The CyberWire Daily Briefing for 12.19.2013
Another news outlet (the Washington Post) is hacked for login credentials: China is the suspect.
Ransomware, both CryptoLocker and its younger, less capable cousin Browlock, continue to worry security analysts. McAfee sees ransomware's threat to businesses growing in 2014.
The alleged, apparent, BT backdoor seems less sinister: the suspicious addresses may have been chosen simply because they're pseudo–private and non–routable.
The airline industry grapples with the usual holiday wave of malware-bearing spam: KULUOZ is being delivered by attachments representing themselves as confirmations and e–tickets.
US retailer Target investigates a very large data breach that exposed customer paycard records; the Secret Service has also been called in. The breach seems to have occurred in–store, not online.
Paunch's arrest and its attendant disruption of Blackhole distribution continue to roil criminal markets (the Cutwail botnet is particularly affected).
The US Federal Election Commission was hacked in October, probably by Chinese operators.
Pro-Bitcoin hacktivists retaliate against China's restrictive virtual currency policy in attacks on that country's central bank.
The US Department of Homeland Security wants cloud providers to purchase insurance for their services.
The US President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies has reported, and the White House released their findings and recommendations late yesterday. The report, "Liberty and Security in a Changing World," receives mixed reviews, but consensus finds it less supine than generally expected. It recommends an end to government attempts to undermine cryptography, restrictions on domestic and foreign data collection, and civilianization of NSA leadership.
Lawyers dissect Klayman v. Obama.
Notes.
Today's issue includes events affecting Brazil, China, European Union, India, Israel, Republic of Korea, Russia, Singapore, United Kingdom, and United States..
For a complete running list of events, please visit the Event Tracker.
Upcoming Events
Cyber Defense Initiative 2013 (Washington, DC, USA, Dec 12 - 19, 2013) NetWars Tournament runs over an intense two- to three-day period, at a conference or hosted onsite. Many enterprises, government agencies, and military bases are using NetWars OnSites to help identify skilled personnel and as part of extensive hands-on training.
FloCon2014 (Charleston, South Carolina, USA, Jan 13 - 16, 2014) FloCon 2014, a network security conference, takes place at the Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina, on January 13–16, 2014. This open conference provides a forum for operational network analysts, tool developers, researchers, and other parties interested in the analysis of large volumes of traffic to showcase the next generation of flow-based analysis techniques.
NASA Langley Cyber Expo (Hampton, Virginia, USA, Jan 14, 2014) The 2013 NASA Langley Cyber Expo is an annual event dedicated to Cyber Security and Information Technology at this secure facility. As the Cyber Expo hosts, the Office of the Chief Information Officer will be recruiting top federal speakers to provide informational sessions on relevant Cyber issues. Industry exhibitors may sit in on the sessions.This event will be promoted to all NASA Cyber and IT-focused personnel, as well as the entire workforce at this location.
cybergamut Tech Tuesday: Malware Reverse Engineering - An Introduction to the Tools, Workflows, and Tricks of the Trade to Attack Sophisticated Malware (Columbia, Maryland, USA, Jan 21, 2014) Reverse engineering malware can be an integral part of every security team's calculus. This session provides a technical review of the tools, workflows, and advanced analytic insight a senior reverse engineer brings to the fight. It will help demystify the process and illustrate the value-proposition associated with deep analytics of malware. Moreover, understanding the detail available through reverse engineering gives the security professional deeper insight into the tactics and techniques the attackers use to circumvent their defensive solutions. The session empowers cyber security professionals at every level to make better-informed judgments on how to improve their response and remediation protocols.
Cybertech Cyber Security Conference and Exhibition (, Jan 1, 1970) Cybertech Israel, the first event of its kind, will present world-leading companies in the field of cyber defense alongside young companies that offer unique solutions to advance the discipline of cyber security. The conference will focus on commercial problem-solving strategies and solutions for cyber infrastructure experts across multiple sectors: energy, utilities, finance, defense, R&D, manufacturing, service sectors, health, government, telecommunications, transportation and more.
U.S. Census Data Protection & Privacy Day (Suitland, Maryland, USA, Jan 28, 2014) The Census Bureau's Privacy Compliance Branch of the Policy Coordination Office is hosting a Data Protection and Privacy Day on January 28. This event is intended to provide a forum for Census employees and contractors to discuss current data protection and privacy policy and to generate ideas to help evolve the current policies . The event will feature various participants from the U.S. Census Bureau as well as other government agencies and industry.
2014 Cybersecurity Innovation Forum (Baltimore, Maryland, USA, Jan 28 - 30, 2014) The 2014 Cybersecurity Innovation Forum (CIF) is a three-day event, sponsored by the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) with DHS, NIST, and NSA as primary participating organizations. The CIF will cover the existing threat landscape and provide presentations and keynotes on current and emerging practices, technologies and standards. The 2014 CIF will provide action-oriented outputs to fuel voluntary principle-driven consensus-based standards efforts, create opportunities for industry growth and drive research activities, and define use cases for subsequent exploration, which in turn will feed back into the subsequent CIF's, continually evolving the state of the art.