“It’s True. Your Devices Are Listening to You,” stated the title for a sales pitch on the website of a major media conglomerate; however, the statement wasn’t a warning about the invasive eavesdropping practice that many suspect that tech companies undertake, but instead it was a boast: media company Cox Mediaread more
While the danger posed by major solar storms to our civilization’s power grids is well documented (such as Whitley’s must-read 2012 ebook on the subject, Solar Flares), the potential effects of such storms on another network vital to the functioning of our society—the internet—is not as well understood. A new studyread more
U.S. intelligence officials are warning that the United States is considering launching cyber attacks against Russian interests, in retaliation for potential interference by Russian hackers in the upcoming American presidential election.
NBC News reports of the existence of "top-secret cyber weapons" — basically malware that is under the control of United States Cyber Command — that the U.S. military has in place in key control systems in Russia, including telecommunications, power grids, and the Kremlin’s own command and control systems.
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Over the past week, the African country of Liberia has been the target of a series of high-bandwidth directed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, nearly crippling the nation’s fledgling internet service.
The attacks originated from a network called Mirai botnet #14, intermittently flooding Libera’s networks with traffic of over 500 gigabits per second in bandwidth during each attack. Botnets consist of a network of thousands of "zombie computers", typically home computers that, unknown to their individual owners, have viruses or other malware that send out data when commended to by the controller of the malware.
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