Today's implant from the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group implant catalog:
JETPLOW(TS//SI//REL) JETPLOW is a firmware persistence implant for Cisco PIX Series and ASA (Adaptive Security Appliance) firewalls. It persists DNT's BANANAGLEE software implant. JETPLOW also has a persistent back-door capability.
(TS//SI//REL) JETPLOW is a firmware persistence impant for Cisco PIX Series and ASA (Adaptive Security Appliance) firewalls. It persists DNT's BANANAGLEE software implant and modifies the Cisco firewall's operating system (OS) at boot time. If BANANAGLEE support is not available for the booting operating system, it can install a Persistent Backdoor (PDB) designed to work with BANANAGLEE'S communications structure, so that full access can be reacquired at a later time. JETPLOW works on Cisco's 500-series PIX firewalls, as well as most ASA firewalls (5505, 5510, 5520, 5540, 5550).
(TS//SI//REL) A typical JETPLOW deployment on a target firewall with an exfiltration path to the Remote Operations Center (ROC) is shown above. JETPLOW is remotely upgradable and is also remotely installable provided BANANAGLEE is already on the firewall of interest.
Status: (C//REL) Released. Has been widely deployed. Current availability restricted based on OS version (inquire for details).
Unit Cost: $0
As part of the deal, RSA Security will provide backdoors that the NSA can make use of in order to gain access to crucial information stored in what used to be a relatively safe database. This backdoor involves setting a particular random number generator (DUAL_EC_DRBG) as a default in its BSAFE cryptographic library. This doesn't sound like much of a big deal, but there is clear evidence pointing to the fact that this particular random number generator'soutcomes can be predicted effectively under some conditions. This wasdiscovered at some point in 2005.
RSA Security has come out with the news to its customers, telling them not to use the default generator, but as the old adage goes, "too little, too late." Customers who have long had faith in RSA and are unaware of the $10 million deal will not have the time to make a complete switchover on their algorithms.
BlackBerry (BBRY) interim CEO John Chen last week released another open letter to assure enterprise customers that the company is "strong financially, technologically savvy and is well-positioned for the future." He failed, again, to mention how BlackBerry will work with channel partners in 2014.
In his letter, Chen continued to stress the importance of surrounding himself with "a talented team of industry leaders," noting that he will add to his "leadership team with those who have the skills and passion to get BlackBerry back on the path to profitability."
Chen said his team needed to move to a new operating unit structure to place more emphasis on what he called core business drivers. He then went on the offensive, calling out BlackBerry's competitors in the mobile device management (MDM) space.
"With a global enterprise customer base exceeding 80,000, we have three times the number of customers compared to Good,AirWatch and MobileIron combined," he said. "This makes BlackBerry the leader in mobile device management."
Chen said BlackBerry's customers include those who have the most stringent security needs.
"For governments, BlackBerry cannot just be replaced. We are the only MDM provider to obtain Authority to Operate on U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) networks," he said. "This means the DoD is allowed to use only BlackBerry. Across the globe, seven out of seven of the G7 governments are also BlackBerry customers."
 The Internet Archive Console Living Roomharkens back to the revolution of the change in the hearth of the home, when the fireplace and later television were transformed by gaming consoles into a center of videogame entertainment. Connected via strange adapters and relying on the television's speaker to put out beeps and boops, these games were resplendent with simple graphics and simpler rules. |
BlackBerry Ltd. (BBRY) co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer Mike Lazaridis walked away from a possible takeover plan and reduced his stake in the struggling smartphone maker after it ended an attempt to sell itself.
Lazaridis now owns 26.3 million shares, or 4.99 percent of its outstanding shares, according to a regulatory filing yesterday. The former BlackBerry executive, who earlier this year had considered making a bid for the Waterloo, Ontario-based company, sold more than $26 million of stock this week, according to the filing. Together with co-founder Doug Fregin, he had controlled about 8 percent of the stock.
Following the collapse of a $4.7 billion buyout by Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. last month, BlackBerry ended its strategic review, opting instead to raise $1 billion in convertible debt and seek a new CEO. Former Sybase Inc. chief John Chen was named executive chairman and interim CEO. The $1 billion infusion helped stabilize the unprofitable company, giving Chen time to craft a turnaround plan.
More:He told the story of a Catholic who asked a priest if even atheists had been redeemed by Jesus.
"Even them, everyone," the pope answered, according to Vatican Radio. "We all have the duty to do good," he said.
"Just do good, and we'll find a meeting point," the pope said in a hypothetical conversation in which someone told a priest: "But I don't believe. I'm an atheist."
While the other eight packages all achieved protection scores of 87% or higher - with five scoring 98% or 99% - Microsoft's free antivirus software protected against only 61% of the malware samples used in the test.
Microsoft conceded last year that its security software was intended to offer only "baseline" performance, saying it wanted to "give customers a good reason to pay for their [security] products" because that would create greater diversity in the market and make life harder for malware writers.
Nevertheless, the company insisted that Security Essentials provided "strong, comprehensive defence against malicious code and attacks".
Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
For the uninitiated, Hadoop is a solution for distributed parallel processing of huge amounts of data. You can see some examples of its uses in our Hadoop infographic.
IT can improve symptom analysis, time to market for drug development and safety, decreased hospitalization and sickness and a lower frequency of spreading diseases. How? Through Hadoop's uses in information exchange, service quality improvements, drug safety testing, symptom co-occurrence identification, drug development processes, illness detection and large-scale patient studies. There's one thing all these health-related topics (and just about everything else government agencies do) have in common —data, and lots of it.
Until the Department of Health fixed the security hole last week, anyone could easily reset your Healthcare.gov password without your knowledge and potentially hijack your account.
More:
A new LMI study has found that NASA could implement techniques already in use by the Defense Department when designing rockets and spaceships.
The nonprofit research recommended the space agency use readiness-based sparing in supply chain management to support ground systems for launch missions, LMI said Thursday.
Research authors Julie Castilho, David Peterson, Tovey Bachman and Rob Kline presented an RBS structure using LMI's ASM Sparing Model, which is designed to provide NASA logisticians with a platform to quantify the trade space using advanced analytics.
The broken government procurement process shoulders the blame for the fiasco over the launch of Healthcare.gov, according to a blog for a company that designs government software.
The problem is that the federal procurement process gives work to a limited number of firms whose expertise is in navigating the procurement process, rather than doing the work, according to a blog post at The Department of Better Technology.
Healthcare.gov is the linchpin of the Affordable Care Act, which mandates, among other things, that Americans have health insurance. States set up exchanges to sell affordable insurance to individuals who don't get it through other channels, such as employers. Some 36 states have elected not to set up their own exchanges, instead letting federal systems handle the work for them. Healthcare.gov is the front door to that federal system.
On launch day Oct. 1, Healthcare.gov was plagued by slowdowns and outages. Site visitors saw a lot of this -- it's Healthcare.gov's fail whale:
Although the problems have been mitigated, they're not completely solved.
Bureaucracy is to blame, says the Department of Better Technology:
Healthcare.gov got this way not because of incompetence or sloppiness of an individual vendor, but because of a deeply engrained and malignant cancer that's eating away at the federal government's ability to provide effective online services. It's a cancer that's shut out the best and brightest minds from working on these problems, diminished competition for federal work, and landed us here — where you have half-billion dollar websites that don't work.That cancer is called "procurement" and it's primarily a culture-driven cancer one that tries to mitigate so much risk that it all but ensures it. It's one that allowed for only a handful of companies like CGI Federal to not only build disasters like this, but to keep building more and more failures without any accountability to the ultimate client: us. Take a look at CGI's website, and the industries they serve: financial services, oil and gas, public utilities, insurance. Have you had a positive user experience in any of those industries?
The Department of Better Technology, which publishes the blog, makes government software, so of course it has a dog in this race. But, still, the blog makes good points. And the blog post is authored by Clay Johnson, who's had a substantial career in government, politics, and the Internet, including heading the digital presidential campaigns of Howard Dean (2004) and Barack Obama (2008). Johnson is CEO and founder of DBT, as well as a supporter of RFP-EZ, a federal project designed to make it easier for smaller companies to bid on federal IT projects.
Bureaucracy wasn't all there was to it. Healthcare.gov is also an incredibly complex problem. "Private companies sell things online all the time. Why is the government having such a hard time setting up an online health insurance marketplace?" writes The Washington Post.
Healthcare.gov's job was much harder than simple online commerce. "Much of the complexity comes from the fact that the exchanges are used to administer the complex system of subsidies the Affordable Care Act provides to low-income consumers. Figuring out whether a customer is eligible for a subsidy, and if so how much, requires data from a lot of federal and state agencies," the Post says. The site must also confirm that the applicant is an American citizen or documented immigrant, checking with the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security. And so on. The Post reproduces a chart from Xerox that describes the problem:
Healthcare.gov was just plain badly built, according to The Wall Street Journal. It was overwhelmed by traffic, failing to cache frequently used portions of the website. Identity authentication broke down. And the site is susceptible to security vulnerabilities.
The White House knew since February that the launch was shaky, according to Forbes.com. But the White House was eager to get the site up and running fast. As Republicans combat the Affordable Care Act, proponents felt they needed to get the law implemented and get the American people using the system to make ObamaCare impossible to repeal. "The Obama administration was more afraid of delaying the launch of Obamacare, than they were of botching it," Forbes said.
This may prove to be a sound strategy. But the key is that the American people have to enjoy the benefits of the ACA. If the White House can't fix the law's Internet problem, there will be no benefits, only frustrations. And the ACA will go down.
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