The CyberWire Daily Briefing 12.20.13

Summary

By The CyberWire Staff

Iran-linked (and probably directed) hacktivists of the "Islamic Cyber Resistance" claim to have penetrated Israeli and Saudi defense organizations.

US retailer Target works to contain damage from the very large data breach it suffered between Thanksgiving and this week. Analysts speculate about possible methods of attack. CSO publishes a guide to the crime, and the Better Business Bureau offers tips on how consumers can protect themselves. Krebs notes that card data stolen from Target is "flooding" underground markets. As bad as this pay card breach is, CNN Money points out that it doesn't even crack the top five.

A relatively new banking Trojan, "Qadars," makes a nuisance of itself in the Netherlands. A zero–day vulnerability in the OpenX Source adserver is being exploited in the wild. Kaspersky reports on five destructive (and currently active) wipers.

Bitcoin exploits retain their popularity—one of them is a Zeus variant affecting mainly Chinese users of the virtual currency.

US business continues to worry about surveillance fears drying up international markets, but one apparent hit to trade (Boeing fighter sales to Brazil) now appears a false alarm (Saab won for other reasons).

Internet companies give the draft NIST cyber standards mixed reviews. Sophos publishes a timely guide to using parental controls.

The UN adopts a largely symbolic resolution in favor of privacy. The EU's deliberations over surveillance advance toward policy. In the US, skepticism over the effectiveness (and intent) of surveillance mounts amid close reading of the Presidential panel's report (and commentary by some panelists).

Notes.

Today's issue includes events affecting Brazil, European Union, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Republic of Korea, Netherlands, Poland, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United Nations, and United States..

Industry Events

For a complete running list of events, please visit the Event Tracker on the CyberWire website.

upcoming Events

FloCon2014 (Charleston, South Carolina, USA, January 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, January 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, January 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 (, January 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, January 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, January 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.

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