Hackers interfered with two U.S. satellites on four separate occasions in the last few years, according to a draft of a report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission obtained by Bloomberg BusinessWeek on Thursday. The attacks are believed to have been orchestrated from China.

First of all, we feel it necessary to clarify some of the confusion surrounding the files and their names related to this incident. To get a full understanding of the situation you only need to know that we’re talking about just two malicious programs here (at a minimum) - the main module and a keylogger. All that has been mentioned in last 24 hours about connections between Duqu and Stuxnet is related mostly to the first one - the main module.

Hackers who infiltrated the Nasdaq’s computer systems last year installed malicious software that allowed them to spy on the directors of publicly held companies, according to two people familiar with an investigation into the matter. The new details showed the cyber attack was more serious than previously thought, as Nasdaq OMX Group had said in February that there was no evidence the hackers accessed customer information.

With virus researchers scrambling to decode a new piece of malware that is based on the code of the Stuxnet worm, an analyst at McAfee is speculating that the new worm, Duqu, may have been created to target certificate authorities. Writing on McAfee’s research blog, Guilherme Venere and Peter Szor say that an analysis of the Duqu code by McAfee experts suggests that the worm was created “for espionage and targeted attacks against sites such as Certificate Authorities (CAs).” The McAfee analysis, if accurate, is the first to explicitly mention the type of organization that the Duqu worm targeted, and would suggest that those behind the worm intended to use it as a precursor to subsequent, targeted attacks.

It was only a matter of time: What might be the first stage of the next Stuxnet attack has been spotted in the wild — and there are multiple versions of the second-generation malware in circulation, including ones that target industrial-control system vendors and certificate authorities (CAs). Researchers at Symantec say newly discovered malware, dubbed “Duqu,” shares much of the code from Stuxnet and shows that the authors had access to the source code of Stuxnet. That suggests the malware might have been developed by the same attackers who devised Stuxnet.

A German electronics engineer has been sentenced at the Old Bailey to three years in prison for committing various offences including skimming fraud. The 26-year-old assisted organised criminal networks by adding skimming components to PIN Entry Devices (PEDs) that had been stolen from retailers across Europe. Once returned to the retail outlet, the compromised PEDs harvested magnetic stripe and PIN data that the criminals could conveniently retrieve via Bluetooth from within a radius of 100 meters of the device – without ever having to go back into the shop. The criminals brought the stolen devices to the UK for modification.

Sony is in the spotlight again, and once more the reason is security related. According to the consumer electronics company, its Sony Entertainment Network (SEN), PlayStation Network (PSN), and Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) services were all targeted in an attack that impacted 93,000 user accounts. “These attempts appear to include a large amount of data obtained from one or more compromised lists from other companies, sites or other sources,” commented Sony’s CISO, Philip Reitinger.

Researchers at Ruhr University in Bochum have succeeded in copying the key from one make of RFID card. As well as having the obvious benefit of convenience, RFID cards, which are used for access control and billing, are supposed to be very secure. But a copied card would offer attackers plenty of scope for abuse.

Two separate hacker groups whose activities are already known to authorities were behind the serious breach of RSA Security earlier this year and were likely working at the behest of a government, according to new statements from the company’s president. RSA President Tom Heiser, speaking at the RSA conference in London this week, said that the two unidentified hacker groups had not previously been known to work together and that they possessed inside information about the company’s computer naming conventions that helped their activity blend in with legitimate users on the network, according to IDG news service.

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other war zones. The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the US military’s most important weapons system. “We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

Navigation-and-emergency-services company OnStar is notifying its six million account holders that it will keep a complete accounting of the speed and location of OnStar-equipped vehicles, even for drivers that discontinue monthly service. OnStar began e-mailing customers Monday about its update to the privacy policy, which grants OnStar the right to sell that GPS-derived data in an anonymized format.

Researchers have discovered a serious weakness in virtually all websites protected by the secure sockets layer protocol that allows attackers to silently decrypt data that’s passing between a webserver and an end-user browser. The vulnerability resides in versions 1.0 and earlier of TLS, or transport layer security, the successor to the secure sockets layer technology that serves as the internet’s foundation of trust. Although versions 1.1 and 1.2 of TLS aren’t susceptible, they remain almost entirely unsupported in browsers and websites alike, making encrypted transactions on PayPal, GMail, and just about every other website vulnerable to eavesdropping by hackers who are able to control the connection between the end user and the website he’s visiting.

A Dutch certificate authority that suffered a major hack attack this summer has been unable to recover from the blow and filed for bankruptcy this week. DigiNotar, which is owned by Illinois-based Vasco Data Security and was the primary provider of digital security certificates for domains owned by the Dutch government, was breached in early June due to lax security.

DigiNotar, the Dutch Certificate Authority (CA) that suffered a massive security breach, resulting in nearly 300,000 Iranians being compromised, has filed for bankruptcy. The voluntary petition was granted on Tuesday by a court in The Netherlands. DigiNotar filed for bankruptcy on Monday, less than 24-hours later the petition was approved. In a statement, DigiNotar’s parent company, Vasco, distanced itself from the security breach, promising to cooperate with the Dutch government during the bankruptcy proceedings.

In the days following 9/11 we heard alarmist warnings of a coming wave of cyberterrorism. In the early days of the war in Afghanistan when an Al Qaeda computer was found, it was treated as evidence that terrorists knew how to use computers so therefore they would soon be sending worms to shut down or blow up our power plants. During that time I was interviewed on a CNN talk show describing what a terrorist might be doing with a computer that was found to have computer aided design (CAD) software on it. I said it might be used to figure out the best place to plant a bomb to cause the most damage to a structure. This wasn’t cyberterrorism. It was using the computer as an engineering tool. Somehow this got lost by the host of the show who kept on plugging away that cyberterror from Al Qaeda was coming soon. That never materialized and in the last 10 years I don’t think there has been any documented cases of cyberterrorism.