Weekly Security Review: Anonymous, Snowden Strike Again
The cybersecurity landscape changes with every new leak and attack. This week Anonymous exposed members of the notorious Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) after the latter defaced Marines.com, and AlienVault raised new funding for its crowd-powered security platform. In related news, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA has inserted backdoors into mainstream encryption solutions.
The pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army made headlines once again on Monday after it vandalized the official website of the United States Marine Corps. The attack came hours after a spokesperson for the group denied that Anonymous obtained several gigabytes worth of information about its organizational structure. The rivaling hacktivist collective claims to have obtained personal information belonging to three prominent members of SEA.
AlienVault, a San Mateo-based provider of anti-malware solution, announced on Thursday that it closed a $26.5 million Series D funding round led by GGV Capital. Existing backers Trident Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sigma West and Adara Venture Partners also participated, along with new investors Top Tier Capital and Correlation Ventures.
AlienVault said it will use the new funding to scale marketing efforts and accelerate the development of its Open Threat Exchange, a system that enables customers to easily share threat intelligence with their peers. The solution serves as the foundation for the company’s Open Source Security Information Management (OSSIM) platform, which protects more than 250,000 users across 170 countries.
Cybersecurity solutions can keep hackers at bay, but the NSA is a different story. A new batch of documents published by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal that the spy agency is spending more than $250 million a year to introduce weaknesses into mainstream encryption standards. These include Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and the protection used on 4G devices.
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