Cyber Security

...... as in the Government "needs to raise its game" on cyber security, MPs warn - a statement made early in 2017 by the Daily Mail.

I started my coverage of this topic in detail on my Canadian site. Now in 2017 the subject is becoming more and more a news item.

2023, I am reviewing my pages and I am adding back references to these topics.

The CIA and FBI

In the days of the new Trump adminstration, Fake News, I find stories such as the Wikileaks leak of 8,761 documents on techniques for hacking and surveillance particularly amusing.

"Fake On" and the one specific Samsung SmartTV. Perhaps this was an exptrpolation of the notion that in the future all devices will be connected to the Internet, the Internet of Things. The security equivalent of the adoption of 3-D TV???

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Cyber Weapons

Wikileaks have said that they are going to release a list of "Cyberweapons" used by the CIA and other American/UK security agencies, first to Microsoft, Apple and other software and hardware vendors such as Google and Facebook, so that they can "defend" against them.

The concept of this is somewhat at odds with the notion that these vendors have capitulated with National Security services, particularly those in the US, and have installed backdoors in their software to allow access by Law Enforcement Agencies.

Man-in-the-middle attack

The Man-in-the-middle and Man-on-the-side attacks are explained on the Wikipedia pages, quotes from both are below. The technicalities of how this is done has been debated in detail in many "hacker forums". The bottom-line with all these attacks is that for the threats to be perpetrated a large measure of Social Engineering has to be employed so that systems can be initially compromised.

In cryptography and computer security, a man-in-the-middle[a] (MITM) attack is a cyberattack where the attacker secretly relays and possibly alters the communications between two parties who believe that they are directly communicating with each other, as the attacker has inserted themselves between the two parties

A man-on-the-side attack is a form of active attack in computer security similar to a man-in-the-middle attack. Instead of completely controlling a network node as in a man-in-the-middle attack, the attacker only has regular access to the communication channel, which allows him to read the traffic and insert new messages, but not to modify or delete messages sent by other participants. The attacker relies on a timing advantage to make sure that the response he sends to the request of a victim arrives before the legitimate response.

SCADA - Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition

The Wikipedia page said at the time of writing.

Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) is a control system architecture comprising computers, networked data communications and graphical user interfaces for high-level supervision of machines and processes. It also covers sensors and other devices, such as programmable logic controllers, which interface with process plant or machinery.

Cyber Security

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