Wednesday, 4 November 2009
International cooperation to shape common policies for cybersecurity and data protection
By William Jackson
GCN.com
Nov 03, 2009
The United States and the European Union have agreed to treat cybersecurity, cyber crime and data protection as international issues, cooperatively developing polices based on shared values.
Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Homeland Security Department, called the recent joint statement on these principles by U.S. and E.U. officials a major milestone in data protection and data sharing.
"The next step is negotiating a binding international E.U.-U.S.
agreement based on these common principles to facilitate further cooperation while ensuring the availability of full protection for our citizens," she said.
The pledge is intended to extend ongoing efforts to align U.S. and E.U.
policies on transatlantic issues, as Europe updates its human rights policies in the Stockholm Programme, expected to be completed this year.
"We would like to take this opportunity to renew our partnership for the next five years," the statement said.
Mossad Hacked Syrian Official's Computer Before Bombing Mysterious Facility
By Kim Zetter
Threat Level
Wired.com
November 3, 2009
Agents of Israel's Mossad intelligence service hacked into the computer of a senior Syrian government official a year before Israel bombed a facility in Syria in 2007, according to Der Spiegel.
The intelligence agents planted a Trojan horse on the official's computer in late 2006 while he was staying at a hotel in the Kensington district of London, the German newspaper reported Monday in an extensive account of the bombing attack.
The official reportedly left his computer in his hotel room when he went out, making it easy for agents to install the malware that siphoned files from the laptop. The files contained construction plans for the Al Kabir complex in eastern Syria - said to be an illicit nuclear facility - as well as letters and hundreds of detailed photos showing the complex at various stages of construction.
At the beginning - probably in 2002, although the material was
undated - the construction site looked like a treehouse on stilts,
complete with suspicious-looking pipes leading to a pumping station
at the Euphrates. Later photos show concrete piers and roofs, which
apparently had only one function: to modify the building so that it
would look unsuspicious from above. In the end, the whole thing
looked as if a shoebox had been placed over something in an attempt
to conceal it. But photos from the interior revealed that what was
going on at the site was in fact probably work on fissile material.
Early in the morning of September 6, 2007, Israeli fighter jets bombed the complex, located in the desert near the Euphrates river about 80 miles from the Iraq border. The attack, dubbed "Operation Orchard,"
seemed to come out of nowhere and was marked by a resounding silence from both Israel and the United States afterward.
Malwarebytes accuses rivals of theft
By Elinor Mills
InSecurity Complex
CNet News
November 3, 2009
Malwarebytes is accusing China-based computer security firm IObit of intellectual property theft, but IObit denied the allegations and said there were problems with its malware submission site.
Malwarebytes claims IObit stole from its database of signatures of malicious applications that its software uses for detecting malware on customer computers.
Malwarebytes discovered that IObit's Security 360 free anti-malware software was flagging a specific key generator piece of code for Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware software and using the same naming scheme, which includes the phrase "Don't Steal Our Software," according to a blog post on the Malwarebytes.org site.
After finding additional evidence, Malwarebytes conducted a test and added fake definitions for a fake rogue application to its database of malware. Within two weeks, IObit was detecting the fake files and using "almost exactly" the fake names, Malwarebytes said.
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