SHAFAQNA

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Shafaqna asked some of the most senior Shia scholars to express their opinions about creating and using accounts with fake identities for social sites (emails, Facebook, twitter, YouTube, etc.) in internet. The answers are given below.

Question 1: What is the decree regarding opening accounts in other people’s names without their permission in social sites in cyber space?

Question 2: Can the information published on these sites without the knowledge of a person be used against that person?

The Grand Ayatollah Fayyaz:

Q1- Not allowed.

Q2- Cannot be used.

The Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Saeed Hakim

Q1- Not allowed if faking their confidential limits.

Q2- Without the person’s confession has no value.

The Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi

Q1- Not allowed.

Q2- Cannot be used.

The Grand Ayatollah Mossavi Ardabili

Q1- It is violation of others rights and it is not allowed.

Q2- Publishing it on a site is not a proof.

The Grand Ayatollah Safi Golpaygani

Q1- If it causes financial or reputation loss is not allowed.

Q2- If it is not authorised by the person is not allowed.

The Grand Ayatollah Nouri Hamedani

Q1- It is not allowed in any case.

Q2- It is not allowed.

The Grand Ayatollah Sobhani

Q1- Opening accounts in the other people’s names without their permission are interfering in private lives of others and are not allowed.

Q2- Can sue the culprit.

www.shafaqna.com/english

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –Cyber activists hacked into Kuwait's information ministry website and posted a speech that earned an opposition leader a five-year prison term, the ministry said on Wednesday.

"The ministry's electronic website has been penetrated by hackers," a source at the ministry said in a brief statement carried by the official KUNA news agency.

"The ministry immediately suspended the site as a precautionary measure and will take legal measures against those who did this."

The statement made no reference to the posting of a speech that opposition leader and former MP Mussallam al-Barrak made on October 15, but activists on Twitter said the text of the speech had been visible on the site for some time.

The ministry website remained suspended more than 10 hours after the cyber attack which happened at about midnight on Tuesday.

Barrak was on Monday sentenced to five years in jail over the speech which was considered offensive to Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah.

The authorities have not yet arrested Barrak, and thousands of people demonstrated in a show of support for him outside his residence for the second night on Tuesday.

They disrupted traffic at a key highway southwest of Kuwait City, watched on by police who took no action unlike on Monday.

Ahead of the latest procession, a new group of prominent activists defiantly read parts of the speech, a day after activists had been joined by former MPs in doing so.

Pro-government MPs on Wednesday strongly criticized Interior Minister Ahmad al-Humud al-Sabah for failing to implement a court ruling by arresting Barrak.

"There is a direct threat to the head of state... and a challenge to the judicial authority... These people (the opposition) hold no respect to the state, regime and the judiciary," MP Maasuma al-Mubarak said in parliament.

"If he (Barrak) refuses arrest, we should send him armored vehicles from the army and the national guard," said Nabeel al-Fadhl, a pro-government lawmaker.-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:al-akhbar

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –Last week, the hacker organization “Anonymous,” symbolized by the famous “Guy Fawkes” mask, hacked Israel’s Mossad.

The hack, initially exposing a hidden network of 30,000 covert operatives, some openly labeled “hitman,” came only days after Israel admitted to their 2010 act of piracy and terrorism against the Freedom Flotilla.

Now the Israeli regime has filled the internet with threats against “Anonymous,” if detailed information on their terror cells is leaked.

After all, who is better to carry out acts of terrorism than an organization with 30,000 covert operatives around the world, almost all trained in use of explosives and demolition, building IEDs, car bombs, kidnapping and assassination and with a long and very public history of, not just murdering people but getting away with it as well.

Every day we see it in the news, dozens killed in Pakistan, dozens more in Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria, the covert army of 30,000, planning terror, building a dozen car bombs a day and then being able to, not just write the lies blaming others but, in most cases, direct public officials, controlled through blackmail, threats or bribery, to “respond as directed.”

Did I forget Syria?

The army, more correctly the “cells” exposed by Anonymous include:

1. Direct Action: Assassins, explosives experts (for the Mossad “signature” car bombs) and kidnap/rendition teams

2. Espionage: Made up of trained agent handlers and signals intelligence personnel, often specially trained while posing as doing their “national service,” this group runs the Pentagon and White House, makes up Congressional employees, most think tanks, AIPAC and the ADL/SPLC. Key espionage operatives are seldom Israeli. Many are Turkish, Saudi, Jordanian and even Cuban diplomats.

3. Controlled opposition: Most obvious are the White Supremacist/Neo-Nazi groups recently exposed as being funded through Merkel’s government in Germany at the direction of the Likudist Party in Israel. Nearly every individual or organization, with few exceptions, that describes itself as “holocaust denial,” “anti-Zionist” or “historical revisionist” is now funded and directed through Israel.

4. Thought Control: No textbook, no university chair, no broadcast executive nor any news editor is ever employed unless a member of the “30,000.” All belong, all are, not just “answerable,” but actively involved in creating cover stories to shift blame for mass killings, political assassination, economic crimes or simply to put forth a continual “drumming,” of the big lie.

Birth by Murder

The first major act of terrorism by Israel’s Irgun, the predecessor to the Mossad, was in 1949. America’s first Secretary of Defense, an office Chuck Hagel only recently assumed, a man under 24-hour protection against Mossad assassins even today, was James Forrestal.

Forrestal was an enemy of Stalin and his inner circle of Zionists who, with the influence of Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, took control of President Truman, pushing him to back the occupation of Palestine by Communists, establishing a Soviet foothold in the Middle East under the guise of a “Jewish state.”

Under the guidance of Morgenthau, one million German POWs were starved to death, Germany was de-industrialized and Stalin was allowed to move into Eastern Europe and gain de facto control of France, Italy, establish broad terror and espionage cells that spread across the world, particularly in Washington.

When the now reviled Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed the State Department was filled with communists, he was totally correct.

Bernard Baruch told Forrestal that Zionists were going to kill him. The Irgun had tried to kill British Foreign Secretary Brevin in 1946.

Forrestal, though Secretary of Defense, was continually attacked by the media, Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, the most influential columnists of the day, wrote scathing attacks against Forrestal continually.

Assassination teams following Forrestal were arrested more than once but released on orders from President Truman who, in March of 1949, finally fired Forrestal over his opposition to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

Soon afterward, Forrestal was poisoned and taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital. While there, he was thrown out of a 16th story window, his body showing signs of a desperate struggle, the room in disarray.

Walter Winchell, an accused Stalinist agent, called Forrestal’s death a “suicide,” a verdict certified later despite evidence to the contrary. The control of the press, likely 10,000 of the identities Anonymous accessed, seen today was “alive and well” many decades ago.

As, decades later, the public became aware that the killings of Forrestal, the Kennedy’s, Martin Luther King, even prominent American Jews like Senator Paul Wellstone and his family were Mossad operations.

The Hollywoodism “spin” on the Forrestal assassination is the classic. We are told that Secretary of Defense Forrestal killed himself because his brain had been taken over by one of the aliens that crash-landed at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.

Jeremy Kagen, producer of the 1981 film, “The Chosen,” depicting New York’s Hasidic community, is responsible for the 1994 film, “Roswell,” which implies Forrestal was murdered by aliens.

We have seen it for over 60 years, if the trail leads to Tel Aviv, it must have been “little green men.”

Is the Story Dead?

As soon as the story hit, press assets, both “blogosphere shills” and the MSM passed on the word, “Mossad assassination teams know where to find ‘Anonymous’ and are ready to kill family members, pets, blow up neighborhoods or even shoot up another elementary school.”

Those passing on the threats are guilty as co-conspirators, covering for espionage and terror groups, using terrorism to protect terrorists.

Thus far, we have only seen the email accounts, a horror in itself, revealing what may only be the “tip of the iceberg.”

What if only 5,000 of the 30,000 are “agent handlers?” Does this mean there are tens of thousands of additional “deep cover agents” armed with dirty bombs or ready to kill public officials if, let’s say, there is a threat to cut aid to Israel?

Wait, isn’t this exactly what brought on 9/11?-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:islamic invitation turkey

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –The Saudi Arabian communications regulator plans to link national Twitter bloggers to personal social media user IDs, local media has reported. There are no technical or legal restrictions to the move, but Twitter's official approval is needed.

The Saudi Arabian Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) studies ways to uncover social media users' real identities, according to a Friday report in daily newspaper Arab News Country’s Twitter microbloggers are top-priority candidates to get tokenized.

This could easily be accomplished by monitoring users who access Twitter from mobile phones, by requiring them to register an ID when they add money to their phone accounts.

“The linking of Twitter registration inside the Kingdom with the ID number of a user could be implemented if Saudi Arabia seriously wants it,” Saudi telecommunication technology expert Waleed Al-Khalil told the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat Arabic international newspaper. However, Al-Khalil stressed that such measures cannot be introduced without a general agreement between the CITC and Twitter's administration.

This is not the first time the country’s authorities have announced plans to place citizens’ Internet activities under governmental supervision.

The CITC is reportedly in talks to monitor communications on Skype, Whatsapp, and Viber. If no deal is reached, Riyadh has threatened to block the services altogether, according to Al Arabiya.

The agency may impose sanctions under the authority of the Saudi Arabian government, and violations of CITC regulations are punishable in criminal court.

“For instance, CITC recently canceled free international roaming service offered by some companies without its permission by strictly enforcing penal measures,” Al-Khalil said, adding that he fully supports the idea of government supervision of Twitter users.

Riyadh's concerns over ‘Twitter power’ are not groundless: The Arab Spring uprisings showed how social networks – especially Twitter – could be used to successfully organize young opposition activists to protest against ruling regimes.

The number of Saudi Arabian Twitter users is booming. Between 2011 and 2012, the number of Twitter users in the Kingdom grew by 3,000 percent, Al-Arabiya estimated.  Saudi Arabian Twitter users post an average of 50 million messages monthly, most of them in Arabic.

A week ago, Saudi Arabia's top religious cleric Grand Mufti Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al-Sheik publicly railed against Twitter, calling the social media website “a council of clowns.” Twitter is a place where

people“unleash unjust, incorrect and wrong tweets,” Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al-Sheik said in a speech to other Saudi clerics.

But Riyadh's concerns over Twitter are likely exaggerated, as two of the most influential Twitter users in Saudi Arabia are Muslim preachers, not opposition activists. Sheikh Mohamad al-Arefe has more than 4.3 million worldwide followers, while Sheikh Ayed al-Qarnee has over 2.8 million – sizable followings in a nation of 25 million people.

Twitter's administration will have to confront the issue soon, as the Saudi Arabian market is extremely attractive to the corporation. In July 2012, Twitter Executive Director Dick Costolo acknowledged that Twitter is the sixth most-browsed website in Saudi Arabia, and that the number of Twitter users is rapidly growing.

Human rights groups have repeatedly criticized Saudi Arabia for its ultraconservative religious law and limited personal freedoms.-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:RT

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –The ‘biggest cyber-attack in history’ has caused a worldwide web slowdown as the battle between an anti-spam group and a Dutch web host continues to heat up.

The largest known distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in history was sparked when the non-profit group Spamhaus placed CyberBunker on a real-time blacklist of sites to be blocked for spreading spam earlier this month.   
The (DDoS) attacks – which flood targeted web servers with fake traffic to make them inaccessible – have reportedly caused millions to experience delays with services such as the Netflix video-streaming service and made other sites temporarily unavailable. Experts fear the web congestion could lead to banking and email system slowdowns around the world.
Spamhaus servers were at one point being inundated with 300 billion bits per second (300Gbps) of data, three times larger than the previous record attack of 100 Gbps, Darren Anstee from Arbor Networks Solutions told IBTimes UK.

Spamhaus, which helps email providers filter out spam and other questionable content, first reported the attacks on March 20.

Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, told the BBC that this scale of attack could knock down government Internet infrastructure.

"If you aimed this at Downing Street they would be down instantly," he said. "They would be completely off the Internet."

Linford noted that “when there are attacks against major banks, we're talking about 50 gbs."
Five separate cyber-police-forces are investigating the incident, he added, though he could not disclose any further details.
Spamhaus further accused Cyberbunker of collaborating with criminal gangs from Eastern Europe and Russia to carry out the attacks.

‘Cyberbunker not behind current attacks’

Cyberbunker, which operates out of a "secretive nuclear bunker," prides itself on rebuking "authorities regarding the rights of individuals. " The firm, boasts they will provide bandwidth to anything but child pornography or terrorism related content.

Sven Olaf Kamphuis, an internet activist and self-described spokesman for Cyberbunker, reportedly told the New York Times the ongoing attack was retaliation for Spamhaus "abusing their influence."However, later on Wednesday Kamphuis told RT's news video agency RUPTLY via Skype that quotes attributed to him by the NYT were part of a campaign of “misinformation” against Cyberbunker, which he says is not currently carrying out DDos attacks against Spamhaus.

“There has been some misinformation from the New York Times that it’s me carrying out the attacks. Spamhaus have pissed off a lot of people over the past few years by blackmailing ISPs and carriers into disconnecting clients without court orders or legal process whatsoever,” he said.

“At this moment we are not even conducting any attacks because people from our group stopped any attack yesterday morning,” he said. “So if they are still under attack which I think they are because I get news feeds that they are still under attack then it’s now other people attacking them.” He argues that such publicized cyber-attacks do serve a function, as they put the “mafia tactics” of Spamhaus in the public spotlight, which he claims are currently “the largest threat” to Internet freedom.

“Well, I think the cyber-attacks do put things under public discussion and that in the case of Spamhaus was urgently needed, because they have been operating in the background, claiming to be spam fighters and a little non-profit and at the moment it is becoming all the more clear what they really are. People that work at internet providers have always known this,” Kamphuis said.

“People who work at abuse desks or as providers, know that if you don’t give Spamhaus their way, they will list your entire provider and at that point all of your customers will start to complain that 1/3 of the internet no longer accepts email to start with. If they put you on drop a whole bunch of American providers no longer accept your backups, so you can no longer communicate with half of the sites hosted in the United States. It is a massive problem when one little offshore from the Bahamas gains such an influence on the internet that they can have such an impact.”-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:RT

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –The Anonymous hacking group says it has hacked into the website of Israel‘s Mossad spy agency, gaining access to top-secret documents.

The Internet hacking group said on its twitter page that it gained access to the personal data of more than 30,000 Israeli officials, including military officials, politicians and Mossad agents, and that it will release the information gradually. 
Hacking group Anonymous has launched a series of cyber attacks against Israeli websites since November 2012 in retaliation for Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip. 
Anonymous said it had launched the OpIsrael campaign following threats by Tel Aviv to cut all Gaza's telecommunication links. 
OpIsrael campaign aims at wiping Israel off the cyber world by April 7. 
Shortly after the pro-Palestinian campaign was launched, dozens of Israeli websites were defaced or attacked. 
Many of the sites had their homepages replaced with messages in support of Hamas and the Palestinians.-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:Press TV

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –President Barack Obama’s plan to protect the United States’ critical infrastructure against cyberattacks is accelerating quickly as more private sector businesses are signing on to share information with the federal government.

When Pres. Obama rolled out his ‘Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity’ executive order last month, he asked that classified cyber threat and technical information collected by the government be given to eligible commercial service providers that offer security services to businesses linked to the country’s critical infrastructure.

But in the few short weeks since the order was announced during the president’s annual State of the Union address, warnings of an imminent attack have only increased. CIA Director John Brennan told a panel last week that "the seriousness and the diversity of the threats that this country faces in the cyber domain are increasing on a daily basis," and US national intelligence chief James Clapper claims there is "a remote chance of a major cyberattack against US critical infrastructure systems during the next two years that would result in long-term, wide-scale disruption of services, such as a regional power outage."

Upon announcement of the executive order, a handful of defense contractors and telecom companies — namely Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, AT&T and CenturyLink — confirmed that they’d be voluntarily sharing information back and forth with the country’s top intelligence agencies in order to closely monitor any threats that could collapse the country’s critical infrastructure, a vaguely defined category assumed to include the nation’s power systems, telecommunication wires and other major utilities.

“The demand is there. I think the priority is there, and the threat is serious,” Steve Hawkins, vice president of information and security solutions for Raytheon, told Bloomberg earlier in the month.

As warnings of a cyberattack increase, however, the latest news out of Washington is that even more private sector companies with ties to critical infrastructure will be participating in the program. In a report published on Thursday by Reuters, the newswire notes that the framework first outlined during last month’s executive order is already quickly shaping up, with tasks being delegated throughout the US so that threat information can be adequately passed to applicable persons.

According to Reuters’ latest write-up, the executive order will require the National Security Agency to collect classified intelligence on serious hacking attempts aimed at American businesses, which will then be handed over to the Department of Homeland Security to pass on to the telecom and cybersecurity providers — Raytheon, AT&T and others — where employees holding security clearances will scan incoming emails and routine Web traffic for threats to the infrastructure.

But while the government has long asked the entities to open up lines of communication with the NSA and other offices, smaller private-sector businesses could soon be signing on. According to Joseph Menn and Deborah Charles of Reuters, the government is already expanding their cybersecurity program so that even more Web traffic heading into and out of defense contractors will be scanned to include far more of the country's private, civilian-run infrastructure.

“As a result, more private sector employees than ever before, including those at big banks, utilities and key transportation companies, will have their emails and Web surfing scanned as a precaution against cyberattacks,” they write.

Once those participating companies sign on to get data from Homeland Security, the DHS will send them computer threat “signatures” obtained by the NSA that will offer a list of red flags to be watching out for as huge amounts of Web data is scanned second-by-second and bit-by-bit.

“The companies can use this intelligence to strengthen cybersecurity services they sell to businesses that maintain critical infrastructure,” Bloomberg News reports.

That intelligence, including but not limited to cyber timestamps, indicators and the critical sector potentially, can then be monitored to search for malicious code and viruses sent through America’s Internet with the intent of causing harm. In exchange, the critical infrastructure companies that could be targeted by cyberterrorists will pay the contractors and telecoms for their help.

The threat of a cyberwar crippling America’s power grid and communication systems has been ramped-up in recent weeks, particularly in light of a highly-touted report that linked Chinese state actors with repeated attempts to sabotage US businesses and conduct espionage to steal secrets.

"Increasingly, US businesses are speaking out about their serious concerns about sophisticated, targeted theft of confidential business information and proprietary technologies through cyber intrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale," National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon told the

Asia Society in New York last week. "The international community cannot afford to tolerate such activity from any country.”-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:RT

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – North Korea, usually blamed for hacking others, has accused the United States of staging cyber attacks against its Internet servers after reports of disruptions to its main news services, the latest twist from an increasingly bellicose North.

Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency said a “powerful hacker attack” from abroad had brought down Internet servers inside the North, disabling access to some websites.

The accusation comes at a time of increased tension between reclusive North Korea and South Korea, along with the South’s ally the United States.

The North has threatened a nuclear war with the United States in response to new United Nations sanctions over its latest nuclear test and to strike back at the South and the United States during military drills they are staging.

South Korea’s MBC television said the North’s state media services were among those affected by the cyber attack.

These included the websites of the KCNA news agency and the official Rodong Sinmun newspaper, which were said to be experiencing disruptions even though they were operating normally on Thursday and Friday.

“It is nobody’s secret that the U.S. and the South Korean puppet regime are massively bolstering up cyber forces in a bid to intensify the subversive activities and sabotages against the DPRK,” KCNA said on Friday.

“Intensive and persistent virus attacks are being made every day on Internet servers operated by the DPRK,” it said.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK, is the North’s official name.

KCNA and Rodong Sinmun have carried the North’s increasingly strident rhetoric of late, accusing the United States and South Korea of staging preparations for war and vowing to scrap the armistice that stopped fighting in the 1950-53 Korean War.

The North has also threatened to use nuclear weapons against what it called hostile forces.

North Korea in turn has been blamed for spreading malicious software that crashed the websites of government agencies and businesses, and for a cyber attack on a South Korean state-run bank server in 2011 that took more than a week to restore.

North Korea denies charges of cyber attacks and accuses the South of a conspiracy to fuel confrontation, although defectors from the North have warned that Pyongyang was recruiting thousands of computer engineers to its cyber warfare unit.

Military experts said cyber warfare was a major threat from North Korea, along with its conventional forces and its weapons of mass destruction program, that posed a security risk to utilities and communications networks in the South.

North Korea also has been accused of jamming global positioning system signals affecting hundreds of flights at South Korea’s main airport.

Earlier this week, U.S. spy agencies said for the first time that cyber attacks and cyber espionage had supplanted terrorism as the top security threat facing the United States.

The United States and China also are embroiled in a row over cyber warfare, with U.S. President Barack Obama calling his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to discuss the issue this week.-www.shafaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –Hacktivist group Anonymous, along with numerous other hackers, is planning a massive cyber-attack on Israel, threatening to “erase” the country from Internet. Israel is apparently taking the threats seriously, with defensive preparations underway.

“Hacktivists Starting Cyber Attack against Israel on 7th of April,” Anonymous wrote on Twitter, calling on hackers around the world to join up for a second ‘OpIsrael.’

Israeli government agencies are reportedly readying for the attack: “It’s something being organized online over the past few days. What distinguishes this plan when compared to previous attacks is that it really seems to be organized by Anonymous-affiliated groups from around the world in what looks like a joining of forces,” Ofir Ben Avi, director of online group Accessible Government told Haaretz.

The first ‘OpIsrael’ cyber-attacks were launched by the hacktivist group during Israeli’s ‘Pillar of Defense’ assault on Gaza in November 2012.

“We are Anonymous. We are legion. We will not forgive. We will not forget. Israel, it is too late to expect us,” their message to Israeli authorities read.

Some 700 Israeli website suffered repeated cyber-attacks, including high-profile government systems such as the Foreign Ministry, and the Israeli President's official website. The Israeli Finance Ministry reported an estimated 44 million unique attacks on government websites.

Following ‘OpIsrael,’ Anonymous posted the online personal data of 5,000 Israeli officials, including names, ID numbers and personal emails.

Anonymous was also involved in an attack in which the details of some 600,000 users of the popular Israeli email service Walla were exposed online.www.shafaqna.com/english

Source:RT

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –The head of the United States Cyber Command says the US is developing 40 new teams of cyber-agents that will both protect America’s critical infrastructure from hackers and as well as launch attacks against the country’s adversaries.

Gen. Keith Alexander, who leads both the Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, told the US Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that the 40 online support teams should be ready for action by 2015, with 13 of those units existing specifically to attack other countries.

Alexander has been reluctant to go into detail about how the newly-designed teams will engage in cyber battle with America’s enemies, but he did say that the 13 squads of offensive fighters won’t be sitting around waiting for hackers from abroad to strike first. The NSA chief described the groups as‘‘defend-the-nation’’ teams but also stressed that their role will be one that puts them on both sides of the action.

“I would like to be clear that this team. . . is an offensive team,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

“The teams are analogous to battalions in the Army and Marine Corps — or squadrons in the Navy and Air Force,” said Alexander. “In short, they will soon be capable of operating on their own, with a range of operational and intelligence skill sets, as well as a mix of military and civilian personnel.”

Chris Strohm, a national security reporter for Bloomberg, says the units will “focus on missions such as protecting vital computer networks from attacks, supporting combat operations and keeping the Pentagon’s information-technology systems secure.”

The Associated Press reports that Gen. Alexander likened the teams’ duties to “knocking an incoming missile out of the sky before it hits a target,” and that they’d serve as defensive teams with added offensive capabilities. What offensive actions the teams will engage in exactly will likely remain unknown for now, however, as the US has continues to closely guard its secretive cyber operations. An order signed by President Barack Obama last year outlining the offensive capabilities of US cyber squads remains classified four months later, but it has been described as being the most aggressive cybersecurity directive ever. Meanwhile, the commander-in-chief and other administration officials have only said that attacks aimed at US infrastructure are increasing in frequency.

"What is absolutely true is that we have seen a steady ramping up of cyber security threats,” Pres. Obama told ABC News during an interview filmed on Tuesday.

And while Gen. Alexander’s 40 new teams won’t be ready for either side of a cyberbattle until 2015, meanwhile Washington is looking for other ways to protect an onslaught of attacks. In addition to the classified order signed by Mr. Obama in November — Presidential Policy Directive 20 — the White House has also released an executive order that will pave the way for the country’s private businesses to share threat information with the US government.

“I signed a new executive order that will strengthen our cyber defenses by increasing information sharing, and developing standards to protect our national security, our jobs and our privacy,” Pres. Obama said during last month’s State of the Union address. Moments later during his speech, he also urged Congress to act fast on their own “by passing legislation to give our government a greater capacity to secure our networks and deter attacks.” One day later members of Congress reintroduced the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, and again this week Pres. Obama asked for lawmakers on Capitol Hill to act on it.

"There are ways that we can harden our critical infrastructure, our financial sector," Obama to ABC."They need to get this done."

Gen. Alexander and Pres. Obama’s statements come on the heels of a series of cyberattacks aimed at America’s military computers, government servers, utility companies and banks. Earlier this week, hackers claiming to be from the Tunisian Cyber Army took credit for hacking a handful of government websites, and say that, along with the al-Qaeda Electronic Army and a crew of Chinese hackers, will continue to attack US websites as part of Operation BlackSummer, or #OpBlackSummer.-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:RT