NSA Developing System To Crack Encryption

The U.S. National Security Agency is working to develop a computer that could ultimately break most encryption programs, whether they are used to protect other nations’ spying programs or consumers’ bank accounts, according to a report by the Washington Post.

The report, which the newspaper said was based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, comes amid continuing controversy over the spy agency’s program to collect the phone records Internet communications of private citizens.

In its report, The Washington Post said that the NSA is trying to develop a so-called “quantum computer” that could be used to break encryption codes used to cloak sensitive information.

Such a computer, which would be able to perform several calculations at once instead of in a single stream, could take years to develop, the newspaper said. In addition to being able to break through the cloaks meant to protect private data, such a computer would have implications for such fields as medicine, the newspaper reported.

The research is part of a $79.7 million research program called “Penetrating Hard Targets,” the newspaper said. Other, non-governmental researchers are also trying to develop quantum computers, and it is not clear whether the NSA program lags the private efforts or is ahead of them.

Snowden, living in Russia with temporary asylum, last year leaked documents he collected while working for the NSA. The United States has charged him with espionage, and more charges could follow.

His disclosures have sparked a debate over how much leeway to give the U.S. government in gathering information to protect Americans from terrorism, and have prompted numerous lawsuits.

Last week, a federal judge ruled that the NSA’s collection of phone call records is lawful, while another judge earlier in December questioned the program’s constitutionality. The issue is now more likely to move before the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Thursday, the editorial board of the New York Times said that the U.S. government should grant Snowden clemency or a plea bargain, given the public value of revelations over the National Security Agency’s vast spying programs.

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Cyber Attacks Increasing In Middle East

Syria’s civil war and political strife in Egypt have given birth to new battlegrounds on the Web and driven a surge in cyber attacks in the Middle East, according to a leading Internet security company.

More than half of incidents in the Gulf this year were so-called “hacktivist” attacks – which account for only a quarter of cybercrime globally – as politically motivated programmers sabotaged opposing groups or institutions, executives from Intel Corp’s software security division McAfee said on Tuesday.

“It’s mostly bringing down websites and defacing them with political messages – there has been a huge increase in cyber attacks in the Middle East,” Christiaan Beek, McAfee director for incident response forensics in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), told Reuters.

He attributed the attacks to the conflict in Syria, political turmoil in Egypt and the activities of hacking collective Anonymous.

“It’s difficult for people to protest in the street in the Middle East and so defacing websites and denial of service (DOS) attacks are a way to protest instead,” said Beek.

DOS attacks flood an organization’s website causing it to crash, but usually do little lasting damage.

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a hacking group loyal to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, defaced an Internet recruiting site for the U.S. Marine Corps on Monday and recently targeted the New York Times website and Twitter, as well other websites within the Middle East.

Beek described SEA as similar to Anonymous.

“There’s a group leading operations, with a support group of other people that can help,” said Beek.

McAfee opened a centre in Dubai on Monday to deal with the rising threat of Internet sabotage in the region, the most serious of which are attacks to extract proprietary information from companies or governments or those that cause lasting damage to critical infrastructure.

Cyber attacks are mostly focused on Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, Qatar, the top liquefied natural gas supplier, and Dubai, which is the region’s financial, commercial and aviation hub, said Gert-Jan Schenk, McAfee president for EMEA.

“It’s where the wealth and critical infrastructure is concentrated,” he said.

The “Shamoon” virus last year targeted Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, damaging about 30,000 computers in what may have been the most destructive attack against the private sector.

“Ten years ago, it was all about trying to infect as many people as possible,” added Schenk. “Today we see more and more attacks being focused on very small groups of people. Sometimes malware is developed for a specific department in a specific company.”

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Chinese Hackers Go After Dissidents

The “Comment Crew,” a group of China-based hackers whose outing earlier this year in major media outlets caused a conflict with the U.S., have resumed their attacks against dissidents.

FireEye, a security vendor that specializes in trying to stop sophisticated attacks, has noticed attackers using a fresh set of tools and evasion techniques against some of its newer clients, which it can’t name. But Rob Rachwald, director of market research for FireEye, said in an interview Monday that those clients include an organization in Taiwan and others involved in dissident activity.

The Comment Crew was known for many years by security analysts, but its attacks on The New York Times, described in an extensive report in February from vendor Mandiant, thrust them into an uncomfortable spotlight, causing tense relations between the U.S. and China.

Rachwald said it is difficult to determine if the organizations being targeted now were targeted by the Comment Crew previously, but FireEye said last month that the group didn’t appear to be hitting organizations they had compromised before.

Organizations opposing Chinese government policies have frequently been targeted by hackers in what are believed to be politically motivated surveillance operations.

The Comment Crew laid low for about four months following the report, but emerging clues indicate they haven’t gone away and in fact have undertaken a major re-engineering effort to continue spying. The media attention “didn’t stop them, but it clearly did something to dramatically alter their operations,” Rachwald said in an interview.

“If you look at it from a chronological perspective, this malware hasn’t been touched for about 18 months or so,” he said. “Suddenly, they took it off the market and started overhauling it fairly dramatically.”

FireEye researchers Ned Moran and Nart Villeneuve described the new techniques on Monday on FireEye’s blog.

Two malware samples, called Aumlib and Ixeshe, had been used by the Comment Crew but not updated since 2011. Both malware programs have now been altered to change the appearance of their network traffic, Rachwald said.

Many vendors use intrusion detection systems to spot how malware sends data back to an attacker, which helps determine if a network has been compromised. Altering the method and format for how the data is sent can trick those systems into thinking everything is fine.

In another improvement, encryption is now employed to mask certain components of the programs’ networking communication, Rachwald said. The malware programs themselves, which are designed to steal data and log keystrokes, are basically the same.

Mandiant’s report traced the hacking activity to a specific Chinese military unit called “61398.” The company alleged that it waged a seven-year hacking spree that compromised 141 organizations.

Rachwald said it is strongly believed the Comment Crew is behind the new attacks given its previous use of Aumlib and Ixeshe. But the group has also re-engineered its attack infrastructure so much over the last few months that it is difficult to say for sure.

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China’s Supercomputer Uses Homegrown Chips

China has built its latest supercomputer based entirely on homegrown microprocessors, a major move towards breaking the country’s reliance on Western technology for high-performance computing.

China’s National Supercomputer Center in Jinan debuted the computer last Thursday, according to a report from the country’s state-run press. The supercomputer uses 8,704 “Shenwei 1600″ microprocessors, which were developed by a design center in Shanghai, called the National High Performance Integrated Circuit Design Center.

Details of the microprocessors and the design center were not immediately available.

The supercomputer has a theoretical peak speed of 1.07 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), and a sustained performance of 0.79 petaflops when measured with the Linpack benchmark. This could place it at number 13 in the world’s top 500 supercomputing list. Photos of the chips used and the supercomputer’s data center can be found here.

China’s Shandong Academy of Sciences built the computer. Officials of the academy could not be immediately reached for comment on Monday.

A report from The New York Times said the supercomputer’s name in English was the Sunway BlueLight MPP.

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EBS Coming To Your Smartphone

In the event of local and/or nationwide disasters, wireless carriers will soon begin alerting the public by sending emergency SMS text messages to mobile phones.

AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless have all agreed to a participate in this new Emergency Broadcast System alert method. It  will initially be rolled  out in New York and Washington, D.C., later this year, and nationwide next year, in April at the earliest.

The emergency text messages will cover public safety threats, Amber Alerts for missing children, and messages from the president, the New York Times reports. Messages will be free for customers, who can opt out of them all except the presidential messages.

We don’t expect the alerts to be frequent,” Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, told the Times. “They will be reserved for when they are truly needed, for tornadoes or for disasters like 9/11.”

Genachowski said the emergency texts will look different from ordinary messages, making them more difficult for hackers to infiltrate or fake. They’ll probably appear directly on the screen, along with a special vibration or other signal. No word on how closely they’ll resemble the tone and color bars of the current Emergency Broadcast System for televisions, or whether users can expect “this is a test” messages on a regular basis.

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RIM’s PlayBook Gets Harsh Reviews

RIM’s PlayBook tablet didn’t fare so well with influential technology reviewers who called the iPad competitor a rushed job that won’t even provide RIM’s wildly popular email service unless it’s hooked up to a BlackBerry.

The overwhelmingly bad initial response to a device the company hopes will get it attached to the tablet computing explosion overshadowed a splashy coming-out party in New York Thursday evening, where co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis played up the gadget’s attractiveness with corporate users.

There was little mention of the blistering reviews only hours before.

“RIM has just shipped a BlackBerry product that cannot do email. It must be skating season in hell,” New York Times’ David Pogue wrote in a review published on Thursday.

Research In Motion built its reputation on a BlackBerry email service that it says is so secure that it can’t bow to government requests to tap messages, winning high-profile customers in business, defense and politics before branching out to a wider consumer market.

But the PlayBook, which hits North American store shelves on Tuesday, offers that secure service only in tandem with a BlackBerry. RIM says secure email and other key services will come later, not at launch.

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Microsoft Eyeing More Software For The iPad

The current rumor on the street is that Microsoft might be looking beyond the recently released OneNote for iPad. Insiders are saying Microsoft is closely monitoring the number of downloads of OneNote for iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch to perhaps gauge the possible interest in adding more productivity software for Apple iOS suite of products. Read More…..