UPDATED 08:50 EDT / FEBRUARY 18 2011

This Week in Cybersecurity: From the Pentagon to HBGray

This past week has seen a lot of security news and developments, even beyond RSA 2011. However, our first update comes straight from the heart of the conference – today’s cyberwar keynote panel.

The panel, which included former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, Mike McConnell and security author Bruce Schneier discussed multiple topics, including the true meaning behind the term cyberwar, and the need for an official cyber attack response structure. Other topics included WikiLeaks, and the notion the government should share more details about the seriousness of cyberwarfare with the private sector.

“While noting that progress has been made in many areas of national cyber security, the panelists seemed resigned to the likelihood that it will take a major incident for the U.S. to take the appropriate steps to better secure our computing infrastructure.”

The panelists also brought up the private sector should work more closely with the government to prepare for cyber attacks, which is exactly what military and deputy secretary of defense William Lynn seems to think. We covered Lynn’s RSA keynote here, but to top that off, Bloomberg reports that Lynn announced the U.S. Defense Department will spend $500 million on cyber security technology development, including cloud computing.

Maybe the private sector and government should join power to develop cyber security, at least in Canada. The AP reports Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper told reporters a few short hours ago that a cyber attack penetrated and took down two key governmental agencies. The attack also infiltrated the computers of high ranking officials, but not specific details regarding the attack were disclosed.

” CBC said it was unclear whether the attackers were Chinese or simply other nationals who used China-based servers, but another Canadian television network, CTV, reported they were “Chinese government hackers”.

China is gaining attention in more than just the security front, and that includes mobile. Lookout Security reported 14 separate instances of the “HongTouTou” malware, which is spread via repackaged Android apps. However, alongside China and the few details circling the Canadian government hacking, The Register delivers just about every bit of information about the recent HBGray security firm cyber attack. That includes an SQL injection weakness in a 3rd party CMS, which was apparently used to steal hashed site passwords.

SiliconANGLE analyst John Casaretto discussed the retaliation attack of the cyberactivist group Anon against the security film  as well as HBGray’s canceling its appearance at the RSA  conference.

From cyber attacks, to cyber security, we covered it all this week, including the highlights from the RSA conference. These include the web & mobile keynote, Cisco’s rethinking of Enterprise 2.0 security and RSA chairman Art Coviello’s take on cybersecurity and virtualization. There’s also the recently released M86 Security Labs Report, which sheds light on some interesting insights to the state of the internet in the second half of 2010.


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