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The US Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Emergency Response Team has released a report , which stated that two American electrical power plants were compromised late last year and has identified a number of glaring electronic vulnerabilities. Some unknown malware infected two power plants control systems using unprotected USB drives as an attack vector. The tainted USB drive came in contact with a handful of machines at the power generation facility and investigators found sophisticated malware on two engineering workstations critical to the operation of the control environment. The report did not say if the computers did or did not have up-to-date antivirus software, but it did say that current software would have found the malware.  The other infection affected 10 computers in a turbine control system. It was also spread by a USB drive and resulted in downtime for the impacted systems and delayed the plant restart by approximately three weeks. ICS-C...

A zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in popular Cisco Linksys routers that allows hackers to gain remote root access. Security vendor DefenseCode discovered the flaw and reported it to Cisco months ago and a fix is already on the way. According to Cisco, more than 70 million Linksys routers sold globally. This exploit was successfully tested against a Linksys model WRT54GL router by researchers at security firm DefenseCode who claimed that the latest Linksys firmware 4.30.14 and all previous versions are still vulnerable. It took the team only 12 days to develop an exploit that could be used by hackers to take control of a person's wireless router and hijack all the information being processed through it. The vulnerability is demonstrated in the following video:

Oracle delivered an unusual emergency patch to Java's critical Zero Day vulnerability on Sunday to fix a malicious bug that allowed hackers access to users web browsers. Exploits for the previously undisclosed flaw were being hosted in a number of exploit kits and attacks have already been seen in the wild dropping ransomware and assorted other malware. Security Alert CVE-2013-0422  include two vulnerabilities that are remotely executable. Oracle confirmed that the flaws were only present in Java 7 versions and did not impact Java on servers, Java desktop applications, or embedded Java. Java is used in 3 billion machines, about 2 billion of which are desktop or laptop computers. Similarly, Back in August last year, Oracle issued an urgent fix to seal a dangerous security flaw within its Java software that's left thousands of computers wide open to malicious attacks from hackers. Lamar Bailey , director of security research and development for nCircle ...

A new sensational discovered has been announced by Kaspersky Lab's Global Research & Analysis Team result of an investigation after several attacks hit computer networks of various international diplomatic service agencies. A new large scale cyber-espionage operation has been discovered, named Red October , name inspired by famous novel The Hunt For The Red October (ROCRA) and chosen because the investigation started last October. The campaign hit hundreds of machines belonging to following categories: Government Diplomatic / embassies Research institutions Trade and commerce Nuclear / energy research Oil and gas companies Aerospace Military The attackers have targeted various devices such as enterprise network equipment and mobile devices (Windows Mobile, iPhone, Nokia), hijacking files from removable disk drives, stealing e-mail databases from local Outlook storage or remote POP/IMAP server and siphoning files from local network FTP servers. Accordin...

Aaron Swartz has committed suicide on January 11, 2013 in New York City.  I have long been fought if you write something about this extraordinary boy, but not dedicate a tribute would be a shame. Aaron Swartz has decided to leave a huge void in the IT scenario.  For me, as the entire world he is a legend, a guy that has profoundly changed our daily work. Aaron Swartz is an eclectic persona; he is an hacker and active activist, co-founder of social news website Reddit and founder of the group Demand Progress. The EFF in a blog post states: " Aaron did more than almost anyone to make the Internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way. His contributions were numerous, and some of them were indispensable. When we asked him in late 2010 for help in stopping COICA, the predecessor to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills, he founded an organization called Demand Progress, which mobilized over a million online activists and proved to be...