PATROL BASE 7171, Helmand province, Afghanistan – Infantry Marines deployed to Afghanistan endure trials that Americans unfamiliar with military life cannot begin to fathom. Inclement weather, insatiable hunger, perpetual fatigue and direct combat with enemy forces are challenges frequently confronting the infantryman because he regularly operates in austere, hostile conditions. The infantry Marine in Afghanistan, commonly 18 years old and fresh out of high school, is often significantly m...

Three individuals have been recently indicted on charges of illegally exporting millions of dollars worth of computer-related equipment from the United States to Iran via the United Arab Emirates, according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Electronic Engineering Times reported April 25. One man, a U.S. citizen, and his Queens, New York-based company, Sunrise Technologies and Trading Co., were indicted in Washington D.C. on 27 counts relating to the illegal export of co...

A U.S. Senator from Minnesota and the attorney general of Illinois have separately pressed Apple and Google to provide more information about the location data they collect about their end users. The requests from the politicians follow recent reports Google and Apple have been collecting data about the location of Android and iPhone users without their permission. While both companies ask permission before collecting the location data required for certain applications, the reports, s...

Compiled from International Security Assistance Force Joint Command News Releases  Afghan and coalition forces detained several suspected insurgents yesterday in the Sayyidabad district of Afghanistan’s Wardak province, officials said. Troops were searching for a Taliban leader responsible for planting roadside bombs to target security forces traveling along Highway 1. In other news yesterday throughout Afghanistan: -- Forces captured two suspected insurgents, inc...

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) facility storing melted fuel from the Three Mile Island nuclear plant has not done enough to address crumbling concrete modules encasing the radioactive material, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said in a letter made public April 15. The 30 dry shielded canisters at the DOE   facility at Idaho National Laboratory contain melted fuel from the Three Mile Island-2 reactor core. The concrete modules are ―showing significant cracking and deg...

  One day after a hacker posted screen shots and data to a hacking mailing list, saying he had broken into a New Mexico wind turbine facility, the company that runs the turbines said it has seen no evidence of a computer intrusion. The hacker, who calls himself Bigr R, made the claims April 16, posting screenshots of the facility‘s management interface, screenshots of an FTP server and project management system, as well as Web server info and configuration data from a Cisco router. B...

Decoding the methods in malicious code is becoming more difficult, according to reverse-engineering experts. Attacks no longer scramble simple function names, but encrypt entire blocks of code. Attackers use obfuscation to make it harder to analyze malicious software and stymie security tools, such as intrusion-detection systems, from recognizing the attack. Initially, obfuscation merely scrambled the names of the functions being called by a program, complicating analysis of the binary code...

A new piece of malware being distributed by Sality uses stolen Facebook credentials to surreptitiously install rogue apps under the corresponding profiles. Sality is the world‘s top file infecting malware and dates back to 2003. The threat has evolved over the years and was fitted with P2P, self-propagation, and malware distribution functionality. According to security researchers from Symantec, at the beginning of 2011, Sality operators pushed a malicious component through its P2P ne...

The Web site of the European Space Agency (ESA) has been hacked into and a list of FTP accounts, as well as email addresses and passwords for administrators and editors have been leaked. The www(dot)esa(dot)int Web server was compromised by a well-known Romanian grey hat hacker who uses the online moniker of TinKode. The hacker posted details of the compromise on his blog in full disclosure style. However, the method he used was not revealed. The published data includes FTP accounts for a r...

Well as many of you old timers here know, and some may not but will now, I run a YouTube Channel called "3rdID8487" and I post videos from the DoD, DVIDS, CENTCOM, NATO and the Pentagon and make a few of my own from materials I get from them. I of course got written permission from all of those first (That was interesting and a story in itself!). Well it started out small and I thought that even if one or two people a day looked at the videos I would be happy. Wow how could I have known what it ...

The FBI and the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) said April 13 they have disabled a "botnet" of more than 2 million computers infected with malicious code that Eastern European cyber criminals may have used to drain millions of dollars from bank accounts around the world. U.S. authorities continue to combat the network of remotely controlled computers called the "Coreflood" botnet, which has secretly recorded computer users’ keystrokes to compromise vast amounts of banking and financial ...

A recently identified ZeuS trojan sample is digitally signed with a fake certificate whose purpose is to make the piece of malware harder to detect. According to security experts from Avira who discovered the sample, the digital certificate is signed by an entity called "DetectMe " and dates since the end of February. Although the ability to digitally sign code has been around since Windows NT, the practice has only seen more adoption starting with Vista where the difference between signed...

Hackers have compromised several servers that support WordPress and may have obtained source code, according to the founding developer of Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform. He wrote on the WordPress blog that Automattic has been reviewing log records to determine how much information was exposed and re-evaluating "avenues to gain access." "We presume our source code was exposed and copied," he wrote. "While much of our code is open source, there are sensitive bits...

Texas exposes addresses, SSNs of 3.5 million residents. The state of Texas revealed April 11 that personal information for 3.5 million citizens has been exposed to the public, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and more. According to the Texas State Comptroller, the data was not exposed by a hacker or a group of vigilantes — it ended up on a state-controlled public server after having been passed around between various state agencies. The data came from the Teac...

Facebook has fixed a bug in the site’s password reset feature that could have been exploited to expose passwords of a small number of users who also use Hotmail. "We can access password of any facebook user who uses hotmail email address as their facebook account," a Turkish security researcher wrote in an e-mail to CNET the weekend of April 9 and 10. "If you have any hotmail account and if it is used as facebook account, we can change and send you your new password:)." A Facebook spok...