US Defense Secretary Panetta warns governments who sponsor cyber attacks of a strong US response, including cyber preemption. Current and former officials speaking on background identify the government Panetta means: Iran's. Specifically, the US believes it has evidence that Iran was behind August's attacks on Saudi and Qatari energy companies. As Panetta spoke a third US bank (Regions Financial, in Alabama) suffered a denial-of-service attack by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters.
Remote administration tools (RATs) used by hackers are found to be buggy in ways that permit alert defenders to turn them against the attackers who deploy them. It turns out that this week's Google and Yahoo outages in Ireland were indeed a "security incident." Irish authorities are investigating. A Facebook outage in Europe yesterday, however, was a technical failure and not a hack. (Anonymous had claimed responsibility.)
Huawei dismisses US espionage accusations as "protectionism" (and a Dark Reading op-ed suggests some general security lessons drawn from the Huawei-ZTE imbroglio). The US Congress struggles to arrive at credible budget sequestration figures. The (ISC)2 Global Information Security Workforce Study predicts that companies and agencies will soon face a seller's information security labor market so severe it will threaten economic growth. Accumulo moves closer to the enterprise as Sqrrl partners with Apache Hadoop to bring the NSA-sponsored data storage software to market.
The University of Nebraska becomes the fourteenth institution to host a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC). The US Air Force and Marine Corps move to increase their cyber capabilities.