FISMA News

From: CBS News

First came reports of a widespread hack of Apple devices in Australia — the attacker locked the devices remotely and demanded ransom from the owners. Now, CBS Los Angeles reports the scam appears to have reached the U.S.

Earlier this week, many Australian owners of Apple devices began discovering that their iPhones, iPads and Macs had been hacked by someone using the name Oleg Pliss. They were directed to a PayPal account and told to send money to have them unlocked, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

From: WSJ/digits

Frances Robinson

BRUSSELS– At the tail end of a bruising 2013, Belgium’s government decided it had had enough. The decision to set up a cyber-security agency followed a series of high-profile incidents, including the hacking of the country’s biggest telecoms operator, Belgacom and the leak to a newspaper of a CD containing the Prime Minister’s personal emails.

With EUR 10 million budget earmarked, the Centre pour la cybersécurité Belgique (CCB) was meant to be up and running in the first half of this year.

It’s now almost the end of May, the center is not operational, no chief has been chosen, and Belgium has been hacked again.

From: NYT

By JONATHAN ZITTRAIN

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — THE European Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday that Europeans have a limited “right to be forgotten” by search engines like Google. According to the ruling, an individual can compel Google to remove certain reputation-harming search results that are generated by Googling the individual’s name. The court is trying to address an important problem — namely, the Internet’s ability to preserve indefinitely all its information about you, no matter how unfortunate or misleading — but it has devised a poor solution.

From: The algemeiner

Britain’s Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance and Israel’s National Cyber Bureau on Thursday met in London to sign a pact to finance joint cyber defense research, the UK’s Jewish News reported.

“Britain is one of the most advanced countries in the world on cyber defense, and we place great importance on promoting and strengthening cooperation with our UK partners,” said Dr. Eviatar Matania, head of the Israeli agency. “We believe that mutual sharing of knowledge will strengthen both countries.”

Matania signed the pact with her British counterpart, James Quinault.

From: The Washington Post

By Mohana Ravindranath

President Obama’s former National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon on Tuesday urged Internet users to employ better “cyber hygiene” to protect themselves in a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape.

At FOSE 2014, Washington’s annual federal IT expo, Donilon gave a keynote talk called “America’s Foreign, Defense and Cyber Policy: An Insider’s Perspective,”during which he said cyber threats are “more sophisticated and pervasive as the world leads more of its business life and its personal life and its security online.”

From: ABC News

By ALEXANDER TUCCIARONE

The former Navy sailor accused of leading a group of hackers that targeted U.S. government and private websites said today that he and his associates were “just a group of people that were dumb and did dumb things.”

“Essentially I am in trouble for posting all of the stuff on Twitter,” Knight told ABC News by email in his first interview. “Although a lot of people are saying I was the leader of some crime organizations that was out to get people which wasn’t true. Just a group of people that were dumb and did dumb things.”

From: China Daily/Op-ed

By Wu Yixue

A female suspect named Gao Yu was detained for leaking “state secrets” to foreign contacts, said Beijing police on Thursday. Gao, 70, a Beijing resident and a former journalist, was suspected of illegally obtaining a highly confidential document of the Chinese central government and sending it to an overseas website in June last year, which later became widely circulated on foreign websites.

This is the third case reported this week on overseas espionage, which highlights the grave challenge to national security. It’s high time the related authorities tightened regulations on classified documents and raised people’s awareness of protecting state secrets.

From: SearchSecurity.in

Anup Basti

The Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec shows that the world is in an era of “mega data breach”. Organizations worldwide are suffering and this includes both national security departments and commercial enterprises.

According to the latest report, the number of data records breached has increased by 62% in the last year, to 552 million.

India is the third most vulnerable country in the world when it comes to data breach threats from malicious cyber activities.

Read Complete Article

From: FierceGovernmentIT

White House report makes big data policy recommendations

By Molly Bernhart Walker

Big data poses a serious risk to consumer privacy and challenges corporations to responsibly handle security – two areas that need prompt attention and policy development from the White House, says a May 1 report (pdf) from administration officials on big data.

Among the report’s recommendations, authors urge the president to push data breach legislation and extend the consumer privacy protections first laid out in the White House’s February 2012 Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights.