Blog posts with "espionage"

In what's being labeled the biggest hacking bust in the history of China, police in the Hubei Province arrested three people and seized several computers and servers, a car, and 1.7 million yuan ($250,000). The three arrested were allegedly involved in a web site known as the Black Hawk Safety Net (www.3800hk.com) which sells courses in cybersecurity, aka hacking. According to officials, the site has made around $1 million since it started in 2005. It does not appear that the individuals arre...

After Obama's State of the Union Address, Brazilian hackers defaced around 50 U.S. government sites, placing expletive containing messages against Obama on each site. These sites primarily serve the House of Representatives, and were undergoing routine maintenance which briefly exposed the sites to attack. That was all the time these vandals needed to heckle these politicians.   One might wonder what the intentions of such an attack might be. Certainly there was a denunciation of Obama, but ...

The situation Google faces in China, with patriotic hackers (possibly even state sponsored) causing trouble for Google subscribers, some of whom are Chinese dissidents, presents a unique example of a synergistic interaction between cyber-criminals and government regulators. The United States has had similar groups emerge, such as vigilante anti-terror hackers, some of which still operate (for an interesting read, click here). Are we seeing some of the first acts of a new class of hackers? Cou...

  Yesterday, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), a congressional advisory panel, released a joint analysis with Northrop Grumman reporting that the Chinese government is building up their hacking and cyber warfare abilities. The report is based on case studies of prior cyber attacks, People's Liberation Army releases, scholarly contributions from experts, and journals from the Chinese National Defense University and the Academy of Military Sciences.     According t...

  Stewart Nozette (pictured left, from nasa.gov), a former NASA, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), and U.S. Naval Research scientist, was arrested Monday for allegedly trying to sell national secrets to FBI agents posing as Israeli government agents for $11,000. This is not the first time Nozette has been under investigation. He was investigated in 2006 for allegedly submitting false expense forms to NASA.     Nozette was arrested on Monday, and indicted Wednesday afternoo...

Three men from Beijing were sentenced over the past few days for attempting to take highly sensitive military technology back to China. The FBI caught the men who were trying to move cutting edge thermal cameras made by FLIR (full story from the FBI here). The three are going to serve between one and five years in federal prison for the attempts. The three were charged under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). Apparently one...