Category Archives: intelligence

FBI pushes private sector to cut ties with Kaspersky

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The FBI has been briefing private sector companies on intelligence claiming to show that the Moscow-based cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab is an unacceptable threat to national security, current and former senior U.S. officials familiar with the matter tell CyberScoop. The briefings are one part of an escalating conflict between the U.S. government and Kaspersky amid long-running suspicions among U.S. intelligence officials that Russian spy agencies use the company as an intelligence-gathering tool of global proportions. The FBI’s goal is to have U.S. firms push Kaspersky out of their systems as soon as possible or refrain from using them in new products or other efforts, the current and former officials say. The FBI’s counterintelligence section has been giving briefings since beginning of the year on a priority basis, prioritizing companies in the energy sector and those that use industrial control (ICS) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. In light of successive cyberattacks against the electric grid in Ukraine, […]

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Russians can hijack satellites in order to launch cyberattacks, documents show

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Russian intelligence services have been capable of hijacking satellite signals to launch stealthy cyberattacks since at least 2013, according to a newly published cache of classified documents belonging to Canada’s Communications Security Establishment and obtained by The Intercept. Because the innovative hacking technique is believed to be limited to a small number of operators, the revelation highlights the Kremlin’s longstanding effort to develop highly sophisticated cyber espionage capabilities on par with other world powers. The Intercept shared these sensitive documents in a story Wednesday, which sought to disprove U.S. President Donald Trump’s assertion that Russian hackers are so skilled that they cannot be tracked or accurately attributed — an opinion that was also recently voiced by Russian President Vladimir Putin. In part, The Intercept’s story underlines how a series of simplistic but critical operational security mistakes by a skilled hacking group, codenamed MakersMark or Turla, eventually allowed Canadian intelligence officials […]

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Fighting Leakers at Apple

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Apple is fighting its own battle against leakers, using people and tactics from the NSA. According to the hour-long presentation, Apple’s Global Security team employs an undisclosed number of investigators around the world to prevent information from reaching competitors, counterfeiters, and the press, as well as hunt down the source when leaks do occur. Some of these investigators have previously… Continue reading Fighting Leakers at Apple→

Who is Publishing NSA and CIA Secrets, and Why?

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There’s something going on inside the intelligence communities in at least two countries, and we have no idea what it is. Consider these three data points. One: someone, probably a country’s intelligence organization, is dumping massive amounts of cyberattack tools belonging to the NSA onto the Internet. Two: someone else, or maybe the same someone, is doing the same thing… Continue reading Who is Publishing NSA and CIA Secrets, and Why?→

I’m A Tricorder, Not A Doctor, Jim!

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Machine learning and automated technologies are poised to disrupt employment in many industries — looking at you autonomous vehicles — and medicine is not immune to this encroachment. The Qualcomm Tricorder competition run by the X-Prize foundation has just wrapped, naming [Final Frontier Medical Devices]’s DxtER the closest thing available to Star Trek’s illustrious medical tricorder which is an oft referenced benchmark for diagnostic automation.

The competition’s objective was for teams to develop a handheld, non-invasive device that could diagnose 12 diseases and an all-clear result in 24 hours or less without any assistance. [Dynamical Biomarkers Group] took second place …read more

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IARPA director: New homomorphic crypto is ‘math magic’

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The latest kind of advanced encryption could soon allow classified computing to be done on unclassified computer systems, a senior intelligence official said Thursday. “That’s really one of the next places [we’re] likely to look — Can we use homomorphic encryption to do secure multiparty computation?” Jason Matheny, director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, told the Billington Cybersecurity Summit. Matheny said that his agency had first started researching homomorphic encryption in 2011 to fix a gap in the way data was kept secure. The method allows analysis on encrypted data without the need for decryption. “We were good at protecting [data] at rest, we were good at protecting it in transit, but not while it was being processed,” Matheny said. The problem: In order to perform any computational function, even as simple as a search, the data had to be decrypted, then processed. And at that point an adversary who […]

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