Cybersecurity Update – Tune in weekdays at 30 minutes past the hour for the latest cybersecurity news on The Federal Drive with Tom Temin and Jane Norris (6-10 a.m.) and The Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris (3-7 p.m.). Listen live at FederalNewsRadio.com or on the radio at 1500 and 820 AM in the Washington, D.C. metro area.

• The Space and Naval Warfare System Center Atlantic is growing. SPAWAR broke ground yesterday on a $9.5 million engineering laboratory. The Charleston Post and Courier reports the 20,220-square-foot building will house several dozen information technology engineers who work on high-tech military initiatives such as cyber security. As the high-tech electronic procurement hub for the Navy and other federal customers, SPAWAR also employs roughly 3,300 federal civil service workers and 9,000 private-sector workers. The new facility is expected to open in the summer of 2011.
• The Senate has confirmed Army General Keith Alexander to lead the US Cyber Command. The vote was unanimous. The Cyber Command will head efforts to secure Pentagon networks. Alexander also leads the National Security Agency, and that has raised concerns about militarizing cyberspace. But during confirmation hearings, Alexander said that won’t happen. The Cyber Command will be housed at Fort Meade in Maryland.
• An unpatched bug has been revealed in Apple’s Safari browser that attackers can use to infect Windows PCs with malicious code. The bug was discovered by the Danish security research firm Secunia, and confirmed by researchers at the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team. The researchers said hackers could exploit the vulnerability with simple drive-by attacks, according to Computerworld. The bug is caused by an error in how Safari handles parent windows. It can also be exploited by duping users into opening rigged HTML-based e-mail within Safari, US-CERT said. Users would be tricked into opening malicious messages in Web mail services such as Gmail or Windows Live Hotmail. Security experts at US-CERT and Secunia are providing Safari users with some sound advice for now at least — don’t open untrusted HTML emails, and disable JavaScript except on trusted sites.

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