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 also asked carriers to detail any … Read More “Maybe the Phone System Surveillance Vulnerabilities Will Be Fixed” »
Category: infrastructure
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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 that the call for new inspections could … Read More “EPA Won’t Force Water Utilities to Audit Their Cybersecurity” »
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, though. You need to sell access to the … Read More “Hacking Gas Pumps via Bluetooth” »
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 perturb our thinking. How would we govern ourselves? It’s unlikely that … Read More “December’s Reimagining Democracy Workshop” »
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 and, eventually, selected teams will participate … Read More “White House Announces AI Cybersecurity Challenge” »
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, including radios, sold by Motorola, Airbus, … Read More “Backdoor in TETRA Police Radios” »
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. Powered by WPeMatico
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 unprecedented capabilities developed for use against industrial … Read More “PIPEDREAM Malware against Industrial Control Systems” »
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 have better defended themselves and … Read More “Cyberwar Lessons from the War in Ukraine” »
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 remit to the participants was this: … Read More “Reimagining Democracy” »