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Pentagon says "aware" of China Internet rerouting

(Reuters) - The Defense Department is aware that Internet traffic was rerouted briefly through China earlier this year, a Pentagon spokesman said on Friday, referring to what a congressionally appointed panel has described as a hijack.

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission charged in its annual report on Wednesday that state-owned China Telecom advertised erroneous network routes that instructed "massive volumes" of U.S. and other foreign Internet traffic to go through Chinese servers during an 18-minute stretch on April 8.

Marine Colonel David Lapan, a Defense Department spokesman, told reporters, "We're aware that on the 8th of April ... Internet traffic was rerouted through China." More...

11-20-2010 07:30

Cyber warfare already here, UK spy agency chief says

(Reuters) - Countries are already using cyber warfare techniques to attack each other and need to be vigilant round the clock to protect computer systems, the head of Britain's communications spy agency says.

Iain Lobban, the director of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), said British government systems are targeted 1,000 times each month.

"Cyberspace is contested every day, every hour, every minute, every second," he said late Tuesday in a rare speech. His remarks, to a London audience, were published Wednesday.

The internet lowered "the bar for entry to the espionage game," he said. Its expansion increased the risk of disruption to infrastructure such as power stations and financial services.

"The threat is a real and credible one," said Lobban, whose GCHQ agency, a big eavesdropping operation similar to the National Security Agency in the United States, handles operations such as intelligence-gathering and code-busting.

Politicians and spy chiefs in Britain and around the world have increasingly been warning about the growing cyber threat. More...

10-13-2010 18:06

Preventing a Hack Attack

When a giant international cyber-theft ring was broken up last week, details emerged about a new tactic hackers are using: bombarding individual and business phones with incessant calls using automated dialing programs and, while the phones are tied up, raiding bank and brokerage accounts.

If the financial institutions can't reach the victims to ask about the suspicious activity, the transactions often go through, law-enforcement officials say. It is a new twist on so-called denial-of-service attacks, in which hackers overload financial-services websites with information in order to crash them.

The cyber-theft ring—in which dozens of arrests were made in the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands and Ukraine, according to court documents and federal officials—allegedly used the tactic, among others.

The ring was responsible for losses of $70 million from accounts at various banks and brokerage firms, including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., E*Trade Financial Corp. and TD Ameritrade Holding Corp.'s TD Ameritrade, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. More...

10-10-2010 20:35

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