Security Software Firm Kaspersky Lab Hit by Stealthy Cyber-Attack

Today’s topics include a stealthy cyber-attack against Kaspersky Lab, Syrian hackers claiming responsibility for attacking the Army.mil Website, news on a new HP server’s compatibility with Microsoft SQL and the development of the Swift 2.0 programming language from Apple.

Eugene Kaspersky, founder of Kaspersky Lab, yesterday had the rare opportunity to talk about an exploit that hit his own network and remained undetected for months.

During a live Webcast press conference from London, Kaspersky detailed the Duqu 2.0 exploit, being cautious not to attribute the attack to any particular nation-state.

In addition to hitting Kaspersky Lab, Duqu 2.0 took aim at the recent P5+1 Iranian nuclear arms negotiations, which has led some to speculate that the State of Israel is somehow connected to Duqu 2.0. The 2.0 attack made use of three different zero-day exploits in Microsoft, all of which have been patched since June 9.

The Syrian Electronic Army, a digital hacking group loosely aligned with the government of Syrian President Basher al-Assad, is claiming responsibility for an attack against the Army.mil Website operated by the U.S. Army.

The attack occurred on June 8, defacing the Army Website and installing multiple pop-up messages, including one that stated, “Your commanders admit they are training the people they have sent you to die fighting.” The Army site was offline and unavailable briefly on June 8 and has since been fully restored.

Hewlett-Packard’s high-end Integrity Superdome X servers are primed to run Microsoft’s database, SQL Server 2014, the companies announced.

The tech giants joined forces to produce a reference configuration for deploying the database platform on the business-critical server hardware from HP. Powered by x86 processors, specifically Xeon E7 server chips from Intel, the servers are a response to the shrinking market for Unix-based enterprise computing systems.

At the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference 2015, Apple announced Swift 2.0, a new version of the programming language along with the plan to open-source the technology later this year.

Swift is an intuitive programming language for iOS, OS X, and smartwatches. Swift builds on the best of C and Objective-C, without the constraints of C compatibility. The language adopts safe programming patterns and adds modern features to make programming easier and more flexible.