Robert McMillan of IDG has three posts on hacking attacks today and over the weekend. We are heading into the busy Christmas on-line shopping season this is a particularly rich time for Internet crime:
New attack fells Internet Explorer "The zero-day flaw is unreliable, but Symantec expects reliable exploits in the 'near future".
This exploit is known to affect only older versions of Explorer, which commands "40 percent" of the browser market. Quite a few people could be affected.
Cyberattacks on U.S. military jump sharply in 2009:
Citing data provided by the U.S. Strategic Command, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said that there were 43,785 malicious cyber incidents targeting Defense systems in the first half of the year. That's a big jump. In all of 2008, there were 54,640 such incidents. If cyber attacks maintain this pace, they will jump 60% this year.
"The cost of such attacks is significant," the report notes. Citing data from the Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations, the report says that the military spent $100 million to fend off these attacks between September 2008 and March 2009.
One point about this data is that this is only the known attacks. I am sure that more than $100 million is spent securing our infrastructure. That is the real cost and the unknown attacks are the real threat.
The full 5MB+ pdf of the report can be found here.
Global warming research exposed after hack:
The files include about a decade of e-mail correspondence belonging to Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Shortly after news of the leak began circulating Thursday, critics of global warming science zeroed in on some of the messages as evidence of bias in the climate research community.
Judging from the data posted, the hack was done either by an insider or by someone inside the climate community who was familiar with the debate, said Robert Graham, CEO with the consultancy Errata Security. Whenever this type of incident occurs, "80 percent of the time it's an insider," he said.
The Wall Street Journal also reported on the leak: Climate Emails Stoke Debate:
The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with.
The IPCC couldn't be reached for comment Sunday.
In one email, Benjamin Santer from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., wrote to the director of the climate-study center that he was "tempted to beat" up Mr. Michaels. Mr. Santer couldn't be reached for comment Sunday.
In another, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics' research was unwelcome: We "will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday.
The emails reveal significant bias, spin, and possible fraud involving climate data including correspondence with Andrew Revkin of the New York Times. The timing is horrible for global warming advocates. With a major conference next month in Copenhagen, there is considerable spin underway among global warming advocates and considerable disclosure underway by their opponents.
See video here and comments here from those opposed to cap and trade taxes.
I like fresh air but it is clear that anything you communicate electronically should be treated as a matter of public record and not private. There are too many ways for it to be made public.
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