After claiming for several years that medical devices need more security and ICT security, and after remembering to everyone that Dick Cheney remote controlled pacemaker has been disabled for all the time he has been US vicepresident, it is nice to see that our perspective is becoming popular (or at least more popular).

The web magazine Dark Reading has recently featured an article regarding this topic, stating that “With an increasing number of Internet-connected medical devices in use to manage diabetes, protection against a variety of wireless network attacks could very well be a matter of life and death for…

This question resulted in the definition of the Belfer National Cyber Power Index (NCPI) that measures 30 countries cyber capabilities in the context of 7 national objectives that countries pursue using cyber means. These 7 objectives are:

1. Surveilling and Monitoring Domestic Groups;
2. Strengthening and Enhancing National Cyber Defenses;
3. Controlling and Manipulating the Information Environment;
4. Foreign Intelligence Collection for National Security;
5. Commercial Gain or Enhancing Domestic Industry Growth;
6. Destroying or Disabling an Adversary’s Infrastructure and Capabilities;
7. Defining International Cyber Norms and Technical Standards.

It is worth noticing that in contrast to the broadly held…

To explain this concern we can recall that current national and European cyber security legislation classifies the networks that distribute electricity, gas and water as critical infrastructure and requires severe security requirements for the ICT/OT networks that supervise and control these infrastructures. The reason is fairly obvious, a successful attack against the control network can have huge impact and also loss of human life is possible. As an example, NIS, Network and Information Security is a European Directive approved in 2016 that requires the adoption of a shared set of security measures for ICT networks and systems. Member States had…

Most OT systems include legacy equipment not designed to be connected to the internet nor defend against malicious cyber activities. This is particularly worrying because more and more utilities, petrochemical installations, factories and so on are remotely managed. Hence, several activities are executed over the web using an IT network to connect to the OT side, enabling monitoring, instrumentation and control, OT asset management / maintenance, and in some cases, process operations and maintenance. An interesting, and even more troublesome point, is that this happens not only in the civilian but even in the military world.

The catastrophic impacts of…

According to this curve, in 2017 more than 40% of US heterosexual couples met online. This confirms Marc Andreessen prediction that ‘software is eating the world’, and everything we are doing is done by interacting with some piece of code running on some piece of hardware. In most cases, we do not own the software, we do not own the hardware and we do not know how the software and the hardware work, which information they are collecting and storing, where the storing memory is located and how long it will maintain this information. This points out two critical problems.
The…

Last month Garmin has been the target of a successful ransomware attack that temporarily took offline most of the company servers. Hence, most of the services it offers have been unavailable. It later claimed it was the victim of a cyberattack without offering specifics about what caused it. Reports and further indicators suggested ransomware was involved.

According to Sky News, Garmin paid a “multi-million dollar ransom” via a third-party company called Arete Incident Response to regain access to its files and systems. Engadget has contacted Garmin for comment.

It has not been revealed who was behind the attack nor to…

It is very significant that just when Twitter is targeted by an attack enabled by the stealing of credential of some of its employees, U.S. prosecutors have filed a superseding indictment in federal court against two former Twitter employees for allegedly spying on dissidents on behalf of Saudi Arabia.

The Department of Justice had alleged last year that two former Twitter employees, Ahmad Abouammo and Ali Alzabarah, have been recruited by a Saudi national with ties to the royal family. The two employees have abused their access to Twitter to collect sensitive information about Saudi dissidents, including location data, email…

According to the NYT and to Wired, Graham Ivan Clark, 17, was charge with 30 felonies and arrested in his Tampa home early Friday and two other peoples have been charged because authorities says it ran a scam scheme that targeted the accounts of celebrities, including the accounts of celebrities like former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Elon Musk. Court documents show about 415 payments to the bitcoin wallet associated with the scam, totaling around $177,000.

The teenager broke into Twitter’s network using a phone spear phishing attack on an employee but it…