After a great event last month in San Jose, Ars is switching coasts for October and descending in force on our nation's capital. If you're on the East Coast and want to come hang out with Ars EIC Ken Fisher and me while we talk to some neat speakers …
Google Cloud constantly innovates and invests significantly in our capabilities to stop cyberattacks such as distributed denial-of-service attacks from taking down websites, apps, and services. It’s an essential part of protecting our customers. Our Project Shield offering, which uses Google's Cloud networking and our Global Front End infrastructure …
Building on the launch of the Google Cloud region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in November 2023, we are excited to announce new data sovereignty, security, and AI capabilities for the Dammam region. These new offerings can help support the digital transformation journeys of organizations operating in …
A Google Cloud incident earlier this month impacted our customer, UniSuper, in Australia. While our first priority was to work with our customer to get them fully operational, soon after the incident started, we publicly acknowledged the incident in a joint statement with the customer. With our customer’s …
It seems that the FCC might be fixing the vulnerabilities in SS7 and the Diameter protocol: On March 27 the commission asked telecommunications providers to weigh in and detail what they are doing to prevent SS7 and Diameter vulnerabilities from being misused to track consumers’ locations. The FCC has …
NIST has released version 2.0 of the Cybersecurity Framework: The CSF 2.0, which supports implementation of the National Cybersecurity Strategy, has an expanded scope that goes beyond protecting critical infrastructure, such as hospitals and power plants, to all organizations in any sector. It also has a new …
The industry pushed back : Despite the EPA’s willingness to provide training and technical support to help states and public water system organizations implement cybersecurity surveys, the move garnered opposition from both GOP state attorneys and trade groups. Republican state attorneys that were against the new proposed policies said …
Turns out pumps at gas stations are controlled via Bluetooth, and that the connections are insecure. No details in the article, but it seems that it’s easy to take control of the pump and have it dispense gas without requiring payment. It’s a complicated crime to monetize …
Imagine that we’ve all—all of us, all of society—landed on some alien planet, and we have to form a government: clean slate. We don’t have any legacy systems from the US or any other country. We don’t have any special or unique interests to …
At Black Hat last week, the White House announced an AI Cyber Challenge. Gizmodo reports : The new AI cyber challenge (which is being abbreviated “AIxCC”) will have a number of different phases. Interested would-be competitors can now submit their proposals to the Small Business Innovation Research program for evaluation …
Seems that there is a deliberate backdoor in the twenty-year-old TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) standard used by police forces around the world. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), an organization that standardizes technologies across the industry, first created TETRA in 1995. Since then, TETRA has been used in products …
Everyone is writing about an interagency and international report on Chinese hacking of US critical infrastructure. Lots of interesting details about how the group, called Volt Typhoon, accesses target networks and evades detection. [...]
Another nation-state malware, Russian in origin: In the early stages of the war in Ukraine in 2022, PIPEDREAM, a known malware was quietly on the brink of wiping out a handful of critical U.S. electric and liquid natural gas sites. PIPEDREAM is an attack toolkit with unmatched and …
The Aspen Institute has published a good analysis of the successes, failures, and absences of cyberattacks as part of the current war in Ukraine: “ The Cyber Defense Assistance Imperative Lessons from Ukraine.” Its conclusion: Cyber defense assistance in Ukraine is working. The Ukrainian government and Ukrainian critical infrastructure organizations …
What will it take for policy makers to take cybersecurity seriously? Not minimal-change seriously. Not here-and-there seriously. But really seriously. What will it take for policy makers to take cybersecurity seriously enough to enact substantive legislative changes that would address the problems? It’s not enough for the average …
Last week, I hosted a two-day workshop on reimagining democracy. The idea was to bring together people from a variety of disciplines who are all thinking about different aspects of democracy, less from a “what we need to do today” perspective and more from a blue-sky future perspective. My …
The International Committee of the Red Cross wants some digital equivalent to the iconic red cross, to alert would-be hackers that they are accessing a medical network. The emblem wouldn’t provide technical cybersecurity protection to hospitals, Red Cross infrastructure or other medical providers, but it would signal to …
The NSA (together with CISA) has published a long report on supply-chain security: “ Securing the Software Supply Chain: Recommended Practices Guide for Suppliers. “: Prevention is often seen as the responsibility of the software developer, as they are required to securely develop and deliver code, verify third party components, and …
Data speed and security should not be mutually exclusive, which is why Confluent Cloud, a cloud-first data streaming platform built by the founders of Apache Kafka, secures your data through encryption at rest and enables secure data in motion. However, for the most sensitive data — particularly data generated by …
Good essay arguing that open-source software is a critical national-security asset and needs to be treated as such: Open source is at least as important to the economy, public services, and national security as proprietary code, but it lacks the same standards and safeguards. It bears the qualities of …
We’re excited to announce Confidential Computing on the latest Google Compute Engine N2D and C2D Virtual Machines. At Google Cloud, we’re constantly striving to deliver performance improvements and feature enhancements. Last November, we announced the general availability of general-purpose N2D machine types running on 3rd Gen AMD …
Almost a decade ago, we started encrypting traffic between our data centers to help protect user privacy. Since then, we gradually rolled out changes to encrypt almost all data in transit. Our approach is described in our Encryption in Transit whitepaper. While this effort provided invaluable privacy and security …
CISA, NSA, FBI, and similar organizations in the other Five Eyes countries are warning that attacks on MSPs — as a vector to their customers — are likely to increase. No details about what this prediction is based on. Makes sense, though. The SolarWinds attack was incredibly successful for the Russian …
At Google Cloud, we believe that the protection of our customers’ sensitive data is paramount, and encryption is a powerful mechanism to help achieve this goal. For years, we have supported encryption in transit when our customers ingest their data to bring it to the cloud. We’ve also …
The Department of Energy, CISA, the FBI, and the NSA jointly issued an advisory describing a sophisticated piece of malware called Pipedream that’s designed to attack a wide range of industrial control systems. This is clearly from a government, but no attribution is given. There’s also no …