TV station hacker warns of zombies in Montana

The Walking Dead? Really? The scary thing about this is "The Great Falls Tribune reports the hoax alert generated at least four calls to police to see if it was true."

Seems like something Orson Welles might do, although he wouldn't have had to hack in because he already had access to the airwaves. I guess people today are just as guiible as people in the 1930s.

Pentagon to Expand Cyber Force

And it's on!

Pentagon to Drastically Expand Cyber Force

As Adam B. Lowther, a Research Professor at the Air Force Research Institute and co-author with Panayotis A Yannakogeorgos of "Conflict and Cooperation in Cyberspace: The Challenge to National Security," to be published by Auerbach in August 2013, said, "With governments and societies believing that cyber attack is something less than an act of war, it should come as no surprise that President Obama is preparing for what may be the opening salvo in America's next confrontation. In fact, it may be the United States that attacks first. Given the cyber vulnerabilities of American society, preemption may be the only option."

Iran as Latest Cyberthreat. Payback's a Bitch.

This article quotes  the head of the Air Force cyber command on Iran's growing cyberthreat.

Well, the Air Force has its cyberwarriors, and wants more, so it stands to reason all our enemies and frenemies want the same. Iran's already hit the financial sector.  Only 17 critical infrastructure sectors  left to go.

Researchers Expose New Vulnerabilities in the Security of Personal Genetic Information

The NY Times covered this story today, too. Basically, using public information, they we able to match people to their DNA.

Here's an interesting demonstration on how this can be done.

This is scary for a lot of reasons, not least of which is health insurance and employment. Forget HIPAA. Your life is an open book. Be worried. Be very worried.

We have two books publishing soon that address this.
The Complete Book of Data Anonymization: From Planning to Implementation by Balaji Raghunathan publishing on February 25, 2013 and Guide to the De-Identification of Personal Health Information by Khaled El Emam publishing on April 29, 2013.

Georgia Tech's Cyber Threat Predictions for 2013: Ho hum, Yawn

I don't know if George Tech is first to 'market' with 2013 cyber threat predictions, but this is getting like political polling. New York Magazine ran an interesting piece about polling, and the fact that anyone with a computer can now create a 'poll' and a voracious media will publish the results. Not to slam Georgia Tech, but first, how many predictions can we digest, and why do predictors think we need so many? I guess it likely doesn't matter because so many of the predictions are similar. In fact, if one is reasonably well read, the predictions are obvious.

Battle for information security 'is being won'

... according to  The Global State of Information Security Survey 2013 published by PwC in conjunction with CIO and CSO magazines.

Cautious optimism or delusional optimism?

Huawei too dangerous to do business with?

Here's more on the supply chain security thing from John Dix, editor of Network World.

Last week, three US service providers came out in support of the Chinese companies. (Sorry, I can't find or recall the reference for this.)

In March, the GAO found that defense agencies claimed to have no supply chain security issues, and discovered that DOD had suspect components.

Is this just New Cold War posturing?