Governments, IOC and UN hit by massive cyber attack

Ringel05

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Aug 5, 2009
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IT security firm McAfee claims to have uncovered one of the largest ever series of cyber attacks.
It lists 72 different organisations that were targeted over five years, including the International Olympic Committee, the UN and security firms.
McAfee will not say who it thinks is responsible, but there is speculation that China may be behind the attacks.
Beijing has always denied any state involvement in cyber-attacks, calling such accusations "groundless".
Speaking to BBC News, McAfee's chief European technology officer, Raj Samani, said the attacks were still going on.
"This is a whole different level to the Night Dragon attacks that occurred earlier this year. Those were attacks on a specific sector. This one is very, very broad."

BBC News - Governments, IOC and UN hit by massive cyber attack
 
Uncle Ferd says its prob'ly Chinese or Mooslamic terrorist hackers...
:eek:
Computer-based attacks emerge as threat of future, general says
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - The general in charge of U.S. cyberwarfare forces said Tuesday that future computer-based combat likely will involve electronic strikes that cause widespread power outages and even physical destruction of thousand-ton machines.
Army Gen. Keith Alexander, commander of the new U.S. Cyber Command, also said that massive losses of private and public data in recent years to computer criminals and spies represent the largest theft in history. Threats posed by cyber-attacks on computer networks and the Internet are escalating from large-scale theft of data and strikes designed to disrupt computer operations to more lethal attacks that destroy entire systems and physical equipment. “That’s our concern about what’s coming in cyberspace — a destructive element,” Gen. Alexander, who is also the director of the National Security Agency, the electronic spying agency, said in a speech at a conference on cyberwarfare.

Gen. Alexander said two cases illustrate what could happen in an attack. The first was the August 2003 electrical power outage in the Northeast U.S. that was caused by a tree damaging two high-voltage power lines. Electrical power-grid software that controlled the distribution of electricity to millions of people improperly entered “pause” mode and shut down all power through several states. The example highlighted the threat of sophisticated cyberwarfare attackers breaking into electrical grid networks and using the access to shut down power. “You can quickly see that there are ways now to get in and mess with [electrical] power if you have access to it,” he said.

The second example was the catastrophic destruction of a water-driven electrical generator at Russia’s Sayano-Shushenskaya dam, near the far eastern city of Cheremushki, in August 2009. Gen. Alexander said one of the dam’s 10 650-megawatt hydroturbine generators, weighing more than 1,000 tons, was being serviced and, by mistake, was remotely restarted by a computer operator 500 miles away. The generator began spinning and rose 50 feet into the air before exploding. The flood caused by the accident killed 75 people and destroyed eight of the remaining nine turbines. A similar deliberate attack remains a huge problem, Gen. Alexander said, saying that destruction by cyber-attacks was outranked only by nuclear bombs or other weapons of mass destruction.

In developing cyberwarfare strategies, Gen. Alexander said, the U.S. will respond to computer-based attacks as it will to other attacks. The government is adopting what he termed an “active defense” strategy aimed at bolstering the readiness of computer networks to respond. The Pentagon’s cyberstrategy announced last summer calls for treating the cyberdomain as equal to the air, land, sea and space domains and leveraging U.S. technology to improve cyberdefenses for government and the private sector. On information theft, Gen. Alexander said the problem is so pervasive that there are two categories for major companies: firms that are aware they have been hacked and the rest who remain unaware of the problem. “What’s been going on over the last few years in the networks … is the greatest theft that we’ve seen in history,” he said. “What we’re losing in intellectual property is astounding.”

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Chinese hackers engaging in industrial spying...
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Chemical, military firms hacked: report
Wed, Nov 02, 2011 - ‘POISONIVY’: A Symantec report said the attacks appeared to be industrial spying and were traced to a computer system owned by a Chinese man in Hebei Province
Cyberattacks traced to China targeted at least 48 chemical and military-related companies in an effort to steal technical secrets, a US computer security company said yesterday, adding to complaints about pervasive Internet crime linked to China. The targets included 29 chemical companies and 19 others that make advanced materials used by the military, California-based Symantec Corp said in a report. It said the group included multiple Fortune 100 companies, but did not identify them or say where they were located. “The purpose of the attacks appears to be industrial espionage, collecting intellectual property for competitive advantage,” the report said. Security experts say China is a center for Internet crime. Attacks against governments, companies and human rights groups have been traced to the country, though finding the precise source is nearly impossible. China’s military is a leader in cyberwarfare research, but the government has rejected allegations of cyberspying and says it is also a target.

The latest attacks occurred between late July and September and used e-mails sent to companies to plant software dubbed “PoisonIvy” in their computers, Symantec said. It said the same hackers were also involved in attacks earlier this year on human rights groups and auto companies. Symantec said it traced the attacks to a computer system owned by a Chinese man in his 20s in the central province of Hebei. It said that when contacted, the man provided a contact who would perform “hacking for hire.” Symantec said it could not determine whether the Chinese man was a lone attacker, whether he had a direct or indirect role or whether he hacked the targets for someone else. It called him Covert Grove based on a translation of his Chinese name.

The US and China have accused each other of being involved in industrial espionage. Security consultants say the high skill level of earlier attacks traced to China suggests its military or other government agencies might be stealing technology and trade secrets to help state companies. The chairman of the US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Representative Mike Rogers, said last month that Chinese efforts to steal US technology over the Internet had reached an “intolerable level.” He called on the US and other governments to pressure Beijing to stop. Another security firm, McAfee Inc, said in August it had found a five-year-long hacking campaign that it called Operation Shady Rat against more than 70 governments, international institutions, corporations and think tanks.

In February, McAfee said hackers operating from China stole information from oil firms in the US, Taiwan, Greece and Kazakhstan about operations, financing and bidding for oil fields. Thousands of Chinese computer enthusiasts belong to hacker clubs and experts say some are supported by the military to develop a pool of possible recruits. Experts say military-trained civilians might also work as contractors for firms that want to steal technology or business secrets from rivals. China has the world’s biggest population of Internet users, with more than 450 million people online, and the government promotes Web use for business and education. However, experts say security for many computers in China is so poor that they are vulnerable to being taken over and used to hide the source of attacks from elsewhere.

Source
 
Fighting smarter so we don't have to fight harder...
:cool:
Drones, computers new weapons of U.S. shadow wars
17 June`12 WASHINGTON (AP) – After a decade of costly conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American way of war is evolving toward less brawn, more guile.
Drone aircraft spy on and attack terrorists with no pilot in harm's way. Small teams of special operations troops quietly train and advise foreign forces. Viruses sent from computers to foreign networks strike silently, with no American fingerprint. It's war in the shadows, with the U.S. public largely in the dark. In Pakistan, armed drones, not U.S. ground troops or B-52 bombers, are hunting down al-Qaida terrorists, and a CIA-run raid of Osama bin Laden's hide-out was executed by a stealthy team of Navy SEALs. In Yemen, drones and several dozen U.S. military advisers are trying to help the government tip the balance against an al-Qaida offshoot that harbors hopes of one day attacking the U.S. homeland.

In Somalia, the Horn of Africa country that has not had a fully functioning government since 1991, President Barack Obama secretly has authorized two drone strikes and two commando raids against terrorists. In Iran, surveillance drones have kept an eye on nuclear activities while a computer attack reportedly has infected its nuclear enrichment facilities with a virus, possibly delaying the day when the U.S. or Israel might feel compelled to drop real bombs on Iran and risk a wider war in the Middle East. The high-tech warfare allows Obama to target what the administration sees as the greatest threats to U.S. security, without the cost and liabilities of sending a swarm of ground troops to capture territory; some of them almost certainly would come home maimed or dead.

But it also raises questions about accountability and the implications for international norms regarding the use of force outside of traditional armed conflict. The White House took an incremental step Friday toward greater openness about the basic dimensions of its shadowy wars by telling Congress for the first time that the U.S. military has been launching lethal attacks on terrorist targets in Somalia and Yemen. It did not mention drones, and its admission did not apply to CIA operations. "Congressional oversight of these operations appears to be cursory and insufficient," said Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy issues for the Federation of American Scientists, a private group. "It is Congress' responsibility to declare war under the Constitution, but instead it appears to have adopted a largely passive role while the executive takes the initiative in war fighting," Aftergood said in an interview.

That's partly because lawmakers relinquished their authority by passing a law just after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that essentially granted the White House open-ended authority for armed action against al-Qaida. Secret wars are not new. For decades, the CIA has carried out covert operations abroad at the president's direction and with congressional notice. It armed the mujahedeen in Afghanistan who fought Soviet occupiers in the 1980s, for example. In recent years the U.S. military's secretive commando units have operated more widely, even in countries where the U.S. is not at war, and that's blurred the lines between the intelligence and military spheres. In this shroud of secrecy, leaks to the news media of classified details about certain covert operations have led to charges that the White House orchestrated the revelations to bolster Obama's national security credentials and thereby improve his re-election chances. The White House has denied the accusations.

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MI5 issues cyber attacks warning...
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MI5 fighting 'astonishing' level of cyber-attacks
25 June 2012 - Jonathan Evans admits some threats might be "dogs that don't bark"
MI5 is working to counter "astonishing" levels of cyber-attacks on UK industry, the organisation's chief has said. In his first public speech for two years, Jonathan Evans warned internet "vulnerabilities" were being exploited by criminals as well as states. The attacks were a threat to the integrity of information, he added. Mr Evans also warned the London 2012 Olympics was an "attractive target" for terrorist groups, but said security preparations were well under way. For this reason the Games would not be an easy target even though there was no doubt some terrorist networks had considered carrying out an attack, he said.

In the speech on Monday night, Mr Evans spoke of MI5's efforts to tackle "industrial-scale processes involving many thousands of people lying behind both state sponsored cyber espionage and organised cyber crime". "Vulnerabilities in the internet are being exploited aggressively not just by criminals but also by states," he said. "The extent of what is going on is astonishing."

In the past Russia and China have been cited as the countries most involved in state-based attack. "This is a threat to the integrity, confidentiality and availability of government information but also to business and to academic institutions," Mr Evans said. "What is at stake is not just our government secrets but also the safety and security of our infrastructure, the intellectual property that underpins our future prosperity and... commercially sensitive information."

The head of MI5 presented an overview of the threats he says Britain faces through the Olympics and beyond. He told the audience at London's Mansion House the Games would present an attractive target since London would be the centre of worldwide attention but said MI5 was "far from complacent". Leave has been restricted at Thames House - MI5 headquarters - and a clock in the entrance foyer counts down to the opening ceremony.

More BBC News - MI5 fighting 'astonishing' level of cyber-attacks
 
Iran lashes out after Stuxnet...
:eusa_eh:
Hackers in Iran responsible for cyberattacks
October 12, 2012 WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. authorities believe that Iranian-based hackers were responsible for cyberattacks that devastated Persian Gulf oil and gas companies, a former U.S. government official said. Just hours later, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the cyberthreat from Iran has grown, and he declared that the Pentagon is prepared to take action if American is threatened by a computer-based assault.
The former official, who is familiar with the investigation, said U.S. authorities believe the cyberattacks were likely supported by the Tehran government and came in retaliation for the latest round of American sanctions against Iran. Before Panetta's remarks on Thursday, U.S. officials had said nothing publicly about the Gulf attacks or the investigation. But Panetta described them in a speech to business leaders in New York City, saying they were probably the most destructive cyber assault the private sector has seen to date.

Panetta did not directly link Iran to the Gulf attacks, but he said Tehran has "undertaken a concerted effort to use cyberspace to its advantage." And, he said the Pentagon has poured billions into beefing up its ability to identify the origin of a cyberattacks, block them and respond when needed. "Potential aggressors should be aware that the United States has the capacity to locate them and hold them accountable for actions that harm America or its interests," said Panetta in a speech to the Business Executives for National Security. A current U.S. official acknowledged Thursday that the Obama administration knows who launched the cyberattacks against the Gulf companies and that it was a state actor.

U.S. agencies have been assisting in the Gulf investigation and concluded that the level of resources needed to conduct the attack showed there was some degree of involvement by a nation state, said the former official. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is classified as secret. While Panetta chose his words carefully, one cybersecurity expert said the Pentagon chief's message to Iran in the speech was evident. "It's not something where people are throwing down the gauntlet, but I think Panetta comes pretty close to sending a clear warning (to Iran): We know who it was, maybe you want to think twice before you do it again," said cybersecurity expert James Lewis, who is with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I think the Iranians will put two and two together and realize he's sending them a message."

More cnsnews.com/news/article/us-hackers-iran-responsible-cyberattacks
 
Ground rules for use of cyberwarfare...
:clap2:
Obama signs directive on use of cyber warfare
11/14/12 - The White House has, for the first time, laid out specific ground rules for how and when the U.S. military can carry out offensive and defensive cyber operations against foreign threats.
The guidelines were codified in a new White House directive signed by President Obama in mid-October, according to The Washington Post. A senior Obama administration official confirmed to The Hill that the president has signed a directive on “cyber operations.” “This step is part of the administration’s focus on cybersecurity as a top priority. The cyber threat has evolved since 2004, and we have new experiences to take into account,” the official said.

The senior administration official stressed that the directive does not create new powers for federal agencies or the military. “The directive establishes principles and processes for the use of cyber operations so that cyber tools are integrated with the fully array of national-security tools we have at our disposal,” the official said. “It provides a whole-of-government approach consistent with the values that we promote domestically and internationally as we have previously articulated in the International Strategy for Cyberspace.”

The cyber rules of engagement, known inside the White House and Pentagon as Presidential Policy Directive 20, represent the latest step by the administration to take the fight to state and non-state actors looking to attack U.S. government and civilian networks. The new directive also closes a critical policy gap at the DOD on cyber warfare that Congress failed to address earlier this year.

In August, White House chief counterterrorism adviser John Brennan told reporters that the administration was considering exercising presidential authority to impose cybersecurity mandates after lawmakers failed to adopt legislation to implement those measures. Passing cybersecurity legislation was near the top of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s legislative to-do list for Congress in the lame-duck session, behind a sequestration deal and approval of a defense authorization bill. A cybersecurity bill co-sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) has remained stalled on Capitol Hill for months.

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Obama gonna issue executive order to stop cyber attacks...
:cool:
Sources: White House to issue cybersecurity order Wednesday
2/11/13 - The White House is poised to release an executive order aimed at thwarting cyberattacks against critical infrastructure on Wednesday, two people familiar with the matter told The Hill.
The highly anticipated directive from President Obama is expected to be released at a briefing Wednesday morning at the U.S. Department of Commerce, where senior administration officials will provide an update about cybersecurity policy. The executive order would establish a voluntary program in which companies operating critical infrastructure would elect to meet cybersecurity best practices and standards crafted, in part, by the government. Observers are expecting the president to briefly mention the need for the country to improve its defenses against cyberattacks during his State of the Union address on Tuesday.

White House press secretary Jay Carney declined Monday to say whether the president would discuss cybersecurity during his Tuesday address to Congress, saying the president believes that it’s “a very important issue.” “It represents a huge challenge for our country. He has called on Congress to take action. Unfortunately, Congress has thus far refused legislatively,” Carney said at a press briefing with reporters. “But I don’t have any previews to provide.” During last year’s address, the president made a brief mention about the cybersecurity legislative blueprint that his administration put forward in May 2011.

The White House began crafting the executive order after Congress failed to pass cybersecurity legislation last year. Officials said the threat facing the United States was too great for the administration to ignore and that it needed to take action as Congress grappled with passing a bill. During his second term, the president is expected to exert his executive power on issues such as climate change, and it appears that cybersecurity is also on that list. Yet administration officials have also stressed that the executive order is not a substitute for cybersecurity legislation, which is needed to protect the country’s water plants, electric grid and other critical infrastructure from cyberattacks.

They note that an executive order cannot, unlike congressional legislation, grant new powers or authorities to federal agencies or departments. “We need comprehensive cybersecurity legislation,” Andy Ozment, a senior director for cybersecurity at the White House, said at a conference in Washington last week. “We cannot do everything under our existing authorities.” White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel, Commerce Department Deputy Secretary Rebecca Blank, Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Jane Holl Lute and National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander will be among the officials participating in Wednesday’s briefing, according to details obtained by The Hill. A White House spokeswoman declined to comment on the timing of the executive order.

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-v...ty-executive-order-on-wednesday#ixzz2Kkbp3alL
 

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