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    #Etats-Unis : 4 millions d’agents fédéraux visés par une #cyber-attaque - Amériques - RFI
    ▻http://www.rfi.fr/ameriques/20150605-cyber-attaque-millions-agents-gouvernement-federal-etats-unis

    Ce serait [...] la deuxième fois que des pirates chinois sont suspectés, sans que l’on sache dans quel but précis..

    Hacking as Offensive Counterintelligence | The XX Committee
    ▻http://20committee.com/2015/06/08/hacking-as-offensive-counterintelligence

    Perhaps the most damaging aspect of this is not merely that four million people are vulnerable to compromise, through no fault of their own, but that the other side now so dominates the information battlespace that it can halt actions against them. If they get word that a American counterintelligence officer, in some agency, is on the trail of one of their agents, they can pull out the stops and create mayhem for him or her: run up debts falsely (they have all the relevant data), perhaps plant dirty money in bank accounts (they have all the financials too), and thereby cause any curious officials to lose their security clearances. Since that is what would happen.

    If this sounds like a nightmare scenario for Washington, DC, that’s because it is. Decades of neglect have gotten us here and it will take decades to get us out of it. The first step is admitting the extent of the problem. Getting serious about security and counterintelligence, finally, is the closely related second step. Back in the 1990’s, CI professionals warned the U.S. government about the hazards of putting everything online (we also pointed this out about internal databases that were supposed to be “secure”). Any cautions or caveats were dismissed as “old think,” out of hand. We were right about this, just as we were right about insider threats like Snowden. The past is the past, it’s time to move forward and do better without delay. The SpyWar is heating up and there’s no time to waste.

    #Chine #informatique #internet #renseignements

    Kassem CC BY-NC-SA
    • @kassem
      Kassem CC BY-NC-SA

      Bulk Collection Is All Fun and Games Until Office of Personnel Management Gets Hacked | emptywheel
      ▻https://www.emptywheel.net/2015/06/06/american-national-security-types-discover-the-drawbacks-of-bulk-collecti

      Once the government does whatever it can to protect the millions compromised by this hack, I hope it will provide an opportunity to do two things: focus on actual cyber-defense, rather than an offensive approach that itself entails and therefore legitimates precisely this kind of bulk collection, and reflect on whether the world we’ve built, in which millions of innocent people get swept up in spying because it’s easy to do so, is really one we want to pursue. Ideally, such reflection might lead to some norm-setting that sharply limits the kinds of targets who can be bulk collected (though OPM would solidly fit in any imaginable such limits).

      China has, unsurprisingly, now adopted our approach, even if it would take a decade for it to catch up in ability to bulk collect from most nodes. And that’s going to suck for a lot of government and private sector employees who will be made targets as a result.

      But that’s the world and the rules we chose to create.

      #leadership

      Kassem CC BY-NC-SA
    • @kassem
      Kassem CC BY-NC-SA

      Sex, lies and debt potentially exposed by US data hack
      ▻http://www.cnbc.com/id/102758588

      When a retired 51-year-old military man disclosed in a U.S. security clearance application that he had a 20-year affair with his former college roommate’s wife, it was supposed to remain a secret between him and the government.
      The disclosure last week that hackers had penetrated a database containing such intimate and possibly damaging facts about millions of government and private employees has shaken Washington.

      Kassem CC BY-NC-SA
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