SecurityWeek

WASHINGTON - The US manufacturing lobby on Monday said President Barack Obama should get tough with President Xi Jinping on alleged  Chinese cyber spying and what it sees as predatory economic policies.

Robert Kugler, a 17-year-old German student submitted a bug report to PayPal’s bounty program earlier this month, and was told he was too young to receive payment. Since reporting it offered no results, Kugler decided to go public – a move that would touch off another discussion about how vendors should treat researchers who find bugs in their products.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) say they’ve uncovered a new set of hard-to-detect methods that could be used to trigger malware on mobile devices and lead to highly focused, targeted attacks. According to a paper published by the UAB researchers, it is possible to use music, lighting, magnets or vibration to initiate an attack. Further, the attacks are low bandwidth, amounting to only five-bits per second.

Cyber-attack headlines in the last couple of months read like a summer blockbuster novel filled with espionage, international hackers and advanced weapons systems. In fact, cyber-attacks against financial organizations, government sites and critical infrastructure have escalated in the past six months.

WASHINGTON - The FBI is stepping up its effort to get broader authority to put "wiretaps" on the Internet to catch criminals and terrorists.

BRUSSELS - Defence ministers from NATO's 28 member states meet on Tuesday with cyber-defence top of the agenda, amid concerns about the threat posed by increasing cyber-attacks, many blamed on China."The challenge evolves all the time, probably (much faster) than any other type of threat we face at the moment," said one senior NATO official who asked not to be named."We have to make certain that NATO keeps pace with the threat," the official added, looking ahead to the meeting Tuesday and Wednesday.

A former campaign manager for New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of computer intrusion and making a false statement. Jamie Estrada, 40, of Los Lunas, New Mexico, is accused of using his access to the campaign’s domain to intercept communications and lying to federal agents when questioned about the incident.

Next week in Washington, DC, top U.S. and international government officials, policy makers, and executives will gather for the 2013 Government Cybersecurity Forumpresented by Kaspersky Lab.

I just finished two weeks of travel – part in Washington DC, part at a Wall Street conference. In both arenas, continuous monitoring is a hot topic. But, as so often happens, the two communities don’t seem to agree on what the words mean. Disconnects on this point aren’t just a semantic detail – in a world of FISMA reform and increasing pressure for federal oversight of “critical infrastructure,” misunderstandings can cause major problems.

ABOARD A US MILITARY AIRCRAFT - The United States must develop "rules of the road" with China and other countries to mitigate cyberthreats, Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel said Thursday.

WASHINGTON - The United States on Thursday lifted a ban on sales of communications equipment to Iranians and opened access to Internet services and social media, aiming to help the Iranian people circumvent tough government controls.

Seven days – that is how long Google believes security researchers should have to give vendors to provide mitigations or a patch before disclosing information about zero-day bugs under attack in the wild.

BEIJING - A Pentagon report accusing Chinese hackers of accessing US weapons designs contained "misjudgements", a spokesman for Beijing's defence ministry said Thursday, adding China could build weapons on its own.

KUALA LUMPUR - Malaysian police have been cooperating with authorities abroad to stem a global online currency operator that is being probed in the US on allegations of massive money laundering, a report said Thursday.

ThreatMetrix, a provider of technologies to help organizations thwart cybercrime, announced a new intelligence network containing threat data and information that can be used to identify transactions and Website visitors as potentially malicious.