US Military approved iPhones and iPads for military networks

The US Department of Defense has cleared Apple's iPhone and iPad for use on its military networks, along with the Samsung Galaxy S4 and BlackBerry 10 devices, the agency said in a statement Friday.

The entire DOD is much, much larger, of course, and mobile devices are increasing in importance for the military just as much as they are for we civilians. The report notes that out of more than 600,000 mobile devices used by the Defense Department, only about 41,000 of those are Apple products, with most of those not connected directly to the military's networks.

But because these platforms have previously not been certified or cleared for use, such devices had not been connected to secure military networks, except for testing.

The move was hardly shocking, but Samsung devices running the Knox security suite and BlackBerry 10 already trickling into the hands of Pentagon employees, the decision sets the stage for a three-way bout for military market supremacy. Officials said the STIG does not allow personally acquired mobile devices to connect to DOD networks.

A number of U.S. agencies switched from BlackBerry to iPhones over the last year, while earlier reports indicate Samsung is attempting to attract more government and corporate customers with a new team of security experts and former RIM employees as well as a water and dust proof variant of its flagship S4 dubbed the Galaxy S4 Active.

“With iPhone and iPad being tested or deployed in almost every Fortune 500 company, Apple continues to scale across enterprise with nearly 30,000 companies globally developing and distributing iOS apps for corporate use by their employees,” Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller told AllThingsD. “The FIPS 140-2 certification and STIG approval demonstrate our ongoing commitment to deliver a secure platform to our enterprise and government customers around the world who deploy iOS devices on their networks.” Apple said.

Also the U.S. Air Force is expecting to save more than $50 million over ten years following last year's decision to replace thousands of pages of flight manuals with iPads.

22 million Yahoo IDs stolen from their Japanese Server

22 million Yahoo! Japan's user IDs may have been stolen during an unauthorised attempt to access the administrative system of its Japan portal.

“We don’t know if the file of 22 million user IDs was leaked or not, but we can't deny the possibility given the volume of traffic between our server and external terminals", Yahoo said.

The information did not include passwords and the kind of data necessary to verify a user’s identity or reset passwords, it said, adding that the company had updated its security measures to prevent a repeat of the incident.

In 2011, Sony said information such as usernames, passwords and birth dates of more than 100 million people may have been compromised after hackers struck the PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment services.

Japan acknowledges that its preventative measures against cyberattacks remain underdeveloped, with the national police agency having announced this month it would launch a team to analyze and combat cyberattacks.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said last month that information related to the International Space Station may have been leaked during an unauthorized attempt to access its system.

Source : JapanToday

Apple certified Mac Malware Captures and Uploads Screenshots without Permission

Earlier this week, new Mac spyware was discovered on a computer at the Oslo Freedom Forum, which is an annual human rights conference. Dubbed as OSX/KitM.A, discovered by computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum.
This Mac malware that has been used to spy on activists, targeted via spear phishing attack and had received emails that duped them into installing the malware.

The malware is a backdoor application called "macs.app" which launches automatically upon login. There are two command-and-control servers, located at securitytable.org and docsforum.info.

Interestingly, the malware is signed with an Apple Developer ID, which is designed to prevent the installation of malware, associated with the name Rajender Kumar and the use of the ID appears to be an attempt to bypass Apple's Gatekeeper execution prevention technology.

As of right now, F-Secure is looking into the origination of the malware and though it doesn’t appear to be widespread. You can easily uninstall the malware by deleting the macs.app entry from your machine’s login items and uninstalling the app which could be located in a number of places including your Mac’s home, applications or downloads folders.

Latest Al-Qaeda Magazine content hacked by Western intelligence agencies

New issue of English-language al-Qaeda magazine posted on the terror group's website earlier this week linked to the Boston terrorist attacks has possibly been hacked by Western intelligence agencies and its content beyond its cover page was scrambled.

The magazine, produced by al Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which regularly includes how-to instructions for followers to carry out terrorist attacks in the West, has received significant scrutiny in recent weeks.

Investigators believe that Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev accessed Inspire magazine, and the material had instructions on bomb-making, a law enforcement official said. 

According to analysts, the explosive devices the Boston bombers built had striking similarities to a bomb recipe in the first issue of the magazine, "How to build a bomb in your Mom's kitchen", that has been downloaded by militants in multiple Islamist terrorist plots.

Previous issues of Inspire magazine have seen intervals of weeks to months between production and final publication. According to the report, Josh Lefkowitz, a senior partner at Flashpoint, analysis the metadata on the new purported Inspire magazine shows it was last modified on April 8, a week before the Boston bombings.

The cover page included a content caption "Open Source Jihad," which in past issues has been a section featuring do-it-yourself terrorism advice.

Flashpoint said they detected the new posting on the administrator account of the top-tier, password-protected forum Al Fidaa, a website regularly used to disseminate propaganda from al Qaeda and its affiliates, on Tuesday evening. All the links led to the same corrupted PDF file, and within minutes, the posting had been deleted from the web forum completely.

What seems not to be in doubt, he said, is that someone hacked the al Qaeda web forum.

Financial Times hacked by Syrian Electronic Army

The Financial Times has become the latest news outlet to be hacked by supporters of the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, following a phishing attack on the company’s email accounts.

The posh broadsheet's Tech Blog - at http://blogs.FT.com/beyond-brics was compromised to run stories headlined "Syrian Electronic Army Was Here" and "Hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army". Twelve posts appeared on the FT’s tech blog between 12.38pm and 12.42pm on Friday, with official Twitter feeds also disrupted.

In a later Twitter statement the FT said, "Various FT blogs and social-media accounts have been compromised by hackers and we are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible."

The Syrian Electronic Army, understood to be a number of hackers and online activists that support the current Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, may have gained control for up to 14 Twitter accounts run by the newspaper.

The group of hackers has claimed responsibility for attacks against the BBC, the Associated Press, The Guardian and others in recent weeks, usually targeting official Twitter accounts.

These targeted attacks prompted Twitter to warn media outlets to shore up their security practices because more attacks were sure to happen.

The Pirate Bay co-founder wants to stand in European elections

Peter Sunde,  the former spokesman for The Pirate Bay has announced he will run in the European Parliament elections next year. Sunde, will participate for the Finnish branch of the Pirate Party. The Pirate Party was founded in Sweden in 2006, and in 2009 Christian Engström was the first member of the Pirate Party elected to European Parliament.

Sunde, along with partners Carl Lundström, Frederik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, were convicted of accessory to breaching copyright laws by a Swedish court in 2009.

Peter Sunde, who was born in Sweden but holds Finnish citizenship, is facing a prison sentence for his involvement with BitTorrent doesn't seem to concern him very much. He has been fighting the sentence for a while and if he gets elected things might get very interesting indeed.

Sunde describes himself as 'socialist, green and a pirate' on his blog. "I am doing what I can to help solve the problems we have today, as well as the ones we will have in the future. That’s why I’ve decided to participate in the election for the European parliament 2014,” Sunde said.

"Even though I'm not a politician, or perhaps because of that, I think that my experiences and knowledge could help create the solutions we're in dire need of."

Sunde reportedly reached out to German-born Mega mastermind Kim Dotcom to also stand for election next year, but Dotcom declined, citing other priorities.