Salon.com > Jeb Boone

Hacker steals sensitive infrastructure data from U.S. military

Thu, 02 May 2013 20:34:00 +0000

The US military has revealed that a hacker infiltrated a government database for a period of several months, gaining access to detailed US Army Corps of Engineers information regarding possible vulnerabilities in US infrastructure.

According to a report published by nonprofit online newspaper the Washington Free Beacon, the hacker, possibly using stolen username and password credentials, accessed the National Inventory of Dams (NID) and siezed information not normally available to the public.

The NID database contains comprehensive information about 79,000 dams throughout the US, including the estimated number of deaths there would be if a given dam failed.

“The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is aware that access to the National Inventory of Dams (NID), to include sensitive fields of information not generally available to the public, was given to an unauthorized individual in January 2013 who was subsequently determined to not to have proper level of access for the information,” Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson Pete Pierce told the Washington Free Beacon.

Can an online market for meth, smack and pot win?

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:38:00 +0000

ATLANTA — Senator Chuck Schumer called it "a certifiable one-stop shop" for meth, heroin and cocaine, "the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen."

That was in June 2011, just days after Gawker writer Adrian Chen outed the site, known as Silk Road.

Schumer's outrage was palpable. He commanded Attorney General Eric Holder to shut down the clandestine marketplace.

But in the nearly two years that have passed, that apparently hasn't happened.

The site mysteriously disappeared for two weeks in November 2012, and its proprietor, alias Dread Pirate Roberts, went incommunicado from online forums. That led some to speculate that law enforcement had shut it down.

But the opposite now appears to be true.

Due to an explosion in popularity, Silk Road's infrastructure had to be rebuilt to accommodate new customers and security, Dread Pirate Roberts said in a post following his return. And performance measures were added to better protect users.

The Pentagon is planning the nation’s largest ever cyber army

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 21:44:00 +0000

In a major expansion of the US Defense Department’s Cyber Command, the Pentagon reportedly plans to recruit thousands of code crackers, online security professionals and even hackers to deploy the nation’s largest ever cyber army.

The command will recruit an additional 4,000 troops and civilians in the expansion of Cyber Command’s personnel to respond to the growing threat of cyber espionage, state-sponsored cyber-attacks and hacker collectives, The Washington Post reported.

“Given the malicious actors that are out there and the development of the technology, in my mind, there’s little doubt that some adversary is going to attempt a significant cyber-attack on the United States at some point,” William J. Lynn III, a former deputy defense secretary who helped fashion the Pentagon’s cyber security strategy, told The Post.

Will Yemen follow in Libya’s footsteps?

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:01:00 +0000

SANAA, Yemen -- Remember Yemen?

With Gadhafi on the run and Syria still at the height of its crackdown, it's easy to forget that protests are still going on in Yemen.

Probably because they aren't making much headway.

Thousands of Yemenis continue to stage anti-regime demonstrations and live in tent cities around the country, more than seven months after they first took to the streets demanding President Ali Abdullah Saleh's ouster.

But Saleh, while remaining in Saudi Arabia, is still the president of Yemen, and for the second time the ruling party has failed to agree on a power transfer to the vice president.

Protesters are growing increasingly frustrated with their lack of progress. Some, inspired by the fall of Tripoli and the triumph of the Libyan rebels, are even considering a more militant approach.

"We saw what happened in Libya and we felt sorry for ourselves," said Nader Abdullah, a protester working in the media center in Sanna's Change Square. "We said that our revolution would always be peaceful. This is a problem."