China building aircraft carrier - sorta. It's a refurb.

BBC:

The head of China's General Staff of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) has confirmed that China's first aircraft carrier is under construction.

Gen Chen Bingde refused to say when the carrier - a remodelled Soviet-era vessel, the Varyag - would be ready.

A member of his staff said the carrier would pose no threat to other nations.

The 300m (990ft) carrier, which is being built in the north-east port of Dalian, has been one of China's worst-kept secrets, analysts say.

Gen Chen made his comments to the Chinese-language Hong Kong Commercial Daily newspaper.

Symbol of power
The PLA - the largest army in the world - is hugely secretive about its defence programme.

The carrier was constructed in the 1980s for the Soviet navy but was never completed. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the rusting hull of the Varyag sat in dockyards in Ukraine.

The giant, grey hulk of China's newest warship, 60,000 tonnes of steel, sits at a dockside in the port of Dalian, almost ready to set sail”

Read Damian Grammaticas' report from Dalian
A Chinese company with links to the PLA bought the Varyag claiming it wanted to turn it into a floating casino in Macau.

The carrier is thought to be nearly finished, and is expected to begin sea trials later this year.

But the BBC's Michael Bristow in Beijing says that does not mean it will then be ready to undertake operational duties.

Learning how to operate it - and fly planes off it - will take a few more years to master, our correspondent says.

Lt Gen Qi Jianguo, assistant chief of the general staff, told the Hong Kong Commercial Daily that even after the aircraft carrier was deployed, it would "definitely not sail to other countries' territorial waters".

"All of the great nations in the world own aircraft carriers - they are symbols of a great nation," he was quoted as saying.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

bin Laden's number two - wants to be number one.

ABC NEWS: Appearing to assume the role as the new leader of al Qaeda, the former number two Ayman al-Zawahiri vowed to avenge the death of Osama bin Laden "blood for blood," in a video posted on the internet Wednesday morning.

The 28-minute video is the first statement from the 59-year-old al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor, to acknowledge the death of bin Laden, killed in a U.S. Navy SEAL raid into Pakistan last month. Looking aged, and at times angry, al-Zawahiri used a chopping motion with his hands and urged his followers to remember the 9/11 attacks against American and made a point to recall the deaths of US military personnel at the Pentagon.

Al-Zawahiri did not specifically mention whether he was now the leader of the terror group's global jihad, but his tone and words suggested he had the legitimacy to succeed bin Laden.


His anger was apparent as he criticized the U.S. for the manner in which bin Laden was reportedly buried at sea from a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. He called it not Islamic, but "the Islam of the United States, the Islam of Obama."

Elsewhere in the message, in which al-Zawahiri appeared with an automatic rifle to his side, he urged the youth of Pakistan to follow the led of the youth of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria seek to overthrow the government.

Al-Zawahiri, founder of the Egyptian extremist group Egyptian Islamic Jihad, also helped found al Qaeda with bin Laden. He sports the largest bounty offered for information on any terrorist by the U.S. government -- $25 million -- and is wanted for his role in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which claimed 224 lives.

Northrop Grumman, L-3 Communications Hacked

IT Security & Network Security News
Northrop Grumman, L-3 Communications Hacked via Cloned RSA SecurID Tokens


25 Days after Lockheed Martin disclosed a cyber-attack on its networks, reports emerged that two more major defense contractors have also been affected.


Another defense contractor appears to have been hit by a cyber-attack, and a leaked memo indicates company executives believe attackers used information stolen from RSA Security earlier this year. If true, RSA’s SecurID technology may be irrevocably compromised.

Attackers hit major defense contractor L-3 Communications Holdings by spoofing pass codes from a cloned RSA SecurID token, Reuters reported May 27. The attackers may have used a similar method to target another defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, on May 21. The second-largest U.S. defense contractor Northrop Grumman may also have been hacked, as the company shut down remote access to its network without warning on May 26, according to Fox News.

L-3 Communications was formed out of 10 business units that had been spun off by Lockheed prior to its merger with Martin Marietta in 1995. L-3 is a major supplier of communication, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technology to the Department of Defense.

"L-3 Communications has been actively targeted with penetration attacks leveraging the compromised information," an L-3 executive wrote April 6 in an internal memo obtained by Wired Threat Level.

It’s not clear from the internal email whether attackers managed to actually break into L-3 networks, or if they were detected in the midst of the attack. The memo also did not specify exactly why or how L-3 came to the conclusion that the SecurID two-factor authentication system was at fault. An L-3 spokesperson just said the company takes security seriously and that the incident has been resolved.

RSA Security admitted March 17 that cyber-attackers had breached its network and obtained “information relating to the SecurID technology.” The company has steadfastly refused to publicly discuss exactly what was stolen or when the breach actually occurred. RSA later disclosed that it had been hit by a phishing email exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader.

At the time, RSA executive chairman Art Coviello said the stolen information “could potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack.”

For someone to break into a SecurID-protect network, the attacker would need at least one employee's user name and pass code as well as have some idea of which services that employee had access to.

While the details of these attacks are not “fully known,” it is likely that attackers were able to install a keylogger somewhere within the network, according to Harry Sverdlove, CTO of security firm Bit9. The information captured and knowledge of RSA’s token-generation algorithm would give attackers a way to breach the network, Sverdlove said, noting that this would be a “worst case scenario” for SecurID.

“It would mean that a single point of attack can be used to defeat the dual-factor authentication provided by the security tokens,” Sverdlove said.

The keylogger may have been installed on a remote system that connected to the network via a VPN. This makes sense, since the “best bet” is to attack vulnerable endpoints, or computers that are connecting remotely and are likely not under the direct control of the organization’s security policies.

Northrop Grumman does not comment on cyber-attacks against it, the company spokesperson said. It’s also unclear how Northrop Grumman was hit, as ComputerWorld reported that the defense contractor replaced all its SecurID tokens with tokens from a different vendor “immediately” after the RSA breach.

READ THE REST OF THE STORY

TD Barnes on Area 51 Annie Jascobsen: "Stolen Valor "

From TD Barnes Blog:

Excerpt: Jacobsen’s book, “Area 51 an uncensored history of America’s Top Secret Military Base” has excited those who subscribe to activism, scandal, conspiracy, Nazi and Stalin atrocities, and child mutilation, and is racing towards being a number one seller. The scandal is not the veterans, named and unnamed, whom the public now affiliates to the wild, unsubstantiated gory “facts” contained in the last chapter of the book where Jacobsen ventures into writing as an activist in the first person. The scandal is Jacobsen who is fending off international condemnation by the media, fellow journalists, and the veterans of Nevada’s atomic programs and DOD operations at Area 51 by now claiming that as a “reporter” it was her duty to report what she was told and that it was not her job to verify the truth. Instead of enjoying a great book that the DOD and DOE families can be proud of and share with their families, the aging Roadrunners are having to show up at Jacobsen’s book sigings, not to promote her book, but to set the record straight and clear their names and legacy.

READ MORE HERE

Brits hacked al-Qaeda magazine - replace explosive recipe with cupcake recipe

Molotov cocktails? More like mojito cupcakes. In a cyber-warfare operation, British spies successfully hacked al-Qaeda's English language magazine, Inspire, and replaced bombmaking instructions with a list of cupcakes. Victory has never tasted so sweet.

The magazine is published quarterly and distributed as a pdf file. But as a result of the British cyberattack, a page in last year's summer issue titled, "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom," instead provided readers with "The Best Cupcakes in America," courtesy of the Ellen DeGeneres Show.

In addition, "pages 4 through 67 of the otherwise slick magazine, including the bomb-making instructions, were garbled," and "it took almost two weeks for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to post a corrected version," the Washington Post reports. A British government official confirmed the hack to the AP Friday, saying his country is, "increasingly using cybertools."


According to the Washington Post, the U.S. considered targeting the extremist publication, but the CIA opposed those efforts, fearing that such a hack could "expose sources and methods and disrupt an important source of intelligence."
British intelligence, on the other hand, decided to go forward with the cyber attack, sabotaging Inspire's launch issue and removing articles by Osama bin Laden himself. Following the terrorist leader's death, news of this attack was icing on the cupcake in the fight against al-Qaeda.