NEW DELHI: In almost the last three years, 117 government websites have been hacked by various groups, parliament was informed on Wednesday. “As per the information tracked and reported to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team a total of 90,119,252 and 117 government websites were hacked in the year 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 (till June) by various hacker groups,” Minister of State for Communications and IT Milind Deora said.

BIO: Mikko Hypponen is the Chief Research Officer for F-Secure. He has worked with F-Secure in Finland since 1991. Mr. Hypponen, born in 1969, was selected among the 50 most important people on the web by the PC World magazine. He also received the Virus Bulletin Award, awarded every ten years, as “Best in industry”.

ACCESS INFOGRAPHIC DATA ON CYBERCRIME STATISTICS

Mr. Hypponen has led his team through the largest outbreaks in history. His team took down the world-wide network used by the Sobig.F worm. He was the first to warn the world about the Sasser outbreak, he named the infamous Storm Worm and he has done classified briefings on the operation of the Stuxnet worm.

Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday and in budget documents next month, calls for a 30% increase in the U.S. fleet of armed unmanned aircraft in the coming years, defense officials said.

One major component of the data collection and dissemination process is the UAV GCS. The ground station receives the information collected by a UAV, processes that information, and reroutes it via a datalink to the appropriate end user. The station also controls where the UAV goes and what it looks at.

For example, the MQ-1 Predator UAV system comes in a package with 4 vehicles, 1 GCS, and a data link suite that consists of UHF and VHF radio relay links, a C-band line-of-sight data link, and Ku-band satellite data links. When the Predator drone is out of sight of the GCS, the operators use a satellite data link.

The Predator GCS is housed in a commercially available trailer. The trailer incorporates an integral uninterrupted power supply, environmental control system, pilot and payload operator (PPO) workstations, data exploitation, mission planning, communication (DEMPC) terminals, and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) workstations. All imagery recording is located in the GCS, since the Predator has no onboard recording capability.

[Drone Control Room]

PENTAGON CONTEMPLATES CYBER WAR OFFENSE FIRST STRIKE

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, held its first-ever symposium to discuss how the U.S. military can better protect itself from foreign-backed hackers. DARPA’s director, Regina Dugan, told conference members the agency will work to develop offensive cyber capabilities.

Hostile governments can now cripple power grids, water supplies, even nuclear facilities without firing a single shot. Creating a national catastrophe has never been easier. And the new weapon of choice for the world’s terrorists is the humble laptop.
[Via: Forbes.com]

SO WHAT IS THE PENTAGON DOING ABOUT IT, THIS REPORT EXPLORES?

“US intelligence officials are investigating the presence of Chinese telecom firms in the country. It marks growing concern in the United States that the Chinese regime is carrying out cyber espionage through major Chinese firms.

US lawmakers are looking into the expansion of Chinese telecom firms. The House Intelligence Committee last week announced it will investigate if two major companies, Huawei and ZTE Corporation, pose a security threat to the United States through telecommunications infrastructures.

Huawei is China’s largest provider of telecom equipment, and has aggressively expanded overseas in recent years. Its operations in the United States have faced opposition from those concerned about its possible ties to the Chinese regime’s military. Huawei’s founder was an engineer in the army, but the private company says he left 25 years ago, and has no links with the Chinese regime.

Former Chinese intelligence officer Li Fengzhi says this does not rule out Huawei and other Chinese firms from engaging in intelligence work in the United States.

[Li Fengzhi, Former Chinese Intelligence Officer]:
“They will register a company in the target country, like the US by a private individual, or a branch of a large private enterprise, or something with government backing. They can then place intelligence workers here who look for opportunities to obtain important or sometimes trivial intelligence, including military intelligence.”

Earlier this month, US intelligence officials accused the Chinese regime of being the biggest perpetrator of economic espionage. Representative Mike Rogers, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, echoed those claims last week. His committee launched an investigation to find out whether Chinese telecom firms in the US give the Chinese regime “an opportunity for greater foreign espionage.”

The Chinese regime denies being involved in cyber espionage, and says the US is politicizing trade issues. Both Huawei and ZTE Corporation, China’s second-largest mobile-equipment maker, maintain they pose no security threat to the United State”

[Via: http://english.ntdtv.com]

THE SUPER COMMITTEE

[Via: Compiled by Thaisi H. Da Silva for NewsHour Extra]