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Posts Tagged ‘United States Army’

Laptop Ghost Strikes at U.S. Government Contractor’s Office

May 14th, 2010

Laptop Encryption with Alertsec

Next in line for the laptop ghost are over 2million U.S. army reservists. Personal data of over 207,000 U.S. army reservists has recently been stolen as it was a part of the the three laptops which have gone missing from the office of a a government contractor (Serco Inc.). The U.S. Army Reserve Command has begun started informing the reservists of security breach by issuing letters. Primarily these letters offer apologies and provide assurances that action will be taken to prevent such things from happening again:

According to Jonathan Dahms, the chief public affairs officer of U.S. Army Reserve, the Reserve Command began alerting affected reservists on May 7 about a recent security breach.

Apparently, the unencrypted data was on a CD-ROM inside a laptop which was one of three stolen from the contractor’s office but also the only one known to contain personal data. It is also believed, that laptop also contained personal data on the spouses and children of some reservists.

Excerpts from the email sent to reservists,

The Army takes this loss very seriously and is reviewing current policies and practices with a view of determining what can or must be changed to preclude a similar occurrence in the future.

At a minimum, we will be providing additional training to personnel to ensure that they understand that personally identifiable information must at all times be treated in a manner that preserves and protects the confidentiality of the data.

Col. Jonathan Dahms also added, “We did have an extensive meeting with all key staff at U.S. Army Reserve Command to see what we can implement to make sure our soldiers and families are protected,”

This incident once again highlights the negligence on the part of the government authorities to use the correct encryption mechnanism and practices. It is something that really cannot be ignored and needs to be treaded with caution. Data encryption mechanisms should be made standards to control the severity of such incidents.

Prevent these incidents: Choose Alertsec

A trusted way to protect information stored on a PC or laptop is by using encryption. Alertsec Xpress offers full disk encryption and is therefore superior to other encryption methods when comparing security, performance, robustness and ease-of-use for both administrators and users. To find out more, see Tech Specs.

Position-Based Quantum Cryptography Proved Secure (science.slashdot.org)
Stolen VA Laptop Contains Veterans’ Personal Data (techdailydose.nationaljournal.com)
VA Continues Its Annual Tradition Of Losing Laptop With Unencrypted Sensitive Data (techdirt.com)

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Posted in Alertsec Express, laptop encryption

Tags: Col. Jonathan Dahms Cryptography data data breach Encryption Identity Theft Resource Center laptop encryption laptop theft Personal computer security Serco Inc. U.S. Army Reserve United States United States Army United States Army Reserve

Computer Systems at 2500 Companies Hacked

February 18th, 2010

: Image by joshuadelaughter via Flickr

In a high security breach malicious hackers have penetrated into more than 75,000 machines in 2500 companies across the US & rest of the world.. Not only have the breached the security, but also they have obtained access to confidential data from commercial and government entitites across the globe.

According to the security firm, NetWitness, the attacks have compromised the login credentials of over 68,000 accounts revealing the new banking site information. Raising serious eye brows about the type of computer security software, the report mentioned a “dangerous new ZeuS botnet (a malicious programme)”.

Apparently, the Zeus botnet tool kit, allows criminals to infect and remotel control of users’ PCs. The Zeus tool kit can be purchased on the payment of some dollars. Swiss anti-spam activist Roman Hüssy operates the ZeusTracker website, which keeps watch on several Zeus control servers that are used by various gangs of criminals.

Alex Cox, who works at NetWitness & uncovered Kneber said, “When we detected the correlation between the methodology used by the Kneber crew to attack victim machines and the wide variety of data sets harvested, it became clear that security teams must rethink their entire perspective on threats such as Zeus”.

Kneber is described as a command-and-control system botnet based on the ZeuS Trojan and is based on the older version of 1.2 Zeus. First discovered in January, the malicious programme collects login credentials of online financial systems, social networking sites like Facebook & corporate email systems from infested computers and reports the information to miscreants.

NetWitness CEO and former Director of the National Cyber Security Division Amit Yoran said that cyber criminals like the Kneber crew target and compromise thousands of government and commercial organisations globally.

The unaware employees were caught on the backfoot when they downloaded the hacked software from the sites which were administered by the hackers. They were baited into opening emails which contained these infected attachments.

According to Yoran, “Because they’re using multiple bots and very sophisticated command and control methods, once they’re in the system, even if you whack the command and control servers, it’s difficult to rid them of the ability to control the users’ computers” .

According to WSJ, there were many companies hit by this attack including Cardinal Health, located in Dublin, Ohio, and Merck. Once the infected computers were identified they were immediately removed from the network. Also caught were the educational institutions, energy firms, financial companies, internet service providers are even government agencies were penetrated.

In a statement issued by the security firm, the scope of these attacks scaled across the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and Mexico.

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