In Australia: A high school teacher who assigned her class to plan a terrorist attack that would kill as many innocent people as possible had no intent to promote terrorism, the school principal said yesterday. The Year-10 students at Kalgoorlie-Boulder Community High School were asked to pretend they were terrorists making a political statement by releasing a chemical or biological…  Read More →

CSC Launches Enhanced Global StrikeForce Security Assessment Suite FALLS CHURCH, Va., Aug. 30 – CSC (NYSE: CSC) announced today that it launched its enhanced CSC Global StrikeForce Security Assessments, a suite of elite services performed by a highly skilled global team of certified and licensed cybersecurity experts. The CSC Global StrikeForce Security Assessments evaluate the  Read More →

Someone sent me this quote in an attempt to convince me that we should focus on vulnerabilities and not threats…I don’t think they are mutually exclusive, but here nor there… Our data tells us that focusing on vulnerabilities is more effective in reducing risk than focusing on threats.  In fact, of nine specific types of threats we  Read More →

A top British codebreaker found mysteriously dead last week in his flat had worked with the NSA and British intelligence to intercept e-mail messages that helped convict would-be bombers in the U.K., according to a news report. Gareth Williams, 31, made repeated visits to the U.S. to meet with the National Security Agency and worked closely with British and U.S. spy agencies to intercept and examine communications that passed between an al Qaeda... 

Pfc. Bradley Manning, the former intelligence analyst suspected of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, has hired a civilian attorney to defend him, according to a report. David Coombs, a former U.S. Army attorney in Rhode Island , was named as Manning’s new attorney, according to the Associated Press . According to his web site, Coombs’s civilian practice specializes in military court martial cases. He has handled military... 

A Las Vegas company established to sue bloggers who clip news content is expanding its operations to a second newspaper chain. Righthaven LLC has struck a deal with Arkansas-based WEHCO Media to expand its copyright litigation campaign, in which bloggers and aggregators across the country are being sued on allegations of infringement. Until now, Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson’s sole announced client had been Nevada-based Stephens Media .... 

An alleged carder arrested earlier this month in France has been added to a long list of defendants charged with participating in the coordinated $9.5 million global heist against Atlanta-based card processing company RBS WorldPay, in a revised federal indictment issued in Georgia last week. Vladislav Anatolievich Horohorin, 27, aka BadB, was charged with one count each of wire fraud and access device fraud for his alleged role…  Read More →

Chilling: How do most wrongful convictions come about? The primary cause is mistaken identification. Actually, I wouldn’t call it mistaken identification; I’d call it misidentification, because you often find that there was some sort of misconduct by the police. In a lot of cases, the victim initially wasn’t so sure. And then the police say, “Oh, no, you got the…  Read More →

Since a fatal crash a few years ago, Boston T (their subway) operators have been forbidden from using — or even having — cell phones while on the job. Passengers are encouraged to report violators. But sometimes T operators need to use their official radios on the job, and passengers can’t tell the difference. The solution: orange tape: The solution?…  Read More →

GE continues to hire security professionals to help reduce IT risk at our company. I should be posting additional jobs for my team ( GE-CIRT ) next month, but right now my boss (our CISO) asked me to help find a Business Response Team (BRT) Leader for our Corporate entity. Visit www.ge.com/careers and search for job 1251700 to find the role. From the summary: The Business Response Team (BRT) Leader is responsible for working with business peers... 

I was only able to get a few interviews while I was in Vegas this year.  But one of my favorites was talking to Joe Grand, the creator of all five year’s worth of electronic Defcon badges.  This year’s badge was smaller than previous years but it had some unique and interesting capabilities and it was also the most artistic of them all.  Joe talks about the hardware that went into making the badge, some of the difficulties they... 

Pretty….  Read More →

Back in May, I attended the EastWest Institute’s First Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit in Dallas. I only had eight minutes to speak, and tried to turn the dialog to security, privacy, and the individual….  Read More →

Full-body scanners in roving vans: American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. This should be…  Read More →

What the heck is that blue box on top of the Small Dome at MIT? Students starting school this week at the venerable geek institution were wondering that themselves. Let’s take a closer look . . . Yep, it turns out that the Doctor is stopping by to give the first lecture in 6.01, the infamously hard and awesome introduction to computer science class. The Doctor, of course, remembers when it was called 6.001. You can see a whole history...