"It's funny how every time I write about Palestine, I get a slew of hack attempts ranging from the most primitive to the most complicated scary ones. I won't get into much details, but I've been noticing a huge amount of unnatural activity."
"Today, every Army outpost in America traces its roots to the walls, guards and gates of Troy. But none of today’s forts relies for boundary defense on anything more substantial than a chain-link fence, even though the base may contain billions of dollars in military equipment and the things most important to the soldiers — their families. The U.S. intends for defense of its “forts” to occur thousands of miles away. We intend to take the fight to the enemy before the enemy has a chance to come here. So, if the fortress ultimately failed, does history provide a different model?"Col. Williamson reports on suggestions for creating a military botnet using existing Air Force systems to provide an U.S. offensive cyber capability and discusses defensive requirements.
"Lawyers have been known to trot out a “parade of horribles” to demonstrate weaknesses in an idea. These issues are difficult but not insurmountable. But before addressing them, it is important to note what the botnet is not.
"The af.mil botnet is not a replacement for law enforcement action or diplomacy. If the harm coming to U.S. systems is low enough that a military response is not required, the U.S. must default to traditional responses that respect the sovereignty of other nations, just as we expect them to respect our sovereignty and the primacy of our responsibility to stop harm coming to them from the U.S. With that understanding, what challenges remain?"
"The truly difficult problems come in defending against attack from devices adversaries have captured from U.S. or allies’ civilians. Generally, the U.S. military is not going to attack a U.S. private computer. Harm coming from one of those machines will first be treated as a crime, and military forces should stay out of the situation in accordance with the Posse Comitatus Act. However, Title 10 of the United States Code, Section 333, allows the president to order use of the military in the U.S. under tightly controlled conditions when civil authorities are overborne."More challenging is the problem of an attack coming from an ally’s civilian computers. Obviously, the U.S. would seek allies’ cooperation if at all possible, but we could be in a position of launching an attack on a nation whom we have sworn to protect in a mutual defense pact. Together, the U.S. and its allies can reduce this risk by cooperating to maximize computer security. If we attack them as a matter of proportionate response, it would only be because computers in their territory are attacking us.
"The biggest challenge will be political. How does the U.S. explain to its best friends that we had to shut down their computers? The best remedy for this is prevention. The U.S. and its allies need to engage in a robust joint endeavor to improve net defense and intelligence to minimize this risk."
"The difference between government-sponsored attacks and grassroots cyber terrorism is growing increasingly fuzzy, even as researchers try to sift through who did what on Estonia's Web. And the difficulty of tracing responsibility for even massive cyber attacks suggests that such maneuvers may become an effective tool not just for indiscriminate vandalism, but also for stealthy cyber censorship."
"This is a mass invasion. Safeguard the motherland’s dignity!
F*** FRANCE! F*** CNN! I WILL ATTACK you ALWAYS !
I love my motherland!"
"The centre will conduct research and training on cyber warfare and include a staff of 30 persons, half of them specialists from the sponsoring countries, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Spain."
"This staff report concerns ... – how violent Islamist terrorist groups like al-Qaeda are using the Internet to enlist followers into the global violent Islamist terrorist movement and to increase support for the movement, ranging from ideological support, to fundraising, and ultimately to planning and executing terrorist attacks.
"In the second section of this report, we examine the increasing number of homegrown incidents and the judgments of the intelligence and law enforcement communities that there will likely be additional homegrown threats in the future.
"The third section explores the four-step radicalization process through which an individual can be enticed to adopt a violent Islamist extremist mindset and act on the ideology’s call to violence.
"Section four identifies the disturbingly broad array of materials available on the Internet that promote the violent Islamist extremist ideology. The availability of these resources is not haphazard, but is part of a comprehensive, tightly controlled messaging campaign by al-Qaeda and like-minded extremists designed to spread their violent message.
"The fifth section of the report examines how these materials facilitate and encourage the radicalization process.
"Finally, the report assesses the federal government’s response to the spread of the violent Islamist message on the Internet and concludes that there is no cohesive and comprehensive outreach and communications strategy in place to confront this threat."
"Headlines on the site were replaced by the word Gukurahundi.
"The word refers to a campaign of mass slaughter that the government has been accused of carrying out after independence."
"...Chinese hackers who claim there is something of a black market for Korean personal information in China. They say Koreans hire Chinese hackers to break into sites to get information, which is then handed over and sold in Korea."
"...the vice head of PR for “Auction” [eBay's Korean subsidiary] said on CBS radio last month that the hacking program employed in the attack was named “Fuck KR,” leading at the time to speculation that the attack was anti-Korean in nature."
"...in the internal network of Digital Equipment Corporation and later in the NASA / SPAN networks. This was jokingly named by the Australian authors as “Worms against Nuclear Killers” and has been misreported in several publications as an example of political hacking [See: Denning, Dorothy E., “Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism: The Internet as a Tool for Influencing Foreign Policy”].
"However, the authors had no political motive in these attacks and were playing on the British meaning of the word 'wank' [Source: "Hacktivism & Politically Motivated Computer Crime"]."
"Recently, Tibetan advocacy groups and China-based foreign journalists have been hit by a wave of sophisticated computer attacks that steal data, cripple Web sites and even monitor what computer users type on their computers.
"The attacks often come in the form of viruses attached to e-mails skillfully made to look like correspondence from people the recipient knows and trusts."
Belgium has become the latest government to accuse China of attacks on their information infrastructures. As with other reports, there are no details or facts to allow proper analysis.
"Justice minister Jo Vandeurzen is reported to have claimed that the Federal Government had been targeted by Chinese hackers, backing up a separate statement by Belgium's foreign affairs minister, Karel De Grucht that his ministry had been hit by espionage in recent weeks.
"In both cases, the Belgians appear certain that the culprits were Chinese and that the Beijing authorities must know something about events, although no evidence has been offered to back up these allegations. The precise nature of the attacks has not been explained either."
Euro-MPs back longer term for EU Web security body"Euro-MPs believe Internet infrastructure security must be protected more effectively as the EU economy depends increasingly on a trouble-free Web.
"A lot of staff are simply pushing papers, making reports and not doing what we need them to do. It's something you might see in the Soviet Union. There is an increase in network security problems," said Reino Paasilinna, a Finnish socialist."
[Editor's Note: After this article was published, I received a clarification on the staffing issues at ENISA from Ulf Bergström, Press and Communications Officer at ENSIA:
‘This year ADM has 17 staff in total, of which 13 are TAs (stable since 2006) to service 66 planned staff members (TAs and contract agents, SNEs and stagiaires).
There’s nothing imbalanced at ENISA. ENISA is even better as some agencies with regard to this ratio. The minimum number of admin staff (that we have) sounds much larger when the overall size of the agency is low.
About his ratio there's nothing what we could more improve, as the financial regulation and the whole set of administrative rules sets a minimum number in order to guarantee sound financial management ("checks and balances").']
"The sustained assault almost coincides with the history of the present political disquiet between the two countries.
"According to senior government officials, these attacks are not isolated incidents of something so generic or basic as "hacking" — they are far more sophisticated and complete — and there is a method behind the madness.
"Publicly, senior government officials, when questioned, take refuge under the argument that "hacking" is a routine activity and happens from many areas around the world. But privately, they acknowledge that the cyber warfare threat from China is more real than from other countries.
"The core of the assault is that the Chinese are constantly scanning and mapping India’s official networks. This gives them a very good idea of not only the content but also of how to disable the networks or distract them during a conflict."
Online protest and hacktivist attacks are gaining more publicity but does this reflect a sudden increase in activity or just more press coverage? A recent blog posting concluding a sudden increase in activity has gained some media attention:
"While incidents of Hacktivism are not new, they are beginning to become a lot more frequent — perhaps due to the availability of tools to conduct hacktivist mischief, but also perhaps due to the ubiquitous social networking mechanisms which can now be used as to build consensus when times of cultural or political unrest present the opportunity.
In any event, Hacktivism is becoming a disturbing trend, and one which can have serious ripple effects that interfere with Internet operational continuity — sometimes in ways which we may have not even thought of yet."
While the availability of social networks and 'hacktivist' tools do contribute to both increasing number of attacks and their effectiveness, most professionals that closely follow politically motivated computer crimes and hacktivism believe there has been a steady increase in activity for several years, with ups and downs following political events in the real world (such as Olympic protests, Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, etc.). What has become more frequent is press coverage of attacks which creates a cycle of more activity followed by more press (see Hacktivism & Politically Motivated Computer Crime for a detailed analysis of the relationship between hacktivism and media coverage).
The website of French magazine 'Capital', conducting an online poll concerning boycotting the 2008 Chinese Olympics, was flooded with votes, apparently from China.
"On the first day, we had about 300 responses, which was normal for this type of poll, and they were 80 percent in favour of a boycott. The next day there were 20,000 responses, with 80 percent opposing a boycott," he [Jean-Joel Gurviez, publisher of the website for Capital magazine] said.
"Almost all of the responses arrived via Chinese servers, Gurviez said, leading technicians to initially think the influx was driven by Chinese sites directing patriotic fans to vote.
"But a few days later we had hackers operating off servers in China try to change our content, and there were 2.5 million attempts to access protected files. We had to shut down the site temporarily," he said."
"Governor of the Bank of Israel Prof. Stanley Fischer was taken by surprise by the hacking of the bank's website last week, and in a moment of anger announced that he would fire those responsible."
"These cyber attacks are extremely worrisome because politically supported attacks have the backing of strong entities. Sponsors of these cyber attacks are trying to gain control to the keys to the kingdom..."
"RFE/RL President Jeffrey Gedmin said he is deeply concerned by the attacks. "If free and independent media existed in these countries where we're working and broadcasting, we would have no reason to exist," Gedmin said. "The Belarusians, the Iranians -- they all have basically the same objective. They see free information -- flowing information of ideas and so forth -- as the oxygen of civil society. They'll do anything they can to cut it off. If it means jamming, if it means cyberattacks, that's what they'll do."
"With the anniversary of the attacks looming, senior officials are preparing for a repeat performance. One official said there had been many smaller attempts to hack into government systems during the last 12 months but they were not as organised or successful as last year's attacks."
"World leaders gathered in Bucharest for this week’s NATO summit are debating what role the trans-Atlantic alliance can play in containing “cyberterrorists,” “hacktivists” and other emerging menaces that experts concede are untraditional, but still potentially lethal."
"Website defacement of this nature requires only basic programming know-how and usually boils down to changing the main page – a file easy to reconstruct.
"Smaller sites are the ones most vulnerable to defacement, since large sites, databases and electronic commerce website usually have high-level security systems at their disposal.
"A statement by any terror group pointing to a unit dedicated to defacing websites does not necessarily indicate any operational sophistication, since any teenager with basic programming skills can do the same."
