The Cyberwar Thread

Enterprises are failing to tackle targeted network attacks

"...almost three quarters (72 percent) of European enterprises have suffered a targeted attack on their networks.

Of the 72 percent of respondents who said they had experienced a targeted attack, a third highlighted that such an attack had had a "significant" impact on their organisation. A loss of financial data was stated as the biggest impact, followed by lost business, loss of regulated personal data and a loss of intellectual property."
 
Cyberspies, Perhaps Operating In China, Infiltrated US Natural Gas Network: Such Cybercrime Poses More Than Virtual Threat, It’s Kinetic

"The military calls this type of threat the “kinetic effect” of cyber warfare, which goes beyond the theft of, say, credit card information or sensitive classified government intelligence. The “kinetic effect” is about taking physical control of an environment: railroad switches, refinery safety valves, power grids or, in this case, whatever keeps natural gas compressors from overloading and exploding."

“Penetration activities may render ICS components inoperable, alter system data, or even cause economic or physical damage by manipulating the physical system,” the report said.
 
Competition in cyberspace

"In order to create effective policy and strategy, policymakers must first acknowledge that cyber power is part of an ongoing strategic military competition between the United States and nations such as Russia and China. Militarized malware is but one part of a larger cyber power complex that other powers seek to imitate and counter. Only by considering the whole of military cyber power will the United States formulate responses to the expansion of military competition in and over cyberspace.

"American military hegemony, coupled with a penchant for cyber-enabled regional intervention, is what is driving adversaries’ search for countermeasures. A military competition is underway over military cyber power."
 
Czech finance sector hit by cyber attacks

"The Czech National Bank's official website was the victim of a "massive cyber attack" on the external server hosting its site, before being brought back online later that day. The attacks overloaded servers with thousands of requests, making them inaccessible to the central bank's customers.

"Other major banks were also targeted, including CSOB, Ceska Sporitelna and Komercni Banka, as well as a number of smaller banks. It is not believed that customer data has been compromised.

"There have been a number of DDOS attacks against banks across the world in recent months. Earlier this week the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters group promised to continue a series of attack against US banks which began in October with DDOS attacks against JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, CapitalOne and Citibank among others.

"In January two members of Anonymous were jailed in the UK for their part in DDOS attacks against a number of financial services companies including Visa and Mastercard."
 
DOD Officials Cite Advances in Cyber Operations, Security

WASHINGTON, March 14, 2013 – A transformation is under way in the Defense Department’s understanding and treatment of cyber requirements in everything from communication networks to military operations in cyberspace, DOD officials told a House panel here yesterday.

“We’re working with the Defense Department, the White House and the interagency,” Alexander said, “to set up standing rules of engagement -- what I'll call the way in which we would actually execute” in response to a cyberattack on critical infrastructure, for example, from a foreign adversary on the United States.

Alexander said he thinks it’s reasonable “that when our nation is under attack, whether it's physical attack or cyberattack, the Defense Department will do its part to defend the country.” The issue, he said, “is when does an exploit become an attack and when does an attack become something that we respond to?”

In his written testimony, Alexander said a Cyber National Mission Force and teams will help defend the nation against national-level threats, a Cyber Combat Mission Force and teams will be assigned to the operational control of individual combatant commanders, and a Cyber Protection Force and teams will help operate and defend DOD’s information environment.
 
The Internet is a surveillance state

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.

Facebook, for example, correlates your online behavior with your purchasing habits offline. And there's more. There's location data from your cell phone, there's a record of your movements from closed-circuit TVs.

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.
 
Seoul Must Not Drop Its Guard Against N.Korean Cyber Attacks

Pyongyang only recently threatened to scrap a ceasefire agreement that halted the 1950-53 Korean War and vowed to attack the South "in a formidable way" for holding annual joint military drills with the U.S. That suggests the computer networks that serve South Korea's key state agencies and nuclear power plants could also come under attack.

North Korea has been training cyber warfare specialists since the 1990s after it could not find the money to bolster its conventional military hardware. The North apparently has 30,000 cyber warfare specialists.
 
Huge cyber-attack causes worldwide disruption
The cyber-attack on Spamhaus, a Swiss-British anti-spam watchdog, is described as the 'largest in the history'.

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A record-breaking cyber-attack targeting an anti-spam watchdog group has sent ripples of disruption coursing across the Web, experts have said.

Spamhaus, a site responsible for keeping ads for counterfeit Viagra and bogus weight-loss pills out of the world's inboxes, said it had been buffeted by the monster denial-of-service attack since mid-March, apparently from groups angry at being blacklisted by the Swiss-British group.

"It is a small miracle that we're still online," Spamhaus researcher Vincent Hanna said on Wednesday.

Denial-of-service attacks overwhelm a server with traffic, like hundreds of letters being jammed through a mail slot at the same time.

Security experts measure those attacks in bits of data per second. Recent cyberattacks, like the ones that caused persistent outages at US banking sites late last year, have tended to peak at 100 billion bits per second.

But the furious assault on Spamhaus has shattered the charts, clocking in at 300 billion bits per second, according to San Francisco-based CloudFlare Inc., which Spamhaus has enlisted to help it weather the attack.

"It was likely quite a bit more, but at some point measurement systems can't keep up," CloudFlare chief executive Matthew Prince wrote in an email.

Patrick Gilmore of Akamai Technologies said that was no understatement.

"This attack is the largest that has been publicly disclosed, ever, in the history of the Internet,'' he said.

Disgruntled service providers

It is unclear who exactly was behind the attack, although a man who identified himself as Sven Olaf Kamphuis said he was in touch with the attackers and described them as mainly consisting of disgruntled Russian Internet service providers who had found themselves on Spamhaus' blacklists.

There was no immediate way to verify his claim.

He accused the watchdog of arbitrarily blocking content that it did not like.

Spamhaus has widely used and constantly updated blacklists of sites that send spam.

"They abuse their position not to stop spam but to exercise censorship without a court order," Kamphuis said.

Gilmore and Prince said the attack's perpetrators had taken advantage of weaknesses in the Internet's infrastructure to trick thousands of servers into routing a torrent of junk traffic to Spamhaus every second.

Both experts said the attack's sheer size has sent ripples of disruptions across the Internet as servers moved mountains of junk traffic back and forth across the Web.

"At a minimum there would have been slowness," Prince said, adding in a blog post that "if the Internet felt a bit more sluggish for you over the last few days in Europe, this may be part of the reason why."

At the London Internet Exchange, where service providers exchange traffic across the globe, spokesman Malcolm Hutty said his organisation had seen "a minor degree of congestion in a small portion of the network."

But he said it was unlikely that any ordinary users had been affected by the attack.
That much force in a DDoS is impressive
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2013/03/2013327231735995653.html
 
From The Japan Times,

Bolster cyber-attack defenses

Cyber-attacks were launched against three major banks and three TV broadcasters in South Korea on March 20, and North Korea is suspected of being the perpetrator. There is also a report that the Chinese military is likely to be involved in many cyber-attacks against the United States.

Japanese government organizations and private companies were also targeted by cyber-attacks. For example, defense contractors such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., IHI Corp. and Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. reported cyber-attacks against them in 2011.

In Japan, the Defense Ministry plans to establish a cyber space defense unit under the fiscal 2013 budget. Information on cyber-attacks held by the air, ground and maritime branches of the Self-Defense Forces will be integrated to the unit. The unit will monitor the computer networks of the ministry and the SDF as well as cope with cyber-attacks.

The National Police Agency has decided to establish special units for the investigation of cyber-attacks at 13 major police headquarters across Japan this month, with 140 specialists manning them.
 
Leilehua High repeats as national 'cyber' champions

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"All 50 states participated in the competition, which challenges students to develop solutions to real-life cyber security situations. Also, Best in Service Awards were presented to top JROTC teams by the Air Force, Navy, Marines, Civil Air Patrol and Naval Sea Cadets."

A relatively trivial story - but indicative of the growing importance and impact of the cyberdomain.
 
'Anonymous Arab' cyberattacks hit Israel

(CNN) -- Several Israeli government websites appeared to crash as anti-Israeli hackers launched cyberattacks Sunday, but Israeli hackers also claimed their own victory.

The website that promoted the "OpIsrael" cyberattacks was itself hacked. Instead of anti-Israeli messages, it was playing Israel's national anthem, "Hatikvah."
 
what's Ardamax Keylogger ? This thing came up this morning and ı am sure ı didn't install it . Now there is this uhm , err , uhm "art" series ı collect and there is always an urgency to get early instalments as the links get reported and ı simply rushed to a web cafe to get it . Had to make a general sweep of my computer last night and ı sincerely doubt this is the programme that eats 40 MB of my disc space regularly .
 
From the BBC;

State-backed data spies hunt industrial secrets

State-sponsored industrial espionage became a bigger cyber-threat to companies in 2012, a report indicates.

While hackers had financial motives in 75% of the cyber-attacks analysed for the report, in 20% of cases the perpetrators were after trade secrets or intellectual property.

"The number one statistical change we noticed is the level of state-sponsored espionage," said security analyst Wade Baker, lead author on the report. "That's a lot higher."

He added that 2012 was the first year that there were so many espionage-motivated attacks that they deserved their own category.
 
SciTechTalk: As Google Glass appears, does personal privacy vanish?

Every jump in technology brings with it adjustments society must make and rules it must develop if the new paradigm is to be considered acceptable, and Google Glass -- a wearable computer that can record video surreptitiously -- presents just such a paradigm shift.

Even Google Chairman Eric Schmidt is being open about it, saying it will require a "new etiquette," admitting there are places a Google Glass wearer shouldn't, well, wear it.

"There are obviously places where Google Glasses are inappropriate," he said last Thursday at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government of the devices that "can record video surreptitiously and bring up information that only the wearer can see."


Restrooms, changing rooms, locker rooms, bedrooms, etc.
 
I quite like the idea of video recording everything that happens to me. (Though I'd never find time to watch it all, even should I want to. And besides, then I'd be recording myself watching a recording of what had happened... and so ad infinitum.)

Apart from anything else, wouldn't it make it very difficult for someone to assault, rob, or harass me?

(Not that I'm bothered by these things myself - it's just the way I started out phrasing the initial sentence.)

Wouldn't it, potentially, make life very much more difficult for child abusers/abductors?
 
A bit of legalese...
The Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, written at the invitation of the Centre by an independent ‘International Group of Experts’, is the result of a three-year effort to examine how extant international law norms apply to this ‘new’ form of warfare. The Tallinn Manual pays particular attention to the jus ad bellum, the international law governing the resort to force by States as an instrument of their national policy, and the jus in bello, the international law regulating the conduct of armed conflict (also labelled the law of war, the law of armed conflict, or international humanitarian law). Related bodies of international law, such as the law of State responsibility and the law of the sea, are dealt within the context of these topics.
http://www.ccdcoe.org/249.html
 
Dutchman accused of launching biggest cyberattack in history

A Dutch citizen arrested in northeast Spain on suspicion of launching what is described as the biggest cyberattack in Internet history operated from a bunker and had a van capable of hacking into networks anywhere in the country, officials said Sunday.

The statement said the suspect called himself a diplomat belonging to the ``Telecommunications and Foreign Affairs Ministry of the Republic of Cyberbunker.''

The suspect is expected to be extradited from Spain to face justice in the Netherlands.
 
As banks, consumers shift to a networked world, robbers have never had it easier.

Cyberthugs making holdups passe

LONDON – International law enforcement agencies say the recent $45 million dollar ATM heist is just one of many scams they’re fighting in an unprecedented wave of sophisticated cyber-attacks.

Old-school robberies by masked criminals are being eclipsed by stealthy multimillion dollar cybercrime operations that are catching companies and investigators by surprise.

The EU remains the world’s largest market for payment card transactions and it is estimated that organized crime groups derive more than €1.5 billion ($1.9 billion) a year from payment card fraud in the EU.
 
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