The FISMA Focus IPD

From: Cybereye

Posted by Brian Robinson

Cybersecurity more and more resembles nothing less than old-fashioned warcraft, with both sides confident in the weaponry they have and in their ability to either penetrate or defend borders. As the threat of cyberconflicts ratchets up, the two modes of warfare seem at times to be getting chillingly similar.

The latest expression of confidence came from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who on March 28 spoke to an audience at the National Security Agency headquarters to mark the retirement of Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of both the NSA and the U.S. Cyber Command.

From: iHealthBeat

On Friday, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT released a new tool to help small- and medium-sized health care providers assess their information security risks, Modern Healthcare reports (Landen, Modern Healthcare, 3/28).

Background

The security risk assessment, or SRA, tool was first introduced in February at a session of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s 2014 conference.

It is ONC’s first mobile application and will help health care organizations document that they have considered security risks (Gold, FierceHealthIT, 3/28).

Details of Tool

The no-cost tool — which can be downloaded to both Windows and Apple iOS operating systems — includes:

From: ComputerWeekly.com

Warwick Ashford

Businesses around the world are counting the cost of failing to defend against advanced evasion techniques (AETs), a report reveals.

Nearly 40% of CIOs and security managers whose organisations have been breached by cyber attacks on their networks believe AETs played a key role, according to a survey by Vanson Bourne.

The study polled 800 CIOs and security managers in the UK, US, Germany, France, Australia,Brazil and South Africa.

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From: EINPresswire

GDF Suez will join an already impressive speaker line-up that includes Total, Tullow Oil, Salalah Methanol Company, Cairn India, and Saudi Aramco among others.

OSLO, NORWAY, March 31, 2014 /EINPresswire.com/ — The oil and gas sector is rapidly evolving to meet increased demand by expanding asset portfolios and updating infrastructure. To support these industry changes, technology is advancing and infrastructural processes are being transformed – improved interconnectivity between business systems and networks within the oil and gas infrastructure setting are enhancing operations, but also exposing new avenues for system threats and vulnerabilities. Cyber attacks in the oil and gas industry can have detrimental effects on process control networks and related systems which could destabilise supply capabilities, endanger personnel and result in environmental damage. New vulnerabilities have been introduced with the migration to IT components such as general-purpose computing platforms, standard operating systems, in addition to the introduction of networking technology like TCP/IP & Ethernet in the SCADA environment and integration of business and process control networks.

From: Reuters

Twenty-one of the world’s top-25 news organizations have been the target of likely state-sponsored hacking attacks, according to research by two Google security engineers.

While many internet users face attacks via email designed to steal personal data, journalists were “massively over-represented” among such targets, said Shane Huntley, a security software engineer at Google.

The attacks were launched by hackers either working for or in support of a government, and were specifically targeting journalists, Huntley and co-author Morgan Marquis-Boire said in interviews. Their paper was presented at a Black Hat hackers conference in Singapore on Friday.