Tag Archive for: Keeping

Keeping the lights on after a ransomware attack • Graham Cluley

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Smashing Security podcast #369: Keeping the lights on after a ransomware attack

Leicester City Council suffers a crippling ransomware attack, and a massive data breach, but is it out of the dark yet? And as election fever hits India we take a close eye at deepfakery.

All this and more is discussed in the latest edition of the “Smashing Security” podcast by cybersecurity veterans Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault.

Warning: This podcast may contain nuts, adult themes, and rude language.

Hosts:

Graham Cluley – @gcluley
Carole Theriault – @caroletheriault

Episode links:

Sponsored by:

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  • Kolide – Kolide ensures that if your device isn’t secure it can’t access your cloud apps. It’s Device Trust for Okta. Watch the demo today!

Support the show:

You can help the podcast by telling your friends and colleagues about “Smashing Security”, and leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser.

Become a supporter via Patreon or Apple Podcasts for ad-free episodes and our early-release feed!

Follow us:

Follow the show on Twitter at @SmashinSecurity, or on Mastodon, on the Smashing Security subreddit, or visit our website for more episodes.

Thanks:

Theme tune: “Vinyl Memories” by Mikael Manvelyan.
Assorted sound effects: AudioBlocks.

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Keeping your computer safe is topic of Nov. 14 Friends of Oak Ridge National Lab lecture

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“How to keep your computer (and you) safe” is the topic of the next Friends of Oak Ridge National Laboratory monthly noon lecture meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 14.

The speaker will be James A. “Jim” Rome, a retired ORNL researcher who has expertise on computer security and is a webmaster for several nonprofit organizations, including FORNL.

James A. "Jim" RomeJames A. "Jim" Rome

James A. “Jim” Rome

He will deliver his lecture at the UT Resource Center, 1201 Oak Ridge Turnpike. Attendees may bring their own lunch to eat. To view the virtual noon lecture, click on the talk title on the homepage of the www.fornl.org website and then click on the Zoom link near the top of the page describing the lecture.

“Computer crime is a multi-trillion dollar business,” Rome said. “Unfortunately, the bad guys are winning. I will speak on how to proactively take steps to remain safe on the internet and how to protect your devices.”

Rome, who calls himself “a computer security paranoid,” spent the latter part of his career at ORNL providing computer security for classified systems.

After receiving four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he started his career in 1971 at ORNL as a theoretical plasma physicist with the Fusion Energy Division, where he conducted research for 25 years. He specialized in doing configuration design and following charged particle orbits in fusion devices.

In the 1970s when personal computers first became available, Rome co-write a scientific graphics program, called GraphiC, for PCs.

He later moved to ORNL’s Computer Science and Mathematics Division, where he specialized in air traffic analysis and worked on making computer workstations “multi-level secure.”

He managed ORNL computer security for the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid, a high-speed network that connected supercomputers and facilities at many universities. He also created a public key infrastructure to enable secure, encrypted logins and access to online Lab Notebooks.

Rome is author or co-author of 155 publications, and a fellow of the American Physical Society.  You can learn more about him on his jamesrome.net website.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Keeping your computer safe is…

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NAB Responds: Keeping your money safe

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NAB Retail Customer Executive, Larna Manson, on keeping your money safe:

 

We want to help you to do your banking safely. When you withdraw large amounts of cash or make a transfer that is unusual for you, we might ask you a few extra questions. We do this with your best interests at heart as sadly, we too often see the devastating impacts that scammers have by socially engineering people. We’ve asked our teams to provide you the best service by making sure you aren’t being put under pressure as part of a scam or criminal activity.

From suspicious emails, unusual requests to unexpected phone calls, we can help you learn how to spot a scam.

If you’re ever unsure if a call, SMS or email is really from NAB, here are some simple tips to keep in mind:

  • We have removed links from our text messages. If you get an SMS from NAB with a link in it, it’s likely a scam. Delete it and report it to [email protected].
  • We’ll never send links via email or SMS to direct you to log into your NAB Internet Banking or NAB Connect.
  • We will never ask you to transfer your money to another account to keep it safe – it’s safe where it is.

For more information, head to nab.com.au/security where you can sign-up to one of our free monthly security webinars. These are free for all Australians to sign-up to.

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Keeping Hackers Off the Electrical Grid | News

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By R. Colin Johnson
Commissioned by CACM Staff

June 20, 2023
Comments

ORNL researchers showed how to encode grid operating data into a unique color pattern hidden inside a single video frame, which can be transmitted to a grid control center computer using a Fibonacci sequence to encode/decode each sensor reading.

Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

As attacks on grid substations increase—by 70% in 2022 alone, according to the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)—engineers there are anticipating new attack vectors and taking measures to protect from hackers using them.

“As researchers, we try to stay ahead of cyber threats, not just react to them after they occur,” said ORNL’s Peter Fuhr, who heads its Grid Communications and Security group. Fuhr’s group recently demonstrated a new method of using a rotating color wheel to encode grid sensor data subliminally into a video feed, and using a novel Fibonacci sequence decoding key that rotates the color-wheel so each sensor reading uses a unique color code.

“ORNL has invented a compelling method to protect our critical grid infrastructure that builds upon known encryption technology,” said Sterling Rooke, chief executive officer (CEO) of Brixon Inc. (Baltimore) , a company that manufactures electrical power monitoring instruments. “With the right application, there will be a need for this novel implementation—a kind of steganography that conceals critical information within the existing live video feeds from the grid substations themselves.”

The technique, Fuhr says, translates the encrypted character codes utilities use today to a color-code hidden in video feeds from cameras that already monitor substation activity. EPB (formerly the Electric Power Board, Chattanooga, TN) successfully tested the technique for six months using a virtual local area network (VLAN) link between the central-EPB grid control center and its substations. “We proved the concept in the lab at ORNL, then extended the testing to a nearby substation, and eventually installed the color encoding/decoding equipment at both the EPB substation and its central-control computer,” said Fuhr. “It’s the real deal—tested and…

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