Peter Singer, strategist at New America think tank, is coauthor of forthcoming novel ‘Ghost Fleet,’ which explores what would happen if digital warfare erupts between nations.
What could World War III look like? If the growing spate nation-state hacks is any indication, it’ll be waged by computers and over networks.
If you look at all the data breaches that took place in 2014, you might conclude that healthcare organizations have lax cybersecurity protocols. You’d be wrong, but it’s not hard to see how you might reach that conclusion. Last year, the healthcare sector reported more breaches—333 in all—than any other industry.
Like any symptom viewed in isolation, diagnosing the real ailment in the healthcare industry requires a more thorough examination. Want to know why hackers are so intent on breaking into healthcare organizations’ systems—and so successful? Here are the top reasons:
Among the multitude of unpleasant issues facing a company whose network has been breached is potential liability to customers and employees whose personal information has been compromised. However, recent district court decisions from around the country continue to limit the opportunity of those customers and employees to have their day in court.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Thursday that China is the leading suspect in an attack against the government’s personnel office, the first time a US officially has publicly pointed the finger at the Chinese government, reported The Wall Street Journal. The attack not only accessed the records of government workers in the Office of Personnel Management but may have compromised 18 million Social Security numbers….
By the time a pair of engineers sat down for lunch together in Austin, the Internet’s growing pains had become dire. Once a novelty for computer scientists, the network was now exploding in size, lurching ever closer to a hard mathematical wall built into one of the Internet’s most basic protocols.
As the prospect of system meltdown loomed, the men began scribbling ideas for a solution onto the back of a ketchup-stained napkin. Then a second. Then a third. The “three-napkins protocol,” as its inventors jokingly dubbed it, would soon revolutionize the Internet. And though there were lingering issues, the engineers saw their creation as a “hack” or “kludge,” slang for a short-term fix to be replaced as soon as a better alternative arrived.
That was 1989.
More than a quarter-century later — a span that has seen the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the smartphone and an explosion of hacking — the “three-napkins protocol” still…
David D. Clark, an MIT scientist whose air of genial wisdom earned him the nickname “Albus Dumbledore,” can remember exactly when he grasped the Internet’s dark side. He was presiding over a meeting of network engineers when news broke that a dangerous computer worm — the first to spread widely — was slithering across the wires.
One of the engineers, working for a leading computer company, piped up with a claim of responsibility for the security flaw that the worm was exploiting. “Damn,” he said. “I thought I had fixed that bug.”
The seven young men sitting before some of Capitol Hill’s most powerful lawmakers weren’t graduate students or junior analysts from some think tank. No, Space Rogue, Kingpin, Mudge and the others were hackers who had come from the mysterious environs of cyberspace to deliver a terrifying warning to the world.
Your computers, theytold the panel of senators in May 1998, are not safe — not the software, not the hardware, not the networks that link them together. The companies that build these things don’t care, the hackers continued, and they have no reason to care because failure costs them nothing. And the federal government has neither the skill nor the will to do anything about it.
Hackers targeted air travel and successfully grounded around 1,400 passengers on Sunday.
The problems for passengers started at Warsaw Chopin airport after the airline says hackers breached its ground computers, which are used to issue flight plans. The grounded airline, LOT Polish Airways, told CNN because of the attack it was unable to create flight plans for outbound flights from its Warsaw hub and as a result outbound flights from Warsaw were not able to depart.
Poland’s national flag carrier says it was forced to cancel 20 flights and several others were delayed on Sunday after suffering an attack on its IT system.
Look at how much cash typical cybercriminals spend and what their potential profits might be: It estimated it would cost $5,900 (£3,860) to buy a ransomware kit that could return up to $90,000 in one month of operation. Experts said people should take precautions and avoid paying up if they get hit.
Ransomware involves a malicious program infecting a machine, scrambling key files and then demanding the machine’s owner pay cash before the data is unscrambled. According to a report from Intel-owned security firm McAfee Labs, high-tech extortion schemes nearly doubled in the first three months of 2015.
A group of security researchers have discovered an alarming vulnerability in Apple’s mobile and desktop operating systems.
A research group has explained how it tested a series of attacks that were able to bypass security checks, steal passwords, and even critical app data. The vulnerability was discovered to exist in Apple devices including the iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers.
Due to the way Apple built apps to communicate with each other, the paper writes, researchers were able to “steal such confidential information as the passwords for iCloud, email and bank, and the secret token of Evernote.”
