One hand of the government is reaching out to the valley, while another is poking them in the eye.

Most Silicon Valley companies are backing Apple in the dispute. They argue that an adverse ruling would spark a flood of requests for similar tools from local, state and federal prosecutors, and they fear it would make smartphones and other encrypted devices more vulnerable to hackers.

“One hand of the government is reaching out to the valley, while another is poking them in the eye,” said Peter W. Singer, a fellow at the nonprofit New America Foundation in Washington and coauthor of the book “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar.”

The debate will shift to Congress on Tuesday when James B. Comey, the FBI director, and Bruce Sewell, Apple’s general counsel, are scheduled to testify at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the competing demands for security and privacy.

Pentagon seeks cyberweapons strong enough to deter attacks

W.J. Hennigan and Brian Bennett

The nation that brought the world the mushroom cloud is now hard at work on a new project: coming up with cyberweapons so strong that their very existence would deter foreign governments from attacking U.S. databases and crucial computer systems.

The idea is to try to adapt a military concept that…

The nation that brought the world the mushroom cloud is now hard at work on a new project: coming up with cyberweapons so strong that their very existence would deter foreign governments from attacking U.S. databases and crucial computer systems.

The idea is to try to adapt a military concept that…

(W.J. Hennigan and Brian Bennett)

The public focus on the FBI fight with Apple is “perhaps a positive outcome of an otherwise tense and sometimes divisive situation,” said Lillian Ablon, a cybersecurity analyst at the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica.

Carter’s trip, and a similar visit by Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch, who will also speak at the cybersecurity conference, “seems like a step in the right direction” to bridge the divide, she said.

Carter, a physicist, is more tech savvy than his predecessors at the Pentagon. He taught at Stanford University, where Google, Yahoo and other major companies got started, and has sought to build relationships with the tech community since he took office a year ago.

Last spring, he flew to Silicon Valley — the first Defense chief to visit in two decades — to open the oddly-named Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental, which serves as a Pentagon incubator in the valley. He will visit the site Tuesday to review progress.

Pentagon aides hope Carter’s outreach to the fast-paced start-up culture can help fill gaps in U.S. cyberdefense efforts, and speed up development and procurement of digital tools — from robotics to artificial intelligence — to the military.

The military, of course, has its own hackers at U.S. Cyber Command, and other arms of the federal government — including the Homeland Security Department, Justice Department and intelligence agencies — are supposed to identify and track militants online.

Though much of the work is classified, the public effort is aimed at getting social media and tech companies to help counter and block online material used to recruit, radicalize and indoctrinate new militants.

“The Internet shouldn’t be used for that purpose,” Carter told a congressional hearing last week. “Why should they be able to communicate? Why should they be using the Internet?”

But stopping that communication is an immense challenge, said Monika Bickert, a Facebook executive who is in charge of ensuring that terrorist material is not posted on Facebook pages.

“We have billions of posts every day,” she said Friday at the nonprofit Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Twitter, which also has a zero tolerance policy for pro-terrorist tweets, said this month it had suspended more than 125,000 accounts. But blocked users often pop up with new handles and new accounts.

Twitter is “the heart and soul of cyber jihad,” said Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, a nonprofit group in Washington that tracks Muslim extremists online.

But a study this month from a project on extremism at George Washington University concluded that Twitter’s effort had helped slow Islamic State’s reach in cyberspace because the new accounts had fewer followers.

J.M. Berger, a coauthor of the report, points to Asawirti Media, a Twitter account holder that has been suspended more than 440 times.

Each time the account pops back, it starts with zero followers, Berger said. In September 2014, Asawirti Media had 81,000 followers; its latest iteration has 1,000.

Tech companies “probably could do more, but it verges on impossible to completely wipe these guys off social media networks,” said Berger, author of the book “ISIS: The State of Terror.”

“There seems to be a wish on behalf of the government to offload the job of quieting extremists to Silicon Valley,” he said. “But they need to understand that no one starts a social media company to become the world’s morality police.”

Firewall Management

 

A firewall management program can be configured one of two basic ways:

• A default-deny policy. The firewall administrator lists the allowed network services, and everything else is denied.
• A default-allow policy. The firewall administrator lists network services which are not allowed, and everything else is accepted.

A default-deny approach to firewall security is by far the more secure, but due to the difficulty in configuring and managing a network in that fashion, many networks instead use the default-allow approach. Let’s assume for the moment that your firewall management program utilizes a default-deny policy, and you only have certain services enabled that you want people to be able to use from the Internet. For example, you have a web server which you want the general public to be able to access. What happens next depends on what kind of firewall security you have.

The importance of computer

 

I found is information very important in the area of computer security and how to prevent hacker gaining access to your computer. Below are the information.

Computer security — a wide concept that encompasses almost any software or hardware that is designed to prevent the loss or theft of electronic data — is important for a number of reasons, but perhaps principally as a means of keeping information safe. Most of the time, the term “computer security” refers to the security of a computer’s insides. The data and compendious information that most users store on their hard drives is often far more valuable than are the machines themselves. Broadly speaking, the importance of computer security lies in how harmful it can be if that data is lost.

Most people think about computer security in a corporate or business context. Companies often store a lot of very sensitive information electronically, including trade secrets, customer lists and extensive corporate documents, both finished and those in progress. The importance of computer security is obvious in these contexts. It is perhaps less obvious for home computer users, but it is no less essential.

Computers are not inherently open to risks such as hacking or data breach. In order for outsiders to get into a computer, that computer must somehow open itself up to intrusion. Internet activity is the primary highway for these transactions. Many computer users do not realize that simply accessing the web could be making their computers more vulnerable.

Network security comprises the measures a company takes to protect its computer system, and it is a prime concern for every company that uses computers. Compromised network security means a hacker or competitor may gain access to critical or sensitive data, possibly resulting in data loss, or even complete destruction of the system.

Appropriate security for a network is achieved when a user has to go through several layers of security before being able to access the desired network. The more layers the system has, the more secure it is.

For more information you can visit: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-data-loss.htm