Homeland Security | featured news

Could this be the deadliest smartphone app ever? A German security consultant, who's also a commercial pilot, has demonstrated tools he says could be used to hijack an airplane remotely, using just an Android phone. Speaking at the Hack in the Box security summit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Hugo Teso said Wednesday that he spent three years developing SIMON, a framework of malicious code that could be used to attack and exploit airline security software, and an Android app to run it that he calls PlaneSploit.

Flight attendants, pilots, federal air marshals and even insurance companies are part of a growing backlash to the Transportation Security Administration's new policy allowing passengers to carry small knives and sports equipment like souvenir baseball bats and golf clubs onto planes.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says U.S. airports, including Los Angeles International and O'Hare International, are already experiencing delays as a result of automatic federal spending cuts....

Faced with growing fears of potentially crippling cyber attacks and not enough skilled technicians to combat the threat, the Defense Department has launched a massive recruitment drive that's tapping an unlikely group: computer hackers. The Pentagon plans to dramatically boost the ranks of U.S. cybersecurity forces, expanding its number of cyber warriors more than five-fold, the Washington Post reported Sunday. But that strategy immediately confronts a critical shortage of those with the required skills.

A 43-year-old Department of Homeland Security worker allegedly used Facebook to solicit more than 70 area children for sexual acts, according to authorities. Robert B. Rennie Jr., a Loudoun County resident, was charged Oct. 24 with five counts of using a computer to solicit a child under the age of 15, after a school resource officer was tipped off to suspicious activity on a Mercer Middle School student's Facebook page.

The federal government is quietly removing full-body X-ray scanners from seven major airports and replacing them with a different type of machine that produces a cartoon-like outline instead of the naked images that have been compared to a virtual strip search....

A Homeland Security review says agents hired prostitutes the past several years in other countries, including China.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee has scheduled a public hearing on the prostitution scandal involving US military and Secret Service agents in Colombia.

A foiled plot to sneak a bomb through airport checkpoints and onto a plane bound for the United States calls attention to gaps in screening measures that are supposed to detect threats airport metal detectors miss.

Minneapolis-St. Paul airport terminal has reopened after a suspicious bag prompted an early-morning evacuation.