– CIMSEC – To stay ahead of competing ports and technological developments, automation has been heralded as inevitable. Major transshipment hubs and aspiring ports bet their future on automation, which raises the impact cyber risks could have in the long-run.

– New York Times – A serial leak of the agency’s cyberweapons has damaged
morale, slowed intelligence operations and resulted in
hacking attacks on businesses and civilians worldwide.

– Washington Post – How Russia conducts information warfare against the US, via Facebook.

– New York Times Magazine – How the Kremlin built one of the most powerful information weapons of the 21st century — and why it may be impossible to stop.

– CIMSEC – A conversation with Dr. Alison Russell of Merrimack College about navies and their relationship with cyber. It’s about the distinct layers of cybersecurity, how navies use them to enhance their capabilities, and the challenges in securing and maintaining that domain.

– New Yorker – What lay behind Russia’s interference in the 2016 election—and what lies ahead? A look at information warfare, Russian-style.

– New York Times Magazine – From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

– The Guardian – Fake news stories. Doctored photographs. Staged TV clips. Armies of paid trolls. Has Putin’s Russia developed a new kind of information warfare – fought in the ‘psychosphere’ rather than on the battlefield? Or is it all just a giant bluff?

– The Atlantic – The U.S. government is surreptitiously collecting the DNA of world leaders, and is reportedly protecting that of Barack Obama. Decoded, these genetic blueprints could provide compromising information. In the not-too-distant future, they may provide something more as well—the basis for the creation of personalized bioweapons that could take down a president and leave no trace.

– Wired – A look at Eugene Kaspersky, whose company is a worldwide leader in anti-virus software, and friend of Vladimir Putin and the Russian FSB.

– Foreign Policy – John Arquilla asks could the age of cyberwarfare lead us to a brighter future?

– New York Times – From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

– Wired – A look at how cyberwar was waged by Libya against its citizens.

– Technology Review – How civilians helped win the Libyan information war.

– Wired – James Bamford writes that under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

– New York Times – The elusive hacker movement known as Anonymous has carried out Internet attacks on well-known organizations like Sony and PBS. In August, the group went after its most prominent target yet: the Vatican. A nice look at how they do it…

– BBC – Hackers are alleged to have destroyed a pump used to pipe water to thousands of homes in a US city in Illinois.

– Defense Technology International – Moscow-based Aviaconversiya Ltd., makes and sells GPS jammers…to anyone who wants to buy them, no questions asked.

– Economist – Warfare is changing as weapons that destroy electronics, not people, are deployed on the field of battle.

– Los Angeles Times – Mark Bowden writes that as modern society leans more heavily on the Internet, its fragility becomes an ever greater concern.

– Vanity Fair – Last summer, the world’s top software-security experts were panicked by the discovery of a drone-like computer virus, radically different from and far more sophisticated than any they’d seen. The race was on to figure out its payload, its purpose, and who was behind it. As the world now knows, the Stuxnet worm appears to have attacked Iran’s nuclear program. And, as Michael Joseph Gross reports, while its source remains something of a mystery, Stuxnet is the new face of 21st-century warfare: invisible, anonymous, and devastating.