the future cyber war

[waltky]

Operation Shady Rat...

Massive global cyberattack hits US hard: Who could have done it?
August 3, 2011 - Cybersecurity firm McAfee says it infiltrated a 'command and control' server with detailed logs of five years of cyberattacks against targets ranging from the US government to the World Anti-Doping Agency. McAfee suggests a country was behind it. Experts suspect China.

Cyberspies believed to be working for a national government for the past five years have stolen vast amounts of classified, sensitive, or proprietary information from at least 72 companies and government and nonprofit groups in 14 countries, with the bulk of the victims in the United States, a major cybersecurity firm is reporting. “What we have witnessed over the past five to six years has been nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth,” the report’s co-author, Dmitri Alperovitch, a vice president of Santa Clara, Calif.-based McAfee, wrote on his blog.

Targets of the information theft included the US federal and state governments, county governments, and Canadian, South Korean, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, and Indian governments. Among other targets: defense contractors, the United Nations, prodemocracy groups, and individual companies in the steel, energy, solar power, electronics, and computer security industries.

What distinguishes this new report from others in the recent past is its level of detail, some cybersecurity experts said. In part that could be because the perpetrators created detailed logs of their exploits on a “command and control” server that McAfee was able to infiltrate.

“Closely guarded national secrets (including from classified government networks), source code, bug databases, email archives, negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions, document stores, legal contracts,... and much more has ‘fallen off the truck’ of numerous, mostly Western companies and disappeared in the ever-growing electronic archives of dogged adversaries,” Mr. Alperovitch wrote.

'Massive economic threat'

See also:

"State actor" behind slew of cyber attacks
- Security experts have discovered an unprecedented series of cyber attacks on the networks of 72 organizations globally, including the United Nations, governments and corporations, over a five-year period.

Security company McAfee, which uncovered the intrusions, said it believed there was one "state actor" behind the attacks but declined to name it, though several other security experts said the evidence points to China. The long list of victims in the extended campaign include the governments of the United States, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the International Olympic Committee (IOC); the World Anti-Doping Agency; and an array of companies, from defense contractors to high-tech enterprises.

In the case of the United Nations, the hackers broke into the computer system of its secretariat in Geneva in 2008, hid there for nearly two years, and quietly combed through reams of secret data, according to McAfee. "Even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators," McAfee's vice president of threat research, Dmitri Alperovitch, wrote in a 14-page report released on Wednesday. "What is happening to all this data ... is still largely an open question. However, if even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the other team's playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat."

McAfee learned of the extent of the hacking campaign in March this year, when its researchers discovered logs of the attacks while reviewing the contents of a "command and control" server that they had discovered in 2009 as part of an investigation into security breaches at defense companies. It dubbed the attacks "Operation Shady RAT" and said the earliest breaches date back to mid-2006, though there might have been other intrusions. (RAT stands for "remote access tool," a type of software that hackers and security experts use to access computer networks from afar).

Some of the attacks lasted just a month, but the longest -- on the Olympic Committee of an unidentified Asian nation -- went on and off for 28 months, according to McAfee. "Companies and government agencies are getting raped and pillaged every day. They are losing economic advantage and national secrets to unscrupulous competitors," Alperovitch told Reuters. "This is the biggest transfer of wealth in terms of intellectual property in history," he said. "The scale at which this is occurring is really, really frightening."

CHINA CONNECTION?

 

[bill5]

sigh

I never thought I'd miss the days when Z-150s were hot stuff.

 

[waltky]

Uncle Ferd says dem sneaky Chinamens is tryin' to get Soviet missiles so's dey can attack us an' make us think its the Roosians...

Why Are the Russians Announcing Chinese Espionage Now?
10/7/2011, Despite its intensive cooperation with China and imminent summit Russia announed the arrest of a Chinese spy.

In a curious sense of timing, Russia announced this week that it had been holding a Chinese national for a year on suspicion of trying to get documentation on the Russian S-300 long-range surface-to-air missile system by bribery. The announcement came shortly before Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is to head for China for summit talks with the Chinese leadership. Russia and China collaborated on torpedoing a Western resolution against Syria this week at the Security Council and the twp powers have been the guiding spirit behind the Shanghai cooperation organization in a bid to secure preeminence in Central Asia. If Tun Shenyun's arrest could have been kept quiet for a year, why break the story now?

Precisely during the week that recalled the Cold War, it is important to cite that during that same Cold War a rift emerged between the Soviet Union and China. In view of the fact that the countries share a long border, one cannot rule out a reemergence of this competition and rivalry. What brought Russia and China together was their fear of American dominance. If the United States retrenches its global commitments, this could weaken the bonds between Moscow and Beijing. Russia increasingly views China as a serious competitor in the arms trade, particularly when the Chinese are successful in stealing technology, reverse engineering and copying imported products. A less sophisticated version of the missile system is being manufactured under license in China.

By making the arrest and going public the Russians are warning the Chinese that despite the strategic cooperation between the two countries, espionage in Russia by China's Ministry of State Security will not be tolerated. A final reason is that an arrest over charges of technology theft represents an indirect compliment to Russian technological prowess. One Russian official commented on the arrest by claiming that China would not engage in the usual tit for tat retaliation. "And it will be hard for them to find a Russian who is spying on the Chinese military because they steal our secrets, not the other way around." As Russia is increasingly sensitive about being eclipsed by China, such sentiments constituted a balm to Russian pride.

Alexander Gurov, a member of the Duma security committee, claims that the various espionage attempts to steal Russian technology gives the lie to charges in the Western media about a decline in the Russian military and outdated weapons in the Russian army. Some of these reports were fueled by criticism of Russian military industries by President Dmitry Medvedev, who in some cases even exhorted the Russian military to import the hardware that it needed. "All these attempts by the so-called spies show that not everything is bad in Russia, although the West is trying to create a bad image of the country,” Gurov said.

Russia: Friendship Does not Mean You Can Spy - Global Agenda - News - Israel National News

 

[waltky]

Personal information of more than 1,300 U.S. military and government personnel stolen...

Malaysian Hacker Linked to ISIS
Friday, October 16, 2015 - Malaysian police have arrested a man suspected of hacking U.S. military information and providing it to members of the Islamic State.

Ardit Ferizi allegedly stole the personal information of more than 1,300 U.S. military and government personnel. Ferizi is a citizen of Kosovo, the mostly Muslim republic in the central Balkans. The United States also had a large military base there.

The U.S. State Department released a statement identifying Ferizi as a leader of an Internet hacking group called Kosova Hacker's Security. According to the State Department, Ferizi was in contact with Junaid Hussain, a senior operative with the Islamic State in Syria.
[/B]

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Hussain, also known as Abu Hussain al-Britani, tweeted that he had a 30-page document disclosing U.S. military information. The post may have been intended to provide ISIS supporters in the United States with information to plan terror attacks against those individuals. "This case is a first of its kind and, with these charges, we seek to hold Ferizi accountable for his theft of this information and his role in ISIL's targeting of U.S. government employees," said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin. "This arrest demonstrates our resolve to confront and disrupt ISIL's efforts to target Americans in whatever form and wherever they occur," he added. If convicted of identity theft and computer hacking, Ferizi could face up to 35 years in prison.

Page Not Found - CBN News - Christian News 24-7 - CBN.com

 

[Igrok_]

Russia’s Winning the Electronic War

it comes at different times, and in different forms. But as they have charted the war in southeast Ukraine over the past year, drones flown by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe have run into the same problem: Russian troops on the ground are jamming them into virtual blindness.

It’s just one part of a sophisticated Russian electronic warfare (EW) effort in Ukraine that has proved a sobering experience for the U.S. Army. Faced with how the newly modernized Russian army is operating in Ukraine and Syria — using equipment like the Krasukha-4, which jams radar and aircraft —American military officials are being forced to admit they’re scrambling to catch up.

Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, commander of U.S. Army units in Europe, hasdescribed Russian EW capabilities in Ukraine as “eye-watering.” Ronald Pontius, deputy to Army Cyber Command’s chief, Lt. Gen. Edward Cardon, told a conference this month that “you can’t but come to the conclusion that we’re not making progress at the pace the threat demands.”

 

[shadow355]

I am wondering what people here think of our country's (USA) ability to conduct cyber war....

Personally, I think we would have all of our infrastructure and private businesses that operate critical facilities (power, natural resources, all communication) shut down within the first day of cyberware against any skilled opponent, and when people can't email or make phone calls there will be anarchy.

Not hard to find intelligence reports and even mainstream journalists have reported on the 'patriotic hackers' - private companies who hack into other countries or international businesses, steal info, and then sell them back to their government - inside countries like china and russia. It is also no secret that China is quietly building itself to become the world's #1 power during and after the next big war. Not only are they capable in the conventional military sense, but they also have the largest group of skilled hackers for cyber offense, as well as strictly controlled internet access for the entire country. They will be able to shut off at will any sectors compromised by would be attackers and move on to other areas.

Almost all of their defenses strategies are strictly unconstituional, but I think something needs to be to better bridge the gap between private companies and even the government itself. Unfortunately, the urgency of this matter has brought about the "cybersecurity act of 2009", which most people will remember as giving the president power to shut down internet connections of priv businesses and gov (just like china has), since we have no real plan in place and only drastic measures can shore us up until its fixed. Most of the effort to get security rolling has been given to NSF and other grant giving instutions, meaning any serious change at a national level is 7 years away at the very least, and much of the "research" will give no real results.

I believe that until the USA takes cyber warefare as serious as it takes the other branches of the military, that no matter how many planes and tanks we have, we are only a few MB of traffic away from complete destruction.

Cyber warfare can't be too hard .

Last month there was a contractor on the west side of the facility I work at - A Department of Defense contractor ; and he had a walki - talki / portable two way radio - and was talking on our Security frequency. He talked on it for about a month.

An outside Excavation contractor - talking on our ( Security ) frequency.

If computers are as easy to manipulate like our radio system - the bad guys more than likely have it made intelligence wise .

Shadow 355

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Think it's gonna take lots of dead people killed because of hacking before we take it as seriously as other threats. Alas.