state sponsored hackers

Pierluigi Paganini February 11, 2013
PandaLabs has published the annual report 2012

Security Software Company PandaLabs has published the annual report on cyber threats proposing interesting statistics on the diffusion of malicious agent on personal computers during 2012. Malware diffusion has registered new records, the security firm detected 27 million new malicious codes, around 74,000 new samples per day, the attacks have targeted government offices and multinational […]

Pierluigi Paganini January 29, 2013
How the US are preparing to cyber warfare?

Every government conscious of strategic importance of cyber security and of the investments of other countries in cyber warfare capability is improving its effort. Last week I wrote about Russian government and the Putin’s request to reinforce the garrison of the fifth domain, the cyber space, through a series of investment to secure national critical infrastructures […]

Pierluigi Paganini January 16, 2013
New attacks against SCADA, old vulnerabilities, very old issues

Stuxnet first and news of countless zero-day vulnerabilities in the wild have strengthened the idea that citizens security is constantly menaced by group of hackers that for different purposes are able to inflict serious damages to the structures that surround us. Critical infrastructures represent privileged targets for very different actors such as cyber terrorists or […]

Pierluigi Paganini January 14, 2013
Nokia and the accusation of MITM attack

The charge is heavy, according to some experts, Nokia analyzes user’s traffic officially to increase performance compressing data on some of its mobile devices. According many experts the popular company is responsible of the hijacking of user’s traffic on its servers, that is the case for the Nokia Asha models, for this reason on internet […]

Pierluigi Paganini January 12, 2013
New security problem for Oracle Java software

The year is start way for Oracle Java platform, a new Java 0-day vulnerability has been discovered and worldwide security community is very concerned on the potential effect of the bug. We have discovered how much dangerous could be the exploit of a zero-day vulnerability especially against institutional targets and governments (e.g. Elderwood project), state-sponsored hackers […]

Pierluigi Paganini January 11, 2013
SCADA and critical infrastructures, in … security

According last report published by The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA)   “ENISA Threat Landscape – Responding to the Evolving Threat Environment” that summarizes principal cyber threats, critical infrastructures represent privileged targets for emerging trends. Different agents such as terrorists, state-sponsored hackers or hacktivists could be interested in attack control systems within a critical […]

Pierluigi Paganini January 03, 2013
Hackers, a need for cyber security

Ten years, that is the time interval that has totally changed the worldwide perception for the role of hacker, these specialists were once seen as shady individuals to avoid, today they are highly sought professionals in both private business and government sectors. Which are the reasons for their success? The world has acquired awareness on […]

Pierluigi Paganini December 28, 2012
DoJ wants to indict state-sponsored hackers. What is the real purpose?

The last couple of years has been characterized by the raise of state-sponsored cyber attacks, governments have increased cyber capabilities to defend their critical infrastructures from offensive originated in the cyberspace but they also improved tactics to offend and spy on foreign government networks. Governments and private business of countries such as US, Japan and […]

Pierluigi Paganini December 24, 2012
Perfect Citizen, US vulnerability assessment program on critical infrastructures

CNET web site has published a news on a secret National Security Agency program named Perfect Citizen that is targeting on large-scale the control systems inside utilities, including power grid and gas pipeline controllers, with the purpose to discover security vulnerabilities. The program was revealed by new documents from EPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center), the […]

Pierluigi Paganini December 17, 2012
Group-IB: Banking trojan «Carberp» sales were reborn with bootkit module

During the last week introduced you the excellent work done by the Group-IB, a security firm resident of the Moscow-based Skolkovo Foundation that has received a grant in the amount of 30m rubles (approximately $966,000) for the development of a global counter-cybercrime system named the CyberCop. It was for me the opportunity to receive many interesting […]