US Air Force sets up Cyber Command

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US Air Force established a provisional Cyber Command Tuesday as part of an expanding mission to prepare for wars in cyberspace, officials said.

The move comes amid concerns over a wave of hacker attacks originating in China against western governments and a crippling attack in May against Estonia amid a dispute with Russia.

Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne announced the creation of the new command at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where the air force's existing cyber warfare operations are centered.

Officials said the provisional command will pave the way within a year for the creation of the air force's first major command devoted to cyberwarfare operations.

The full Air Force Cyber Command "will train and equip forces to conduct sustained global operations in and through cyberspace, fully integrated with air and space operations," said Major General Charles Ickes.

The US 8th Air Force, headquartered at Barksdale, will continue to conduct day-to-day cyber operations until the Cyber Command is fully operational, officials said.

Skilled hackers can exploit weaknesses in computer networks to steal or change information, cripple them with viruses or overwhelm them with masses of data.

The mass attacks on Estonia in May shut down government websites, banks, schools and other institutions.

The US military has recognized the potential for cyberwarfare at least since the late-1990s when officials acknowledge launching offensive electronic attacks against Yugoslavia during a NATO air war over Kosovo.

But it has expanded its efforts in recent years as rivals like China have stepped up their efforts, and while Al-Qaeda has exploited the Internet to recruit followers and plot attacks.

"We've got to contest the virtual space," retired general John Abizaid, the former US commander in the Middle East, said Monday. "In the Napoleonic era, war was land and sea."

"Today we have to operate, not only land, sea, air and space, but we have to understand that the virtual domain is a domain of war that requires our constant attention and vigilance and it's not just an area to be watched."

"It's an area in which to fight," he said at a conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

A US military report on China's military power earlier this year said the Peoples Liberation Army began incorporating computer network operations in its exercises in 2005, "primarily in first strikes against enemy networks."

"The PLA sees CNO (computer network operations) as critical to achieving 'electromagnetic dominance' early in a conflict," the report said.

The air force in 2005, meanwhile, declared military operations in cyberspace a fundamental mission, putting it on a par with operations in air and space and setting in motion plans for the new command.

"This step simply recognized the existing fact that significant air force personnel and technology have long been engaged in fighting in cyberspace," Wynne said in a speech in November 2006.

 

Quoted from http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iO7DxqVJSIF7gp_uJduaZ8Aptyjw:

AFP: US Air Force sets up Cyber Command

Technorati Tags:Internet,Scary,Security

Your Private Nuclear Bunker

A German security company produces bunkers for private homes to protect against September 11th-style attacks. The company says their customers are ordinary citizens from Germany and abroad. But potential customers have to ensure they have some space on their property, and at least $120,000.

Technorati Tags: International, Safety, Security, Video, Weird

Congress sends 9/11 bill to Bush

By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Congress sent President Bush legislation Friday to intensify anti-terror efforts in the U.S., shifting money to high-risk states and cities and expanding screening of air and sea cargo to stave off future Sept. 11-style attacks.

The measure carries out major recommendations of the independent 9/11 Commission.

The bill, passed by the House on a 371-40 vote, ranks among the top accomplishments of the six-month-old Democratic Congress. The Senate approved the measure late Thursday by 85-8, and the White House said the president would sign the bill.

Six years after the Sept. 11 attacks and three years after the 9/11 Commission made its recommendations, "Congress is finally embracing what the 9/11 families have been saying all along," said Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. "It takes a willingness to do things a different way."

The bill elevates the importance of risk factors in determining which states and cities get federal security funds — that would mean more money for such cities as New York and Washington — and also puts money into a new program to assure that security officials at every level can communicate with each other.

It would require screening of all cargo on passenger planes within three years and sets a five-year goal of scanning all container ships for nuclear devices before they leave foreign ports.

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., who steered the legislation through the Senate with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said it would "make our nation stronger, our cities and towns more secure and our families safer."

Republicans generally backed the bill while stressing their own administration's success in stopping another major terrorist attack. The bill, said Rep. Peter King of New York, top Republican on the Homeland Security panel, "is another step in the right direction building on the steps of the previous 5 1/2 years."

"These efforts build upon the considerable progress we've made over the past six years," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel.

Completion of the bill, six months after the House passed its original version on the first day of the current Congress, was a major victory for Democrats who have seen some of their other priorities — immigration and energy reform and stem cell research funding — thwarted by GOP and presidential resistance and House-Senate differences.

Another goal, raising the minimum wage, went into effect last Tuesday, and Democratic leaders still hope for agreement on ethics and lobbying changes before Congress departs for its August recess at the end of next week.

The independent 9/11 Commission in 2004 issued 41 recommendations covering domestic security, intelligence gathering and foreign policy. Congress and the White House followed through on some, including creating a director of national intelligence, tightening land border screening and cracking down on terrorist financing.

Democrats, after taking over control of Congress, promised to make completing the list a top priority.

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., the vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, said with enactment of the bill some 80 percent of the panel's recommendations will have been met. "The bottom line is that the American people will be safer," he said.

The 9/11 bill led off the first busy legislative week in the House last January, and the Senate passed its version in March. The measure stalled after that, partly because of a White House veto threat over language, since dropped, to give collective bargaining rights to aviation screeners.

House-Senate negotiators finally reached an agreement this week after Democrats worked out a provision satisfying GOP demands that people who report what they in good faith believe to be terrorist activity around planes, trains and buses be protected from lawsuits.

The most controversial provision in the legislation requires the radiation scanning of cargo containers in more than 600 ports from which ships leave for the U.S. The White House, and other critics, say that the technology isn't there, that the requirement could disrupt trade and that current procedures including manifest inspections at foreign ports and radiation monitoring in U.S. ports are working well.

Supporters argue that the unthinkable devastation from the detonation of a nuclear device in an American port makes it imperative to scan cargo before it reaches U.S. shores. As a compromise, it was agreed that the Homeland Security secretary can extend the five-year deadline for 100 percent scanning in two-year increments if necessary.

The White House was also unhappy with a provision that requires total amounts requested and appropriated for the intelligence community to be made public.

There was more agreement on changing the formula to ensure that more federal security grants go to high-risk states and cities. The current formula makes sure that every lawmaker, even those representing rural areas relatively safe from terrorism, get a chunk of the federal grants. Under the new formula a larger percentage of grants will go to high-risk urban areas.

The bill also establishes a new grant program to ensure that local, state and federal officials can communicate with each other and approves $4 billion over four years for rail, transit and bus security.

It strengthens security measures for the Visa Waiver Program, which allows travelers from select countries to visit the United States without visas.

The massive legislation also contains language requiring the president to confirm that Pakistan is making progress in combatting al-Qaida and Taliban elements within its borders before the United States provides aid to the country.

Hamilton said that one shortcoming of the bill is that it fails to carry out the commission's recommendation that Congress streamline its own overlapping setup for monitoring intelligence and homeland security matters. "I think congressional oversight still remains a weakness in our homeland security," he said.

___

The bill is H.R. 1

 

This was found at Yahoo! News.

Technorati Tags: Maine, Politics, Security, War

DHS acknowledges own computer break-ins

Technorati Tags: Lame, Scary, Security

By TED BRIDIS,

Associated Press Writer

The Homeland Security Department, the lead U.S. agency for fighting cyber threats, suffered more than 800 hacker break-ins, virus outbreaks and other computer security problems over two years, senior officials acknowledged to Congress.

In one instance, hacker tools for stealing passwords and other files were found on two internal Homeland Security computer systems. The agency's headquarters sought forensic help from the department's own Security Operations Center and the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team it operates with Carnegie Mellon University.

In other cases, computer workstations in the Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration were infected with malicious software detected trying to communicate with outsiders; laptops were discovered missing; and agency Web sites suffered break-ins.

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said such problems undermine the government's efforts to encourage companies and private organizations to improve cyber security.

"What the department is doing on its own networks speaks so loudly that the message is not getting across," Thompson said.

Congressional investigators, expected to testify Wednesday during an oversight hearing about the department's security lapses, determined that persistent weaknesses "threaten the confidentiality, integrity and availability of key DHS information and information systems," according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office being released later in June.

The Homeland Security Department's chief information officer, Scott Charbo, assured lawmakers his organization was working to prevent such problems.

"We need to increase our vigilance to ensure that such incidents do not happen again," Charbo wrote in testimony prepared for Wednesday's hearing. "The department takes these incidents very seriously and will work diligently to ensure they do not recur."

The computer problems disclosed to the House Homeland Security subcommittee occurred during fiscal 2005 and fiscal 2006, and occurred at DHS headquarters and many of the department's agencies, including TSA, the Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Customs and Border Protection and others.

The subcommittee's chairman, Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., said break-ins to government computer networks and theft of information are "one of the most critical issues confronting our nation, and we must deal with this threat immediately."

All the problems involved the department's unclassified computer networks, although DHS officials also have acknowledged to lawmakers dozens of incidents they described as "classified spillage," in which secret information was improperly transmitted or discussed over nonsecure e-mail systems.

This was found at Yahoo! News.

Suddenly, the Paranoids Don't Seem So Paranoid Anymore

By Tony Long
06.07.07 | 2:00 AM

Have you noticed? We've become a people that no longer respects, or apparently desires, privacy. Our own or anybody else's.

That's a remarkable thing, when you stop to think about it. We Americans, historically, have fiercely guarded our personal privacy. It's one of our defining characteristics. Others, who live in societies where personal privacy isn't so easily taken for granted, have looked on with a mixture of admiration and bemusement. "Mind your own business" is a singularly American expression.

But now we've allowed that birthright to be compromised, in a hundred little ways, and in a few conspicuously big ones, by an increasingly meddlesome government -- not to mention opportunistic, predatory marketers -- armed with the technology that gives them an easy entrée into our most secret places. Why is that, do you suppose? Have we surrendered to Big Brother because "you can't fight city hall," or have we been lied to, cajoled and softened up for so long by so much stupid television and the endless drumbeat of consumerism that we no longer care?

Do you think you're surfing porn at home in complete anonymity? Do you think the government can't retrieve every single scrap of personal information you own? Do you think The Gap doesn't know that you've moved up to a 34 waist? We've been scanned, cookied and catalogued so thoroughly that there are agencies and companies out there who know more about us than we know about ourselves.

Now, thanks to Google, you can't even expect your privacy to be respected in one of the most paradoxically private places around -- the public street.

People who don't live in big cities often cite the lack of privacy as one reason why they wouldn't. Actually, the anonymity of living in a community of hundreds of thousands of people affords a lot more privacy than one might expect; certainly more than in of those cute little towns where everybody knows everybody else's business.

Or at least it did, until Google came along with Street View.

Now the mere act of walking down a public street is liable to get you some unwanted publicity, especially if you're captured doing something you'd rather not share with the world.

Google says Street View is intended to provide street-level tours of selected cities (currently San Francisco, New York, Denver, Miami and Vegas are so blessed; others are in the works). Why they feel such tours are necessary at all is another question. "Because it's way cool" will probably suffice.

In an Associated Press story, Google spokeswoman Megan Quinn shrugs off any privacy concerns, saying: "This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street." I don't know how often Ms. Quinn walks the mean streets of her town, but it's not comparable at all. For one thing, the casual pedestrian isn't staring at a computer screen with your image plastered all over it. And being spotted on the street by a single person, someone as anonymous as you are, is a far cry from being available to the prurient curiosity of millions of online peeping toms.

This is just incredibly vulgar.

But just to be safe, Google makes it clear that it's on firm legal footing; that you have no legal guarantee to privacy on a public street. So if you turn up on Street View as you're ducking into the local porn emporium, that's your tough luck. Maybe it is legal. Probably it is. So what? Being legal doesn't mean being right.

Let's call a spade a spade here, lay all our cards on the table and use all the clichés necessary to make one thing perfectly clear: Google is invading your privacy for the same reason (and only reason) it does anything. It smells a chance to make money and it's going to make money, and to hell with you and your privacy. Do no evil? Balls.

Greed, unfortunately, is another American characteristic. One that will eventually destroy us.

- - -

Tony Long is copy chief at Wired News.

This was found at Wired.

Cell Phone Bugging...

Intelligence center hones spy tech

IARPA develops groundbreaking gadgets for 16 agencies, but critics question need.

Katherine Shrader
The Associated Press

Washington — Using a new laptop and a satellite link, FBI agents can find out within two minutes whether the fingerprint from a newly captured suspect overseas matches a terrorist database in Virginia.

Intelligence officials are running documents in languages such as Arabic through a new computer program called "English Now." It converts the foreign characters into the Roman alphabet and makes words such as Baghdad, President Bush or Osama bin Laden jump out to spies who can't read Arabic.

The language software and the fingerprint-recognition system are examples of new spy gear that the national intelligence director's office bought last year. They may seem like tools that should have been available years ago, but the government isn't noted for its ability to quickly develop new technology.

A fledgling center called IARPA is hoping to change that. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity will try to develop groundbreaking technology for the 16 spy agencies.

One potential tool sounds like it comes from an episode of "Star Trek": "cloaking" technology that can bend radar around an object to make it appear it's not there. Others include power sources shrunk using nanotechnology and quantum computers that can speed code-breaking, says IARPA acting director Steve Nixon.

Not everyone is convinced this is the right way to make spy tools. The House Intelligence Committee questions whether the government needs it.

There is even resistance within the CIA itself, according to officials who spoke about the concerns privately. The agency gets money that is supposed to go for spy tools that can be shared across the government. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano denied any friction, saying the agency welcomes ideas that promote collaboration on new technology.

In the last half-century, U.S. spy agencies have made technical breakthroughs large and small. In the 1970s, the CIA shared its lithium-iodine batteries with the medical field, which now uses them in pacemakers. Its scientists developed microdot cameras that can produce images so small they can be hidden in the period of this sentence. They also built a life-size robotic dragonfly that could have been used for surveillance, if only it could have handled crosswinds.

The new intelligence organization will be based at the University of Maryland and staffed with 56 intelligence professionals from the CIA and from McConnell's organization.

Nixon says IARPA will sponsor research at universities, national labs and other organizations.

IARPA is thinking broadly, he said. It won't limit itself to hard sciences, but will also tackle social-science problems such as finding tools for language research or to help analysts measure cultural habits of another society. He also said the organization will work on privacy protection. NSA and other agencies want to be able to make better use of foreign intelligence information from overseas, which often contains information on U.S. citizens.

 

This was found at News-Leader.com

Vibrator 'threat to national security'

A radio-controlled vibrator made in Britain has been banned in Cyprus after it was branded a threat to national security.

The Cypriot military are concerned the sex toy's electronic waves will disrupt the army's radio frequencies on the island.

A spokesperson for makers Ann Summers confirmed its Love Bug 2, a small, egg shaped device operated by a remote control, was on sale for use everywhere in Europe - except Cyprus.

"The remote control only has a range of six metres. We have still been selling them in Cyprus, but with a warning urging Cypriots not to use it unless they travel abroad," said the Ann Summers spokesperson.

In its promotional literature the company describes the device as a "deceptively powerful matt silver love egg", later adding: "Not for use in Cyprus".

Military officials refused to comment on the reasons for the ban, but the government's Communications and Works Ministry said it had been a purely military decision.

"We never even saw them, they were banned before we even had a chance to check them, but if issues of national security are at stake then that is not surprising," a spokesperson said.

"The military does operate on a different frequency to the general frequency, but they do not share that information for obvious reasons, only they would have been able to decide what SRD's (Small Range Devices) might be a threat and what to do about it."

Lizzie Eddleston from the Ann Summers press office in the UK said: "It is a shame but we have to honour the request and have made it clear that the Love Bug is not for sale in Cyprus.

"We have been told the electronic waves given off by the 'Love Bug' would affect military frequencies, but we have told locals that we have a lot of other devices that are not banned which will satisfy their needs. After all, it's better to make love, not war." - Ananova.com

This was found at IOL.

Shredded East German files reassembled

By DAVID RISING
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

BERLIN -- German researchers said Wednesday that they were launching an attempt to reassemble millions of shredded East German secret police files using complicated computerized algorithms.

The files were shredded as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and it became clear that the East German regime was finished. Panicking officials of the Stasi secret police attempted to destroy the vast volumes of material they had kept on everyone from their own citizens to foreign leaders.

So great was the task that it overwhelmed the shredding machines, and a large number of the documents were torn by hand into between eight and thirty pieces.

Some 16,250 sacks containing pieces of 45 million shredded documents were found and confiscated after the reunification of Germany in 1990. Reconstruction work began 12 years ago but 24 people have been able to reassemble the contents of only 323 sacks.

"Many important documents are slumbering in these sacks," Marianne Birthler, head of the Stasi archives, told Deutschlandfunk radio.

Berlin's Frauenhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology estimates that putting everything back together by hand would take 30 people 600 to 800 years.

Researchers are hopeful they will be able to put together 400 sacks in two years using new computer technology employed by the Frauenhofer Institute.

If the government-funded $8.53 million pilot project is successful, head researcher Bertram Nickolay said, researchers will be able to put together all of the bags in four to five years.

Using algorithms developed 15 years ago to help decipher barely legible lists of Nazi concentration camp victims, each individual strip of the shredded Stasi files will be scanned on both sides. The data then will be fed into the computer for interpretation using color recognition; texture analysis; shape and pattern recognition; machine and handwriting analysis and the recognition of forged official stamps, Nickolay said in a statement.

Hand-torn documents are expected to be the easiest to reassemble, because the pieces can be matched together by shape, like a complicated puzzle.

Putting the machine-shredded documents together requires analysis of the script on the surface of the fragments. The institute has already had success putting together similarly destroyed documents for Germany's tax authorities.

This was found at SeattlePI.com

My Kind of Car Security

Ex-Wal-Mart worker admits to spy campaign

A Wal-Mart employee, who was fired last month for intercepting a reporter's calls, says he was part of a sophisticated surveillance operation.

April 4 2007: 11:18 AM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- A former Wal-Mart Stores Inc. worker said he was part of a large surveillance operation that included snooping on employees, stockholders and others, according to a Wall Street Journal report Wednesday.

Security worker Bruce Gabbard was fired last month after 19 years with the company for intercepting a reporter's phone calls, the paper said.

Gabbard said he recorded the calls because he felt pressured to stop embarrassing leaks. But he said his spying activities were sanctioned by superiors.

Gabbard said that as part of the surveillance, the retailer infiltrated an anti-Wal-Mart group to determine if it planned protests at the company's annual meeting last year and deployed monitoring systems to record the actions of anyone connected to its global computer network.

Many of Gabbard's statements were confirmed by other former Wal-Mart employees, the paper said.

Wal-Mart conducted an internal investigation of Gabbard and his group's activities, fired his supervisor and demoted a vice president over the group, the paper said.

"This group is no longer operating in the same manner that it did prior to the discovery of the unauthorized recording of telephone conversations. There have been changes in leadership, and we have strengthened our practices and protocols in this area," the company said in a statement.

Wal-Mart has since disconnected some systems and an internal investigation of the group's activities was launched earlier this year, the paper said citing an executive in the security-information industry.

Wal-Mart has always had strict limits on what its employees can do while at work. Store employees are prohibited from using personal cell phones on the job. And managers receive a list of email addresses and phone numbers their employees have used as well as a list of Web sites visited, the paper said citing current and former employees.

The company also limits Internet access and blocks social-networking and video sites, according to Gabbard.

"Like most major corporations, it is our corporate responsibility to have systems in place, including software systems, to monitor threats to our network, intellectual property and our people. These situations are limited to cases which are high risk to the company or our associates, such as criminal fraud or security issues," Wal-Mart said in a statement.

A U.S. attorney is investigating whether any laws were violated as a result of the phone and pager intercepts, according to the Journal.

New "paint" provides wireless network protection without encryption

March 24th, 2007 by George Gardner

Forget WEP and WPA; I’m switching over to the EM-SEC Coating System, a recently revealed paint developed by EM-SEC Technologies that acts as an electromagnetic fortress, allowing a wireless network to be contained within painted walls without fear of someone tapping in or hacking wireless networks.

The EM-SEC Coating System is clearly the most secure option aside from stringing out the CAT5, and can be safely used to protect wireless networks in business and government facilities.

“The use of EM-SEC Coating as an electromagnetic barrier for the containment of wireless networks has opened a new realm of possibilities for our company and for the future of wireless communications” said Robert Boyd, Vice President and Director of Technology for EM-SEC Technologies, LLC. “As hackers, identity thieves and even terrorists become more sophisticated in the methods they use to obtain information or inflict damage, this experiment confirmed EM-SEC Coating reduces the threat from electronic eavesdropping and blocks out electromagnetic interference for the protection of electronic data.”

The EM-SEC Coating System uses a series of water-based shielding products that restrict the passage of airborne RF signals, and was initially developed to aid the U.S. Government and Military is shielding operation centers; the Military always gets the good stuff first.

Recent tests on the product revealed that this special wireless blocking paint can now be successfully used by corporate and private companies.

“We have developed an innovative shielding system that cannot only be utilized by corporate offices, boardrooms, server and computer rooms and research and development laboratories to protect their digital assets from electronic eavesdropping, but it will also ensure the safe operation of wireless networks”, said Wayne LeGrande, President and Chief Technical Officer, EM-SEC Technologies, LLC.

We’ve seen first hand that many wireless encryption methods simply do not work, and can be hacked using a couple hundred dollars worth of equipment and free downloadable software. This EM-SEC Coating solution provides strong network security combined with the freedoms that come with a wireless network, something that would have previously been thought to be impossible.