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Detecting pieces of malware and powerful cyberweapons of all types is what cybersecurity companies do, therefore it is clear the creators of Duqu 2 were so confident that it would never be discovered they decided to attack one of the worlds best-known cybersecurity companies directly. Kaspersky Lab has revealed how it uncovered the Duqu 2 attack against its own network and believes it is a generation ahead of anything wed seen earlier in terms of its thinking and the techniques it uses to remain undetectable. So, what is Duqu 2, where did it come from and how was it detected An evolution of Duqu Duqu was a sophisticated piece of malware discovered in 2011 having been used in a number of intelligence-gathering attacks against a range of industrial targets. Duqu had a number of similarities to the infamous Stuxnet worm, leading many to believe it was also developed by the US and Israel. Duqu was detected after being deployed in Hungary, Austria, Indonesia, the UK, Sudan and Iran, and there are clues that the cyberweapon was used to spy on the Iran nuclear programme and also to compromise certificate authorities to hijack digital certificates. How was it discovered Duqu was discovered because it attacked the one group which could have possibly recognised it was under attack - Kaspersky Lab. The Russian security company was testing a very early version of its Anti-APT solution - a piece of software designed to detect advanced state-sponsored cyberattacks such as Stuxnet, Gauss, Flame, Red October, The Mask... and of course Duqu. Kaspersky said it detected the exceptional attack in early spring this year after the attackers had been inside their system for a number of months thanks to the expertise of our researchers and our technologies. How powerful is Duqu 2 This is how Kaspersky Lab founder Eugene Kaspersky put it: We found something really big here. Indeed, the cost of developing and maintaining such a malicious framework is colossal. The thinking behind it is a generation ahead of anything wed seen earlier – it uses a number of tricks that make it really difficult to detect and neutralise. It looks like the people behind Duqu 2.0 were fully confident it would be impossible to have their clandestine activity exposed.

The computer of German Chancellor Angela Merkel was used to spread Trojan malware during a cyberattack on the German parliament (Bundestag), Bild am Sonntag reports. BERLIN (Sputnik) – German Bundestag’s internal computer network was hacked in May. It was unclear whether the cybercriminals, which some reports said were Russian, obtained any classified information as a result of the breach. Bild am Sonntag said on Sunday that Merkel’s computer was one of the first attacked by the hackers, who accessed the system using Trojan malware. The chancellor’s name was then used to spread the virus to other computers through a fake invitation to a conference. A link in the letter would activate the Trojan virus. None of the sources close to Merkel could say whether the hackers stole any data from the chancellor’s computer, the German newspaper said. Merkel was at the center of a spying scandal in 2013, when former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) tapped the chancellor’s phone and eavesdropped on millions of Germans using a listening post in Bavaria.

An independent review of U.K. surveillance powers conducted by QC David Anderson published its findings this week. Among its recommendations the report calls for judges to sign off interception warrants, and for a new law to govern surveillance powers — replacing the problematic patchwork of outdated and amended legislation that currently exists with stricter and more coherent oversight. The report also supports continued use of “bulk data collection” (aka mass surveillance) by U.K. intelligence agencies — so long as “strict additional safeguards” oversee its usage and minimize privacy impacts. Anderson writes: …if the acceptable use of vast state powers is to be guaranteed, it cannot simply be by reference to the probity of its servants, the ingenuity of its enemies or current technical limitations on what it can do. Firm limits must also be written into law: not merely safeguards, but red lines that may not be crossed. He also weighs in on encryption, although his recommendations here are rather more murky. In essence, he is taking the view that more widespread use of strong encryption ultimately sanctions mass surveillance — and even hacking activities by state agencies — as necessary workarounds to get at information that’s otherwise locked out of reach. The 300-page+ report was commissioned by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron last year in the wake of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations. Since then Cameron has stepped up his rhetoric in support of state surveillance powers, making hawkish pronouncements arguing for expanded capabilities — to the point where, earlier this year, he appeared to be calling for an effective ban on strong encryption. “Are we going to allow a means of communication between people which even in extremis, with a signed warrant from the Home Secretary personally, that we cannot read? No we must not. The first duty of any government is to keep our country and our people safe,” said Cameron back in January. Anderson’s review backs Cameron’s notion that encryption should not be an ultimate barrier to security agencies — arguing that the power to “intercept a particular communication” or “track a particular individual” “needs to exist”, although he also qualifies this by saying such a power might only be usable “where skill or trickery can provide a way around the obstacle”.

Until now only when someone possessed a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon, it was considered to be a weapon of mass destruction in the eyes of the law. But we could have an interesting -- and equally controversial -- addition to this list soon. The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), an agency of the United States Department of Commerce that deals with issues involving national security and high technology has proposed tighter export rules for computer security tools -- first brought up in the Wassenaar Arrangement (WA) at the Plenary meeting in December 2013. This proposal could potentially revise an international agreement aimed at controlling weapons technology as well as hinder the work of security researchers. At the meeting, a group of 41 like-minded states discussed ways to bring cybersecurity tools under the umbrella of law, just as any other global arms trade. This includes guidelines on export rules for licensing technology and software as it crosses an international border. Currently, these tools are controlled based on their cryptographic functionality. While BIS is yet to clarify things, the new proposed rule could disallow encryption license exceptions.

After Heartbleed, there is another major security issue in SSL that affects a millions of websites. The bug affects an algorithm called “Diffie–Hellman key exchange“, which allows two parties that have never met before to negotiate a shared key over an insecure channel. The vulnerability affects an estimated 8.4 percent of top one million websites, along with huge number of mail servers. A number of security researchers from different organisations and universities, have discovered a number of security issue in this algorithm, and published a report that explains about the flaw. The attacks allow man-in-the-middle (MITM) to downgrade HTTPS connections to 512-bit cryptography. You can check whether you browser is vulnerable or not through this site.At the time of writing this article this site shows that both Chrome and Firefox are vulnerable to this flaw, while Internet Explorer is safe from Logjam vulnerability. We recommend to this guide if you system admin of a server.

A few days ago we reported that Google had secretly been rolling out a Phantom algorithm that at the time the search engine giant kept under raps, yet thousands of webmasters noted as rankings and traffic fluctuated. And we finally have some confirmation that the Phantom (as the secretive update was named at the time) was indeed a Google update. The update was not a web spam focused change, but indeed a general tweaking of the core search quality algorithm. John Mueller, one of Google’s primary techies (Webmaster Trends Analyst to be precise), said that on the 1st of May there was a major update – which he confirmed in one of his regular Google+ Hangouts with webmasters yesterday. He said: “Essentially this is something where we are not… calling this anything specific. “This is essentially just a normal algorithm update that we make all the time, and sometimes that is something that affects more sites and sometimes that is something that affects fewer sites. “But essentially, we are working on trying to increase the relevance and the quality of the search results, and that is essentially just a normal update that was happening there. Nothing really specific. “So if you are seeing changes within your sites traffic, impressions that are coming from search, I think that is something where you can work on your website in general and for most cases it is not something where there is any technical issue that you need to focus on and you would see that in Webmaster Tools. “So if you’d like us to be more visible about these updates, focusing on your site and making it the best it can possible by is always a good strategy.” SPEEDING UP PANDA AND PENGUIN Mueller also confirmed that Google are working at speeding up both the Panda and Penguin algorithms, with webmasters citing their frustration that Panda in particular hasn’t been updated in months. “We are working on updates there,” Mueller said. “I know it’s frustrating, if you’ve worked a lot on your website already to clean up these issues (poor quality content). “The same applies to Penguin as well. Where maybe you cleaned up a lot of web spam issues and you are just waiting for things to kind of open up again – that is something we are definitely working on to… update that data again and make it a little bit faster.”