Category Archives: USG

Senator questions DHS’s handling of Kaspersky software ban in federal agencies

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A senior U.S. official pushed back against a Democratic senator’s criticism Thursday concerning the 90-day timeframe provided by the Department of Homeland Security for federal agencies to uninstall Kaspersky Lab products after the technology was linked to Russian intelligence efforts. In an open congressional hearing Thursday, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill questioned why the Homeland Security Department would offer such a grace period when the threat of foreign espionage is apparently evident. She implied that the Kremlin, if found in a similar situation, would be handling the situation much more rapidly. “You’re giving them a long time,” said McCaskill. “Do you think if this happened in Russia, if they found a system of ours was looking at all their stuff, that they would give their government 90 days to remove it? Seriously? The point I am making I mean is that why don’t you just say you have to remove it […]

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Good USB – Protecting Your Ports With Two Microcontrollers

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If you’ve ever needed an example of why you should not plug random USB peripherals into your computer, you need only look at BadUSB. The BadUSB attack relies on the fact that the microcontroller inside every USB device is a black box. If you plug a USB thumb drive into your computer, the microcontroller could quickly set up an additional network interface, forward all your traffic to the attacker’s server, and still keep serving up all those files and documents on the drive. Do you want a thumb drive that attaches a virus to every file? Bad USB can do …read more

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