Cyber warfare

Pierluigi Paganini July 15, 2012
Cyber security at large sporting events

Article published on The Malta Indipendent by Ron Kelson, Pierluigi Paganini, David Pace The London 2012 Olympics will bring together 10,500 athletes, diplomats, politicians, business leaders and millions of spectators from all over the world. Behind the scenes there is an immense effort being made to ensure the security and well-being of everyone participating, in any […]

Pierluigi Paganini July 14, 2012
The importance of security requirements in design of SCADA systems

Excerpt from the article published on the last edition of PenTest AUDITING & STANDARDS 06 2012 The article exposes the main issues related to the use of SCADA systems in critical infrastructures, providing a careful analysis of the relative level of security on a global scale. It discusses the main vulnerabilities of critical systems exploitable by cyber […]

Pierluigi Paganini July 08, 2012
ICS-CERT report, a worrying increase of cyber attacks

It’s been long debated the need to protect critical infrastructures from cyber attacks, cyber threats could hit foreign countries causing loss of human lives identically to a conventional attack. Don’t forget that similar attacks con be organized by state-sponsored hackers or cyber criminals with the different purposes, target destroying or cyber espionage. Emergency Response Teams […]

Pierluigi Paganini July 06, 2012
A view on the economic impact of cyber attacks, from US to China

On June 28th, a FBI official declared before a House panel that the phenomenon of cyber espionage is increasing with an alarming trend. We are living a period of great crisis and the intellectual property is becoming a privileged target for cyber attacks. It has been estimated that the economic espionage in the current fiscal […]

Pierluigi Paganini June 30, 2012
Dalai Lama + Mac OS X = APT with Tibet malware

Another excellent discovery of the active experts of Kaspersky Labs that have identified a new variant of the malware used in Tibet against Uyghur hacktivists, a Turkic ethnic group living in Eastern and Central Asia. The instance of Tibet malware detected infects OS X machines and is spread following a consolidated schema for politically motivated […]

Pierluigi Paganini June 29, 2012
Stratfor refunds clients.Concerns on subcontractors in the security chain

Last Christmas the Stratfor Global Intelligence was hacked by Anonymous who disclosed company website and also the full client list of over 4000 individuals and corporations. The hacker gained access to a subscriber list stored on stratfor.com, and that list contained unencrypted credit card data. Stratfor is an organization that gathers open source intelligence which […]

Pierluigi Paganini June 25, 2012
The ‘cyber war’ era began long ago

Article published on The Malta Indipendent by Ron Kelson, Pierluigi Paganini, Benjamin Gittins, David Pace  US military strategist John Boyd states: “War comprises acts of physical, biological, psychological, social, cultural and other destruction at all levels, for example, intrapsychic, interpersonal, intergroup, interorganisational, and international.” Cyber warfare is combat in cyberspace and includes computers, the Internet and the […]

Pierluigi Paganini June 24, 2012
Cyber war, the strategic importance of the defense

I was reading an interesting article on the cyber wars I was attracted by the comparison of Stuxnet to the first nuclear bomb detonated at a site nicknamed Trinity in the barren Jornada del Muerto desert of New Mexico on  July 16, 1945. Although the comparison must be done with the proper proportions, it summarizes […]

Pierluigi Paganini June 23, 2012
The mystery of a massive cyber attack on Iran

Winds of cyber war blow Iran, the political situation is becoming difficult to manage, exacerbating the tones of a psychological battle growing. After the publishing of the news regarding the genesis of Stuxnet and Flame every actor of the conflict has increased the effort on cyber warfare especially on cyber defense fearing an imminent cyber […]

Pierluigi Paganini June 16, 2012
The malware factory

Article Published on The Hacker New Magazine – June Edition “Malware” With the term malware we refer a heterogeneous family of malicious software designed with the purpose to disrupt computer operation, gather sensitive information, or gain unauthorized access to victims systems. With the term we indicate in fact several types of malicious code such as computer […]