_________________________________________________________________ London, Wednesday, August 21, 2002 _________________________________________________________________
INFOCON News _________________________________________________________________ IWS - The Information Warfare Site http://www.iwar.org.uk _________________________________________________________________ InfowarCon 2002: Homeland Defense and Cyber-Terrorism, Washington, DC September 4-5, 2002, optional workshops September 3 & 6. Presented by MIS Training Institute and Interpact, Inc. Proven strategies for protecting against threats to critical infrastructures and government systems. Go to: http://www.misti.com/08/iw02nl27inf.html _________________________________________________________________ ---------------------------------------------------- [News Index] ---------------------------------------------------- [1] GAO recommends performance measures for new security agency [2] U.S. Probes Firm In Security Breach [3] BlackBerry to carry DOD security [4] Fighting spam with copyrights [5] State Department officials envision new intelligence role [6] Study: Admins slow in patching Apache-SSL servers [7] NASA REJECTS CLAIMS IT PLANS MIND READING CAPABILITY [8] (Ethiopia) A Sheep-ish Stab at E-Commerce [9] Know Your Enemy: Building Virtual Honeynets [10] Israeli teenagers charged over Goner virus [11] Agencies should use existing systems to share information [12] Popular MS download has mysterious vuln [13] Cracking the hackers' code [14] IRS loses track of computers [15] Army picks Anteon for overseas IT support [16] GSA awards FirstGov contract to AT&T [17] TSP board delays new computer system again _________________________________________________________________ News _________________________________________________________________ [I recommend to read the GAO report. WEN] [1] GAO recommends performance measures for new security agency By Tanya N. Ballard The Bush administration must develop clear goals and performance measures for agencies that will be merged into the proposed Department of Homeland Security, according to an official from the General Accounting Office. "The nation does not yet have a comprehensive set of performance goals and measures upon which to assess and improve prevention efforts, vulnerability reduction and responsiveness to damage and recovery needs at all levels of government," said Patricia Dalton, GAO's director of strategic issues. Dalton testified Tuesday about the organizational and management issues facing the proposed Homeland Security Department before the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Financial Management and Intergovernmental Relations. Full story: http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0802/082002t2.htm The General Accounting Office (GAO) today released the following testimony: TESTIMONY Homeland Security: Effective Intergovernmental Coordination is Key to Success, by Patricia A. Dalton, director, strategic issues, before the Subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Financial Management, and Intergovernmental Relations, House Committee on Government Reform, House of Representatives, in Abilene, Kansas. GAO-02-1011T, August 20. http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-02-1011T ---------------------------------------------------- [I hope they get shut down as what they did was totally unethical. The excuse below is rather ridiculous as there is always a way of contacting the government without using the media! Bottom line: The government should make an example out of them and close them down, so that unethical Infosec consultants will think twice before doing such a publicity stunt! WEN] 'As former employees of a private investigation firm -- and relative newcomers to the security field -- the ForensicTec consultants said they continued examining the system because they were curious, and appalled by how easy it was. Last week, O'Keeffe said his consultants concluded that they had found a serious problem and wanted to help the government by bringing it to light. "We could have easily walked away from it," he said last week.' [2] U.S. Probes Firm In Security Breach Consultants Invaded Federal Computers By Robert O'Harrow Jr. Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, August 21, 2002; Page E03 Federal law enforcement authorities searched the computers of a San Diego security firm that used the Internet to access government and military computers without authorization this summer, officials said yesterday. Investigators from the FBI, the Army and NASA visited the offices of ForensicTec Solutions Inc. over the weekend and on Monday, seeking details about how the company gained access to computers at Fort Hood in Texas and at the Energy Department, NASA and other government facilities, officials said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42019-2002Aug20.html ---------------------------------------------------- [3] BlackBerry to carry DOD security BY Christopher J. Dorobek Aug. 20, 2002 The company that makes BlackBerry handheld devices is working with the National Security Agency to meet the Defense Department's needs for the increased security of the Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) standard, the company said. The announcement from Research In Motion (RIM) Ltd. that its BlackBerry products will support the standard comes as the Defense Department is nearing the release of its new wireless security policy, possibly as soon as this week. http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2002/0819/web-mime-08-20-02.asp ---------------------------------------------------- [90% of the spam comes from about 150 people who sent out millions of emails a week (Average return: 25 purchases per 1 million spam emails. WEN] [4] Fighting spam with copyrights Reuters August 20, 2002, 7:33 AM PT SAN FRANCISCO--A California company said on Monday it plans to fight Internet e-mail spam using a new system that relies on U.S. copyright and trademark law. Palo Alto, California-based Habeas Inc. provides a system that allows people to easily differentiate between acceptable e-mail and spam, said Chief Executive Anne P. Mitchell. "We're letting you separate the wheat from the chaff," Mitchell said. Habeas is a Latin term used in legal proceedings that means "evidence" or "to show proof." http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-954509.html ---------------------------------------------------- [5] State Department officials envision new intelligence role By Shane Harris PHILADELPHIA - The State Department will play a new leading role gathering intelligence on foreigners who could be potential terrorists, according to agency officials who spoke at a homeland security conference Monday. Diplomats aren't usually thought of as intelligence agents, but with more than 257 embassies, consulates and other official posts in about 180 countries, no federal agency can match the department's overseas presence, said Hunter Ledbetter, State's coordinator for intelligence, resources and planning. >From the most senior diplomats to consular officers stamping passports, State personnel living and working abroad are often the first point of contact with would-be terrorists, soaking up information from personal interviews or articles in local newspapers that might go unnoticed otherwise, Ledbetter said. Full story: http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0802/082002h1.htm ---------------------------------------------------- [6] Study: Admins slow in patching Apache-SSL servers By Joris Evers 21 August, 2002 9:00 AMSTERDAM, U.K. Many Web servers running Apache-SSL remain vulnerable to attacks, although a June security alert did prompt administrators to patch standard Apache Web installations, according to a survey released Tuesday. About 75 percent of Web sites hosted on Apache-SSL servers are vulnerable, as the software has not been upgraded to fix a serious flaw uncovered in June, according to a survey by Web server information firm Netcraft Ltd. of Bath, England. http://www.computerworld.com.au/idg2.nsf/All/8F882A39F938D8A2CA256C1B007248FA!Op enDocument&NavArea=Home&SelectedCategoryName=News ---------------------------------------------------- [7] NASA REJECTS CLAIMS IT PLANS MIND READING CAPABILITY NASA managers today said published media reports suggesting the agency plans to read the minds of potential terrorists go too far and ignore the facts and science behind the research. The articles were based on a NASA presentation, which served as talking points for a meeting with Northwest Airlines in December 2001. The presentation was in response to the call from the Federal Government for all agencies to look inward and find what could be done to help in the war on terrorism. ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/pressrel/2002/02-160.txt ---------------------------------------------------- [8] A Sheep-ish Stab at E-Commerce By Joanna Glasner In an effort to tailor its gift selection to local tastes over the past two years, the website has offered the animals in three sizes -- medium, big or very big -- to overseas customers wanting to send gifts to friends and family in Ethiopia. "It's true that with globalization, people are starting to become more and more similar. But there are differences that we have to take into account," said Dawit Bekele, the Ethiopian-born computer science PhD who founded the site. "Most Ethiopians are not used to giving flowers as a gift, while sheep is a very common gift," he said. >From his own experience living in France for nine years, Bekele said he had first-hand experience with the difficulties of sending gifts home. As he watched the rise of the commercial Internet in Europe, Bekele said he wanted to find a way to adapt the medium to his homeland. http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,54360,00.html?tw=wn_ascii ---------------------------------------------------- [9] Know Your Enemy: Building Virtual Honeynets by The Honeynet Project last updated August 20, 2002 This article has been contributed to SecurityFocus by the Honeynet Project. For more information on honeypots and honeynets, please visit the Honeynet Project at http://www.honeynet.org. Over the past several years, honeynets have demonstrated their value as a security mechanism, primarily to learn about the tools, tactics, and motives of the blackhat community. This information is critical for organizations to better understand and protect against the threats they face. Among the problems with honeynets is that they are resource intensive, difficult to build, and complex to maintain. Honeynets require a variety of both physical systems and security mechanisms to be effectively deployed. However, the Honeynet Project has been researching a new possibility, virtual honeynets. These systems share many of the values of traditional honeynets, but have the advantages of running all the systems on a single system. This makes virtual honeynets cheaper to build, easier to deploy, and simpler to maintain. http://online.securityfocus.com/infocus/1614 ---------------------------------------------------- [10] Israeli teenagers charged over Goner virus According to reports in an Israeli newspaper, five teenagers have been charged in connection with the W32/Goner-A virus which spread worldwide late last year. The Ha'aretz newspaper reports that the five were charged at Haifa District Court with wilfully causing damage to computers belonging to companies and private individuals around the world, including the American space agency NASA, by deliberately writing and spreading a computer virus across the internet. http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/articles/gonera2.html ---------------------------------------------------- [11] Agencies should use existing systems to share information By Molly M. Peterson, National Journal's Technology Daily PHILADELPHIA - As federal, state and local agencies work to fuse their information systems to defend the nation against terrorist threats, they should look for existing solutions before attempting to "reinvent the wheel," several government technology experts said Monday. "We don't want to invest dollars if we already have something that we can build upon," Steven Cooper, the White House Office of Homeland Security's chief information officer, told a crowd of more than 900 during a homeland security conference sponsored by the Government Emerging Technologies Alliance. Cooper, whose keynote address began the three-day conference, said the tendency to duplicate existing information-sharing efforts is a "major risk" facing hundreds of agencies at all levels of government, as they race to connect the dots. "It doesn't make sense," Cooper said. "It's not good business at any level." http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0802/082002td1.htm ---------------------------------------------------- [12] Popular MS download has mysterious vuln By Thomas C Greene in Washington Posted: 21/08/2002 at 09:39 GMT A certain remote root vulnerability in a Microsoft application called File Transfer Manager (FTM), a gimmick for developers, beta testers and volume license addicts (i.e., most of their corporate customers) alike, is not serious and there's almost no chance that some wily blackhat has used it against you. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/26765.html ---------------------------------------------------- [13] Cracking the hackers' code By Suelette Dreyfus August 20 2002 If your organisation suffered a computer crime in the past few years and reported it to AusCERT, it was probably an attack from outside your walls. Nearly 90 per cent of Australian organisations that reported an incident were attacked externally, according to the 2002 Australian Computer Crime and Security Survey. This is the first time the threat of being attacked from outside surpassed the likelihood of an assault from inside. It might be increasingly difficult to keep out external hackers but there are signs IT managers are finding it easier to win support within companies for improving security. Management consulting firm McKinsey & Co recently studied security best practices at Fortune 500 companies. About 30 of these companies, including AOL Time Warner, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft and Visa International, had appointed a chief security officer or other senior executive to oversee information security. In some cases, this executive had the power to stop the launch of new products or systems, and answered only to the chief executive. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/08/20/1029114072039.html ---------------------------------------------------- [14] IRS loses track of computers BY Colleen O'Hara Aug. 19, 2002 The Internal Revenue Service can't account for computers that it lent to volunteers who help the elderly and others prepare their tax returns, according to a Treasury inspector general's audit report. The Aug. 13 report from the Treasury inspector general for tax administration comes on the heels of well-publicized reports of missing laptops from the Justice Department, the U.S. Customs Service and Defense Department. http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2002/0819/web-irs-08-19-02.asp ---------------------------------------------------- [15] Army picks Anteon for overseas IT support BY Dan Caterinicchia Aug. 20, 2002 The Army Network Engineering and Telecommunications Activity recently awarded Anteon International Corp. a five-year, $10.8 million contract for information technology support services at overseas locations. http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2002/0819/web-army-08-20-02.asp ---------------------------------------------------- [16] GSA awards FirstGov contract to AT&T >From National Journal's Technology Daily The General Services Administration announced Tuesday that its federal technology services branch awarded a contract to AT&T to provide Web-hosting and security services for FirstGov, the federal government's Web portal. Under the deal, which became effective Aug. 14, AT&T will provide hardware and software to GSA's Office of Citizens Services and Communication (OCSC), which manages the FirstGov site. The contract will last for one year at $1.9 million per year, giving GSA the option to renew it over the next three years. "The federal government's e-gov initiatives will be able to use the new contract to design, test, and deploy a wide range of new services to better serve the citizen," said Casey Coleman, chief technology officer for OCSC. GSA described the deal as an "interim solution" while OCSC improves its Web offerings. OCSC is a new office within GSA that aims to provide easy access to information and services on federal and state government Web sites. http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0802/082002td2.htm ---------------------------------------------------- [17] TSP board delays new computer system again By Brian Friel A new computer system that would give federal employees more control over their 401k-style Thrift Savings Plan account won't be ready until November, the TSP board announced Tuesday. The announcement marked the fifth time in two years that the computer modernization schedule has slipped. The board had previously announced that the new system would be up and running in September. TSP officials said the new system is fully developed, but testing has fallen behind because it took longer than expected to convert TSP participants' records to the new system. Contractors are testing the records to make sure they were completely and accurately converted, TSP officials said. "Although data conversion is expected soon to be validated, the compression caused by its delay dictates an adjustment to our implementation schedule to accommodate parallel testing," said TSP Executive Director Roger Mehle. Parallel testing will make sure the new system can handle the TSP's high volume and complexity of transactions. About 3 million civilian and military participants have about $100 billion invested in the TSP. "We will make a transition to the new . system only when we are completely satisfied of its reliability," Mehle said. http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0802/082002b2.htm ---------------------------------------------------- _____________________________________________________________________ The source material may be copyrighted and all rights are retained by the original author/publisher. 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