Iran admits expanded cyberattacks, claims it’s identified hackers
The Iranian government acknowledged today that authorities have found evidence of recent cyberattacks against several agencies, according to reports by state-sponsored media outlets.
A week ago, the country's oil ministry confirmed that it and other facilities in the energy industry had been targeted by malware attacks.
Today, the Mehr News Agency said that Esmaeil Ahmadi-Moqaddam, Iran's national police chief, had claimed that his office has "found clues about recent cyberattacks on a number of Iranian ministries and companies."
Mehr is a semi-official arm of the Iranian government. Read more...
Google highlights trouble in detecting web-based malware
Google issued a new study on Wednesday detailing how it is becoming more difficult to identify malicious websites and attacks, with antivirus software proving to be an ineffective defense against new ones.
The company's engineers analyzed four years worth of data comprising 8 million websites and 160 million web pages from its Safe Browsing service, which is an API (application programming interface) that feeds data into Google's Chrome browser and Firefox and warns users when they hit a website loaded with malware.
Google said it displays 3 million warnings of unsafe websites to 400 million users a day. The company scans the Web, using several methods to figure out if a site is malicious.
"Like other service providers, we are engaged in an arms race with malware distributors," according to a blog post from Google's security team.
That detection process is becoming more difficult due to a variety of evasion techniques employed by attackers that are designed to stop their websites from being flagged as bad, according to the report. Read more...
Anonymous suspect ‘Topiary’ charged over DDoS attacks
The 18-year-old teenager identified by police as the spokesman for the hacking groups Anonymous and Lulz Security was charged on Sunday with five offenses and expected to appear Monday in a London court.
Jake Davis, 18, was arrested in the Shetland Islands on Wednesday. He is alleged by police to be "Topiary," a spokesman who did interviews with media and ran a prolific Twitter account documenting frequent denial-of-service attacks and data theft escapades of Anonymous and LulzSec.
Davis was charged with conspiring with others to conduct DDoS attacks against the website of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, a British law enforcement institution similar to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Read more...
Despite arrest, Lulzsec sails on
The hacking group known as LulzSec pledged to continue their online rampage Tuesday, a day after U.K. police arrested a man allegedly affiliated with the group.
Scotland Yard declined to name the 19-year-old man, but LulzSec and local media identified him as Ryan Cleary. According to LulzSec, he operated an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server used by the group and was not a leader.
"Ryan Cleary is not part of LulzSec; we house one of our many legitimate chatrooms on his IRC server, but that's it," the group said Tuesday in a Twitter message. "Clearly the UK police are so desperate to catch us that they've gone and arrested someone who is, at best, mildly associated with us. Lame." Read more...