Iranian Hackers Set Up New Network to Target U.S. Political Campaigns

On the same subject

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  December 4, 2024 | International, C4ISR, Security

  Europol Dismantles Criminal Messaging Service MATRIX in Major Global Takedown

  Europol shuts down MATRIX, a criminal messaging service, seizing servers and €500K in cryptocurrency.

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  March 1, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Land

  New Swiss defense chief orders second opinion on huge air-defense revamp

  By: Sebastian Sprenger COLOGNE, Germany — Switzerland's new defense chief, Viola Amherd, has intervened in the course of the multibillion-dollar “Air 2030” program, tasking a former Swiss astronaut with critiquing its underlying premises. Claude Nicollier, an astrophysicist and former military pilot, has until the end of April to review a 2017 expert report on the $8 billion project to buy a new fleet of fighter aircraft and ground-based air-defense gear. The second opinion is expected to delay the political process for the program. Technical evaluations of contractor offerings will proceed as planned this spring and summer, the defense ministry said in a statement. Former defense chief Guy Parmelin had planned to present a full program and investment plan for Air 2030 to parliament in February. Government officials still want to subject the proposal to a referendum in 2020. Replacing the country's decades-old F/A-18 and F-5 jets will eat up the lion's share of the program, at roughly $6 billion. The rest will go to new, ground-based, air and missile defense weapons. The envisioned concept of operations dictates that a fleet of 30 or 40 aircraft will intercept those targets outside of the ground weapons' range. Officials want enough capacity to have four planes in the air at any given time during crises. Defense ministry spokesman Renato Kalbermatten told Defense News that Nicollier's scope for critiquing the 2017 expert report is wide open, which means anything from aircraft numbers to cost is open for scrutiny. It is not expected, however, that the review will question the overall need for the program, he said. Notably, a reassessment of the threats expected to be countered by the modernization program is part of Nicollier's mandate. Swiss officials received offers from five aircraft makers on Jan. 25: Airbus with its Eurofighter, Boeing's F/18 Super Hornet, Dassault's Rafale, Lockheed Martin's F-35A and Saab's Gripen E. In the ground-based interceptor portion of the program, the Eurosam consortium is expected to offer its SAMP/T; Israel's Rafael is pitching David's Sling; and Raytheon wants to sell its Patriot system. The three vendors met with Swiss industry representatives earlier this month in preparation for a requirement to offer offset deals worth 100 percent of the eventual contract. Those deals are meant to benefit a broad section of Swiss industries, including the country's famed watchmakers, according to Armasuisse, the country's defense acquisition office. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2019/02/28/new-swiss-defense-chief-orders-second-opinion-on-huge-air-defense-revamp

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  August 8, 2019 | International, Security

  The Air Force sends good guys in to hack its cloud

  By: Andrew Eversden The Air Force invited ethical hackers into its IT networks again this spring, allowing good guys the chance to infiltrate its enterprise-wide Air Force Common Computing Environment in search of vulnerabilities, the white hat hacking company Bugcrowd announced Aug. 6. The bug bounty program, done in a partnership with Bugcrowd and the Air Force's CCE program office, found 54 vulnerabilities. Bug bounties work under the assumption that the customer, in this case the Air Force, will now close the loopholes the hackers found, making the system more secure. The CCE cloud uses Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure commercial cloud. The service plans to migrate more than 100 applications to that cloud environment, Bugcrowd executives said. The largest payout from the bug bounty totaled $20,000. The event ran from March 18 to June 21 at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts. Casey Ellis, Bugcrowd founder and CTO, said it was the first time Bugcrowd has worked with the Air Force. The Air Force has completed several other white hat hacking events with the firm HackerOne. Ellis said that moving to the cloud from on-premise environment represents a “paradigm shift” for many organizations. Penetration testing is an important part of keeping that environment secure, he said. Bugcrowd conducted such tests in six phases: source code analysis, AWS environment testing, Azure environment testing, black box network authentication assessment, social engineering engagement and Air Force portal testing. Bugcrowd declined to discuss how many vulnerabilities were found throughout each stage of the process. According to a news release from the Air Force from April, the CCE currently houses 21 Air Force applications and "has room for countess more.” The computing environment allows the Air Force to have a cloud to host its applications that reside on its Global Combat Support System, which is a centralized, cohesive enterprise resource planning system. The Air Force said in the April release that each migration costs $446,000 and that the service has spent more than $136 million on the program since 2016. https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/air-force/2019/08/06/the-air-force-sends-good-guys-in-to-hack-its-cloud/