December 19, 2007
DHS Official Blogs About Hajj Travel
The Homeland Security Department's recently launched blog has a new entry from Daniel Sutherland, the agency's civil rights and civil liberties chief. His post outlines efforts to make Hajj travel efficient and safe. More than a million people, including thousands of Americans, make a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia each year.
"We are strengthening our cultural competence and honoring our proud traditions of civil rights and civil liberties -- including religious freedom -- as we protect our homeland and our travelers," Sutherland wrote. "We work closely with various religious groups such as Sikh and Jewish organizations concerning the screening of people who wear religious head coverings or carry certain religious articles when they travel."
The DHS "Leadership Journal" averages more than 1,000 visitors a day, officials said. Recent posts have covered diverse topics like biometrics; the rollout of the standardized identification card program known as "Real ID;" and the government's response to an ice storm in the Midwest.
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November 19, 2007
Study: Spammers Changing Strategy
Global spam levels reached an all-time high of 95 percent of all e-mails at its peak during the third quarter of 2007, according to a new report by Commtouch®. The study, based on the automated analysis of billions of e-mail messages, noted the emergence of new kinds of attachment spam such as PDF spam and Excel spam.
There's a growing threat of innocent appearing spam containing links to malicious Web sites, the report indicated. The common thread to all of the nasty activities is the utilization of zombie botnets -- networks of compromised computers that are used to launch the blended spam/malware attacks, officials said. A bit of good news: image spam is on the decline.
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October 26, 2007
Security Information Wants To Be Shared
This story was originally published in Tuesday's PM Edition of Technology Daily.
By Heather Greenfield
A House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee spent Tuesday afternoon reviewing government and private-sector efforts to secure the nation's Internet infrastructure. The House Homeland Security Committee held a similar hearing last week.
The attention comes in part because the Homeland Security Department has declared October as Cyber Security Awareness Month, but the hearings are timelier after a recent video leak to the media. It showed an experiment at one of the national laboratories in which a researcher hacked into a power-plant control system and set fire to it with the click of a mouse.
Getting a grasp of the history of improving cyber security is a challenge in part because the threat has changed. Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, said in prepared testimony that as America has moved from vulnerabilities that might have taken months to exploit to the current era of immediate attacks, "just getting information is no longer nearly enough."
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