THE parliamentary computers of at least 10 federal ministers including the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Defence Minister are suspected of being hacked into in a major breach of national security.. It is believed that several thousand emails may have been accessed. Senior sources in the Government have confirmed to The Daily Telegraph that the espionage occurred over more than a month, beginning in February. Four separate government sources confirmed that they had been told Chinese intelligence agencies were among a list of foreign hackers that are under suspicion. An investigation is now believed to be under way by ASIO after Australian intelligence agencies were tipped off to the cyber-spy raid by US intelligence officials within the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The link for this article located at Daily Telegraph AU is no longer available. The link for this article located at Daily Telegraph AU is no longer available. . Significant compromise of governmental integrity feared, associated with unauthorized intrusion into federal lawmakers' digital communications, impacting cabinet members.. Email Breach, Cyber Espionage, Government Security. . Alex
A former government contractor says that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation installed a number of back doors into the encryption software used by the OpenBSD operating system. The allegations were made public Tuesday by Theo de Raadt, the lead developer in the OpenBSD project. . DeRaadt posted an email sent by the former contractor, Gregory Perry, so that the matter could be publicly scrutinized. "The mail came in privately from a person I have not talked to for nearly 10 years," he wrote in his a posting to an OpenBSD discussion list. "I refuse to become part of such a conspiracy, and will not be talking to Gregory Perry about this. Therefore I am making it public." No one has come forward to corroborate Perry's story, but the allegations are remarkable. If they're true -- and at present they're being greeted with skepticism by the security community -- they mean that the FBI may have developed secret ways to snoop on encrypted traffic and then hidden them in source code submissions accepted by OpenBSD. The link for this article located at InfoWorld is no longer available. . Reports have surfaced suggesting that the NSA might have secretly introduced vulnerabilities into the Linux kernel. The community reacts with widespread concern.. OpenBSD, Encryption Software, Back Door Allegations, Government Intrusion, Software Integrity. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
'm as big a fan of government intrusion as the next person, but things may have gotten a little out of hand lately. Take last week's legal contretemps between the Justice Department and Google. Forget for a minute that Google really faces no downside by refusing the government's request to turn over search data. Even if Google loses the case and has to turn over some (truncated) amount of (very general) information about a (random) selection of searches, it still wins in the court of public opinion as a defender of personal privacy. As my colleague Chris Murphy put it, Google should take the court costs out of its marketing budget. . Why should the federal government demand that search providers turn over their hard-earned data? Finders keepers, after all. Besides, search data is meaningless without context. Just because a man was convicted recently of killing his wife based partly on evidence of Internet searches for terms like "neck," "snap," and "break," what does that prove? That he was a do-it-yourself-Thanksgiving guy, as much as anything else, if you ask me. The link for this article located at InformationWeek is no longer available. . Why should the federal government demand that search providers turn over their hard-earned data? Fin. government, intrusion, person, things, gotten, little. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
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