Provided by CommunityDNS, the information in this post consists of news items in the security-based Internet community.

Study warns of cyberwarfare during military conflicts

Cyberwarfare will accompany future military conflicts. International action will be necessary to blunt an attacks impact, as noted by an independent research group. Last year’s attack on Georgia, apparently planned by the Russian with assistance from Russian nationals, was very effective in targeting, and shutting down sites crucial to the Georgian government. Using this attack as a model it is expected Russians will use this model in the future.

Using the Georgia incident as a model, it is important that an international organization provide risk advisories when preparations for a cybercampaign, or an attack are detected. If an attack is underway it is important for multiple nations, or an international cyber-response force to come together and assist the country under attack; even if it means setting up operations to help the targeted country to survive the attack.

The report also found where Russian sympathizers communicated through other means such as Facefook, Twitter and LiveJournal.

Comment: With the recent DDoS attacks on Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal, might future attacks also include DDoS attacks on such widely used information sharing platforms? In the case of Iran, citizens opposing the recent election results were able to communicate to the world via Twitter. Such social networking sites would be a good way for those negatively affected by an attack to communicate. However, the other side of the sword is such social networking site are also a good way for those conducting the attack to communicate.

Click here and here for more information.

West Africa net service restored

The cable fault that occurred off West Africa in late July, affecting Benin, Togo, Niger and Nigeria, has been repaired. The cut, which cut Nigeria’s bandwidth by 70% caused problems for the country’s banking sector, government and mobile phone networks. Two additional cables for the region are planed but will not be ready until 2010 and 2011 respectfully.

Click here for more information.

Bungling cybercops r00t-y0u.org sting backfires

Australian Federal police, working to clamp down on an underground cybercrime forum left out one detail in their plan to capture the cybercriminals. As a result the cybercriminals were able to hack into and deface the system used by the Federal police for purposes of this rade.

Comment: As countries are implementing cyber forces to help fight cyber crime we need to be keenly aware of two basic items:

• These forces are new to the area of cyber crime.

• Cyber criminals have been at their craft for a long time and have a well established community upon which they can rely for assistance.

So while it is good to learn from other’s mistakes, CommunityDNS strongly disagrees with the title of the story as provided by The Register.

Click here for more information.

Three Men Charged with Stealing 130 Million Credit Cards

Three men indicted for capturing 130 million credit and debit card information in what became the world’s largest known hack of user information. Maximum sentencing could yield a combined 25 year prison sentence as well as a $250,000 fine for each charge.

Click here for more information.

EU invests millions in high-speed mobile internet

18 million euro, or $25 million will be spent on an “ultra high-speed” internet system that forms the basis for the next generation of mobile services. Creating a network to handle four times the capacity of current 3G networks. This network is expected to provide the foundation for mobile devices to become powerful computer systems as well as pave the way for effective delivery of mobile access to TV and video-on-demand systems. The network will used frequencies freed by the switchover from analogue to digital TV.

Click here for more information.

Virgin hijacks empty pages

Adopting what US-based ISPs, Comcast, Verizon and several smaller ISPs do, Virgin Broadband is the first in Europe to join the ranks of seeking additional funding by serving up advertising pages instead of telling the user they have reached a page that does not exist. This practice is expected to spread to other European ISPs. The potential problem is it blurs the line between ISP-sponsored ad pages and pages served-up by cybercriminals as users may not know they tried to reach a page that does not exist.

Click here for more information.

38% of large US companies have full-time email monitoring staff

News about corporate cyber hacks make for sensational reporting. However, the largest form of corporate leakage of sensitive information still comes from internal sources. As such a recent poll of 220 companies that employed more than 1,000 people has found 38% of the companies employ people whose job function is to read outgoing e-mail, blogs and employees social networking pages to see if sensitive corporate information is being leaked. The poll uncovered that data is more likely to be leaked by internal employees where there is either employee termination or the risk of potential termination due to rumored lay-offs.

Click here for more information.