Win32.PSWSteal.Gen , are told that their hard drive has been encrypted and that they will need to pay $300 to for a decryption tool. Morris believes this extortion threat is actually a ruse designed to conceal the attacker's true motivation: data gathering. "We think the ransomware is to point anyone investigating this down the wrong alley," he said. Morris said he is troubled that such a high percentage of the infected PCs are related to the transportation sector, which has been the target of terrorist attacks. "When we reverse-engineered the IP addresses of those computers, we couldn't believe that this was a daisy chain that led to government-associated sites and to other defense contractors, and to American Airlines," Morris said. "This was a very highly targeted attack." Criminals have increasingly turned to this type of targeted attack in order to collect and eventually sell data from corporations and government agencies, said Marcus Sachs, deputy director of research group SRI International's Computer Science Laboratory. But while Prevx's list of compromised organizations is "kind of scary," it's still hard to characterize what was motivating the attack, Sachs said. "I wouldn't necessarily associate it with terrorists," he said.
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Some pilots see 'suspicious' activity, but say there's no direct way to report it.
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A report by an EU panel released Thursday said the bank data transfer agency SWIFT broke European privacy laws by handing over personal data to U.S. authorities for use in anti-terror investigations.
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WASHINGTON - Everyone who took a commercial flight within the United States in June will have his travel information turned over to the government so it can test a new system for identifying potential terrorists, federal officials announced Tuesday.    The Transportation Security Administration plans to order airlines to turn over the information in November...
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The US government wants airlines to turn over information on more than a million people who traveled in June to test a new system for identifying passengers who may pose a security risk, officials said on Tuesday.
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The FBI failed to report accurately how many people it snooped on using anti-terror measures, officials said a government audit revealed today. Demands for banks and phone companies to hand over people's private information without telling them may also have gone beyond what is allowed by the Patriot Act, officials with access to the report told CNN.
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The latest agreement allows many more U.S. government agencies to access data about passengers flying to the U.S. from Europe, including details such as a passenger's name, address and credit card information.
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The Federal Aviation Administration needs to improve its oversight of air carriers and passengers who bring hazardous materials onto airplanes, according to a report released yesterday
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The Department of Homeland Security is looking for some live data to feed its new Secure Flight watch-list system, so it will order airlines to fork over a months' worth of passenger itineraries. By Ryan Singel.
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NASA grudgingly released some results Monday from an $11.3 million federal air safety study it previously withheld from the public over concerns it would upset travelers and hurt airline profits. It published the findings in a format that made it cumbersome for any thorough analysis by outsiders.