''How Fear of Cyber Attack Could Take Down Your Liberties and the Constitution''

From TomDispatch
By Karen Greenberg

''First the financial system collapses and it's impossible to access one’s money. Then the power and water systems stop functioning.  Within days, society has begun to break down.  In the cities, mothers and fathers roam the streets, foraging for food. The country finds itself fractured and fragmented -- hardly recognizable.''

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''Cyber War and Peace''

From ISN Blog
By Joseph Nye

"In my book The Future of Power, I argue that the diffusion of power away from governments is one of this century’s great political shifts.  Cyberspace is a perfect example. Large countries like the US, Russia, Britain, France, and China have greater capacity than other states and non-state actors to control the sea, air, or space, but it makes little sense to speak of dominance in cyberspace. If anything, dependence on complex cyber systems for support of military and economic activities creates new vulnerabilities in large states that can be exploited by non-state actors."

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''China's capacity for cyber-war''

From Asia Times

"The US shift to service industries and outsourcing of manufacturing to other countries beyond the reach of regulators, seemed like a good idea when America's economy was booming. Overlooked was the potential national-security threat of letting countries like China control the technological supply train, and use this power to enhance its own cyber-war capabilities."

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''Wired Opinion: Cyberwar Is the New Yellowcake''

"Today’s cyber criminals have the ability to interrupt life-sustaining services, cause catastrophic economic damage, or severely degrade the networks our defense and intelligence agencies rely on,” Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said at a hearing last week. “Congress needs to act on comprehensive cybersecurity legislation immediately.”

Yet evidence to sustain such dire warnings is conspicuously absent. In many respects, rhetoric about cyber catastrophe resembles threat inflation we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War. And while Congress’ passing of comprehensive cybersecurity legislation wouldn’t lead to war, it could saddle us with an expensive and overreaching cyber-industrial complex."

from wired........

''Researchers unearth more Chinese links to defense contractor attacks''

"Researchers with Symantec have uncovered additional clues that point to Chinese hacker involvement in attacks against a large number of Western companies, including major U.S. defense contractors.

The attacks use malicious PDF documents that exploit an Adobe Reader bug patched last month to infect Windows PCs with "Sykipot," a general-purpose backdoor Trojan horse.

According to findings published Thursday by Symantec's research team, a "staging server" used by the attackers is based in the Beijing area, and is hosted by one of the country's largest Internet service providers, or ISPs."

from mis asia...

''Congress gives DoD green light on cyber attacks''

read more........from federal times....

"Congress has given the Defense Department explicit authority to launch offensive operations in cyberspace.

The provision included in the National Defense Authorization Act passed by lawmakers last week affirms that DoD has offensive cyber capabilities and that the department "may conduct offensive operations in cyberspace" when directed to do so by the president.

"This is a positive step, but there is nothing remarkable about it, and that's as it should be," said Kristin Lord, vice president and director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, a nonpartisan national security think tank in Washington."

'DARPA Boosts Cybersecurity Research Spending 50%'

they will use this tech against americans............from informationweek......

"The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, birthplace of the Internet, plans to increase its spending on cyber research 50% over the next five years, and will increasingly focus on offensive cyber capabilities as well as defensive capabilities, agency director Regina Dugan said Monday.

"Modern warfare will demand the effective use of cyber, kinetic, and combined cyber and kinetic means," Dugan said, speaking before the DARPA Cyber Colloquium, a gathering of cyber professionals. "We need more options, we need more speed, and we need more scale. We must both protect its peaceful shared use as well as prepare for hostile cyber acts that threaten our military capabilities." DARPA sought $208 million in cyber spending in fiscal 2012, up from $120 million the year before, and that's just the start of the jump in spending"..........READ MORE

'Iran to unleash e-warfare with U.S.'

from trend azerbaijan.......

"Iran's Civil Defense agency has received an order to a special squad to defend the country against cyber attacks, Mehr News Agency quoted Head of the agency Golam Reza Jalali as saying on Monday.

Jalali first announced an idea of creation the special unit in August when some media reported that US President Barack Obama's administration is actively engaged in the process of establishing "shadow" Internet and mobile phone systems throughout the world"......READ MORE

'Russia and Communist China accused of cyber-spying campaign to steal U.S. secrets'

from latimes.......

"The military and intelligence services of Russia and China are conducting a sustained campaign to steal American commercial and military secrets through cyber espionage, according to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and he warned that sophisticated computer hacking poses a major danger to U.S. interests.

"Nation states are investing huge amounts of time, personnel and money to steal our data," Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said Friday in a speech to an association of retired U.S. intelligence officers. "We are not as prepared as we need to be"...........READ MORE

'Researcher follows RSA hacking trail to Communist China'

from computer world.......

"Malware used in the attack against RSA Security earlier this year was controlled from China, a well-known botnet researcher said Wednesday.

Joe Stewart, director of malware research for Dell SecureWorks, traced the command-and-control (C&C) servers used to oversee the RSA attack to networks in Beijing and Shanghai.

"This gives us the where, but not the who," said Stewart when asked whether his work had come up with clues about the attack's architects.

In mid-March, RSA confirmed that it had been targeted by hackers who had breached its network defenses and stole proprietary information. Although RSA has never detailed what was stolen, it has admitted that information related to the company's SecurID two-factor authentication products was part of the haul"..............READ MORE

'Hackers target 72 organisations in 'biggest cyber attack in history'

from the telegraph........

"Security experts have discovered the biggest series of cyber attacks to date, involving the infiltration of the networks of 72 organisations including the United Nations, governments and companies around the world"

Security company McAfee, which uncovered the intrusions, said it believed there was one "state actor" behind the attacks but declined to name it, though one security expert who has been briefed on the hacking said the evidence points to China.

"

The long list of victims in the five-year campaign include the governments of the United States, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the International Olympic Committee (IOC); the World Anti-Doping Agency; and an array of companies, from defence contractors to high-tech enterprises.

In the case of the United Nations, the hackers broke into the computer system of the UN Secretariat in Geneva in 2008, hid there unnoticed for nearly two years, and quietly combed through reams of secret data, according to McAfee.

"Even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators," McAfee's vice president of threat research, Dmitri Alperovitch, wrote in a 14-page report.

"What is happening to all this data ... is still largely an open question. However, if even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the other team's playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat".............READ MORE