DHS Chief Announces Cyber Awareness Competition

Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano announced the National Cybersecurity Awareness Campaign Challenge Competition at the RSA conference in California Wednesday. The campaign will solicit ideas from individuals and industry on the best strategy for clearly addressing the issue of cybersecurity with the American population.

During her address, Napolitano said “We need to have an ongoing, two-way conversation,…

Featured Job- Cybersecurity Systems Engineer with QinetiQ

Responsibilities: Participate as a member of the Cyber Security Team with specific responsibilities in the system development life-cycle including, system architecture development, system development, system integration, interaction with technical partners, tailoring the offering for specific customer engagements, and life-cycle maintenance of installed system solutions. The candidate will be a primary lead for the definition of the Cyber Security offering architecture and…

WoW Users Lose Health Points in Real Life

World of Warcraft (WoW), the online role playing game, has now also become a target for cyber criminals who have developed a man-in-the-middle attack to bypass the authentication kit currently used in WoW. The cyber attack involves tricking unsuspecting WoW users into downloading Trojans by disguising them as legitimate ad-ons for the game, according to an article on TheRegister.co.uk.

After the Trojan is downloaded to a victims computer, the…

German Court Rules for Privacy Advocates over Data Collection

The German Constitutional Court has overruled a 2008 law which required telecommunications companies to keep communications data for six months. The law was passed to aid in counter terrorist operations and combating transnational crime and required telecom companies to maintain logs for SMS messages, e-mails, calls, faxes and Internet use.

Around 35,000 German nationals filed complaints against the law,…

Tracking Botnets Just Got Harder

Security researchers often use ‘honey-pots’, computers without anti-virus protection containing monitoring software, to conduct research on botnets. The honey-pot computer becomes infected with a virus that would turn it into part of the botnet. However, the system is set up so the commands sent to the computer are monitored and the computer does not actually follow the commands of the control computer.

This research effort, which is one of the…

P2P Threatens Health Record Privacy Too

Peer-to-peer sharing software seems to be the bane of Internet security, particularly in privacy terms. Records of highly classified materials (like the schematics of the president’s helicopter) have been found on P2P networks along with records of confidential ethics investigations undertaken by Congress.

Personal health records can also be added to the list. In a recent article which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, researchers discovered…

Featured Job- Cybersecurity Mission Area Director with Northrop Grumman

The Cyber Security Mission Area Director will develop the business strategy and serve as the subject matter expert for the cyber security mission of civilian agencies for the Civil Systems Division. This position will serve as the public face of Civil Systems Division on Cyber-security, creating thought leadership, participating in industry committees and nurturing executive relationships with key customers. This position will…

CNCI Declassified

The White House has unveiled a declassified version of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI). The CNCI was originally started by the Bush Administration and President Obama has decided to evolve the CNCI to become key sections in an expanded and up-to-date cybersecurity strategy for the US.

The decision to declassify portions of the…

Howard Schmidt Discusses Cybersecurity at RSA Conference

This week, San Francisco is playing host to the RSA Conference, which has seen a gathering from some of the top IT security professionals in the world. Howard Schmidt, currently serving as the White House Cybersecurity Coordinator, was a featured speaker at the event.

Today, Schmidt announced the declassification of a portion…

Diana Gowen Discusses Recent Developments in Cyber at Qwest

Last month, Qwest Communications opened a new facility in the Washington, D.C., area for cloud-computing infrastructure services, its 17th cyber center in the nation. In a recent interview with Fed Cloud Blog, Diana Gowen, senior vice president and general manager at Qwest Government Systems, discussed the opening of the new center and the…