Cyberwar: What happens when a nation-state cyber attack kills? - by Danny Palmer

The increasing sophistication and power of state-backed cyber attacks has led some experts to fear that, sooner or later, by design or by accident, one of these incidents will result in somebody getting killed.

It might sound far-fetched, but a former head of the UK's intelligence agency has already warned about the physical threat posed by cyber attacks and the potential damage they could do.

"Nation-states are getting more sophisticated and they're getting more brazen. They're getting less worried about being caught and being named -- and of course that's a feature of geopolitics," said Robert Hannigan, who served as director general of GCHQ from 2014 to 2017.

"The problem is the risk of miscalculation is huge," he said, speaking at a security conference in London last month. "If you start to tamper with industrial control systems, if you start to tamper with health systems and networks, it feels like it's only a matter of time before somebody gets hurt and somebody is ultimately killed."

Read more at: Cyberwar: What happens when a nation-state cyber attack kills? | ZDNet

NATO Prepares for War With Russia With Simulated Naval and Cyberattacks - by Cristina Maza

Around 1,000 participants from 30 member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) gathered in the tiny Baltic nation of Estonia late last month to prepare for war with an enemy that looks a lot like Russia, according to reports.

The exercises were dystopian and catastrophic, and included simulated cyberattacks, poisoned water supplies, a hacked drone employed to kill NATO soldiers and a faulty power grid. As tensions ratchet up between Moscow and the West, NATO countries, especially those like Estonia that border Russia, are increasingly preparing for the worst. The Locked Shields live-fire cyber exercise is a key part of that preparation.

“The exercise required participants to counter high-intensity attacks on a fictitious country’s IT systems and critical infrastructure networks. Teams had to maintain the IT systems while reporting incidents, managing crises, making strategic decisions, solving digital forensics tasks and dealing with other challenges,” according to a report on homeland preparedness. “The exercise involved a total of 4,000 virtualized systems and more than 2,500 attacks.”

Note EU-Digest: Contemplating war between Nuclear Powers is utter madness and even the idea of preparing for one is tltal madness, because their will be no victors. The only solution is complete disarmement by all nuclear Nations. Unfortunately with all these ego maniacs political leaders around the world this this is impossible.

Read more: NATO Prepares for War With Russia With Simulated Naval and Cyberattacks

Canada: Ottawa set to ban Chinese firm from telecommunications bid - by Steven Chase

Citing a rarely used national-security protocol, Ottawa has sent a signal to Chinese telecom equipment giant Huawei Technologies that it would block the firm from bidding to build the Canadian government’s latest telecommunications and e-mail network.

Shenzen-based Huawei is riding a storm of suspicion. On Monday, a powerful U.S. congressional committee called the company a threat to U.S. security and recommended that its products be excluded from government computer systems. Canada’s national surveillance and cryptology agency, the Communications Security Establishment, has warned the military of potential security risks in installing Huawei’s equipment.

One of Canada’s former top spies says that the damage done by economic espionage is now on par with the threat posed by al-Qaeda and other radical groups.  “It has become equal to the threat of terrorism. Why? It has such long-term repercussions. The future prosperity of Canadians,” says Ray Boisvert, who had served as the assistant director of intelligence for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service until his retirement six months ago.

Read more:  Ottawa set to ban Chinese firm from telecommunications bid - The Globe and Mail

Sweden: WikiLeaks cyberwar: hackers bring down Swedish government site

Anonymous hackers who claim they are defending WikiLeaks brought down the Swedish government's website amid warnings they will attack again. The official site, regeringen.se, was offline for several hours overnight and only a message saying the site could not be reached was visible.

Commercial websites including Visa, MasterCard and PayPal have already been targeted by co-ordinated action on one of the busiest shopping days of the year after the firms said that they would no longer process donations to WikiLeaks.

A group calling itself Anonymous and operating under the banner "Operation Payback" was said to be behind some of the attacks and there were concerns that Twitter could become a target because it removed Anonymous' listing.

For more: WikiLeaks cyberwar: hackers bring down Swedish government site - Telegraph

The Cyber War has begun: Anonymous’ Operation: Payback campaign defends Wikileaks, downs MasterCard website

Online supporters of whistleblowing website Wikileaks are fighting back after news of Julian Assange’s arrest hit the wires.

Online activists known as “Anonymous” have initiated what they called Operation:Payback, a call to action to bring down the websites of companies that have publicly removed services once used by the Wikileaks website. Anoymous has already targeted the Swiss bank PostFinance, a bank that froze all payments to the controversial website, after it promised to take down PayPal, the online payment company that cancelled Wikileaks’ account that it used to solicit donations.

Its current target? Mastercard. The website is currently down for a large number of users after a DDOS attack.

For more: Anonymous’ Operation:Payback campaign defends Wikileaks, downs MasterCard website