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Exclusive Infographic: All Cyber Attacks on Military Aviation and Aerospace Industry
Cross Posted from TheAviationist.
2011 has been an annus horribilis for information security, and aviation has not been an exception to this rule: not only in 2011 the corporate networks of several aviation and aerospace industries have been targeted by digital storms (not a surprise in the so-called hackmageddon) but, above all, last year will be probably remembered for the unwelcome record of two alleged hacking events targeting drones (“alleged” because in the RQ-170 Sentinel downed in Iran episode, several doubts surround the theory according to which GPS hacking could have been the real cause of the crash landing).
But, if Information Security professionals are quite familiar with the idea that military contractors could be primary and preferred targets of the current Cyberwar, as the infographic on the left shows, realizing that malware can be used to target a drone is still considered an isolated episode, and even worse, the idea of a malware targeting, for instance, the multirole Joint Strike Fighter is still something hard to accept.
However, things are about change dramatically. And quickly.
The reason is simple: the latest military and civil airplanes are literally full of electronics, which play a primary role in managing avionics, onboard systems, flight surfaces, communcation equipment and armament.
For instance an F-22 Raptor owns about 1.7 millions od line of codes , an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter about 5.7 millions and a Boeing 787 Dreamliner about 6.5 millions. Everything with some built in code may be exploited, therefore, with plenty of code and much current and future vulnerabilities, one may not rule out a priori that these systems will be targeted with specific tailored or generic malware for Cyberwar, Cybercrime, or even hacktivism purposes.
Unfortunately it looks like the latter hypothesis is closer to reality since too often these systems are managed by standard Windows operating systems, and as a matter of fact a generic malware has proven to be capable to infect the most important U.S. robots flying in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and Indian Ocean: Predator and Reaper Drones.
As a consequence, it should not be surprising, nor it is a coincidence, that McAfee, Sophos and Trend Micro, three leading players for Endpoint Security, consider the embedded systems as one of the main security concerns for 2012.
Making networks more secure (and personnel more educated) to prevent the leak of mission critical documents and costly project plans (as happened in at least a couple of circumstances) will not be aviation and aerospace industry’s information security challenge; the real challenge will be to embrace the security-by-design paradigm and make secure and malware-proof products ab initio.
While you wait to see if an endpoint security solution becomes available for an F-35, scroll down the image below and enjoy the list of aviation and aerospace related cyber attacks occurred since the very first hack targeting the F-35 Lightning II in 2009.
Of course aviation and aerospace industries are not the only targets for hackers and cybercriminals. So, if you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated) at hackmageddon.com. And follow @pausparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
As usual the references are after the jump…
December 2011 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part I)
As usual, here it is my compilation of December Cyber Attacks.
It looks like that Christmas approaching is not stopping hackers who targeted a growing number of organizations including several security firms (Kaspersky, Nod 32 and Bitdefender) even if in secondary domains and with “simple” defacements.
Cyber chronicles report of Gemnet, another Certification Authority Breached in Holland (is the 12th security incident targeting CAs in 2011) and several massive data breaches targeting Finland (the fifth this year, affecting 16,000 users), online gambling (UB.com affecting 3.5 million of users), Telco (Telstra, affecting 70,000 users), and gaming, after the well known attacks to Sony, Sega and Nintendo, with Square Enix, which suffered a huge attacks compromising 1,800,000 users (even if it looks like no personal data were affected).
Online Payment services were also targeted by Cybercrookers: a Visa East European processor has been hit by a security breach, but also four Romanian home made hackers have been arrested for a massive credit card fraud affecting 200 restaurants for a total of 80,000 customers who had their data stolen.
As usual, hacktivism was one of the main trends for this first half of the month, which started with a resounding hacking to a Web Server belonging to ACNUR (United Nations Refugees Agency) leaking more than 200 credentials including the one belonging to President Mr. Barack Obama.
But from a mere hactvism perspective, Elections in Russia have been the main trigger as they indirectly generated several cyber events: not only during the election day, in which three web sites (a watchdog and two independent news agencies) were taken down by DDoS attacks, but also in the immediately following days, when a botnet flooded Twitter with Pro Kremlin hashtags, and an independent forum was also taken down by a further DDoS attacks. A trail of events which set a very dangerous precent.
Besides the ACNUR Hack, the Anonymous were also in the spotlight (a quite common occurrence this year) with some sparse attacks targeting several governments including in particular Brazil, inside what is called #OpAmazonia.
Even if not confirmed, it looks like that Anonymous Finland might somehow be related to the above mentioned breach occurred in Finland.
Other interesting events occurred in the first two weeks of December: the 0-day vulnerability affecting Adobe products, immediately exploited by hackers to carry on tailored phishing campaigns and most of hall, a targeted attack to a contractor, Lockheed Martin, but also another occurrence of DNS Cache Poisoning targeting the Republic of Congo domains of Google, Microsoft, Samsung and others.
Last but not least, the controversial GPS Spoofing, which allegedly allowed Iran to capture a U.S. Drone, even the GPS Spoofing on its own does not completely solve the mistery of the capture.
Other victims of the month include Norwich Airport, Coca Cola, and another Law Enforcement Agency (clearusa.org), which is currently unaivalable.
As usual after the page break you find all the references.
One Year Of Lulz (Part I)
Update December 26: 2011 is nearly gone and hence, here it is One Year Of Lulz (Part II)
This month I am a little late for the December Cyber Attacks Timeline. In the meantime, I decided to collect on a single table the main Cyber Attacks for this unforgettable year.
In this post I cover the first half (more or less), ranging from January to July 2011. This period has seen the infamous RSA Breach, the huge Sony and Epsilon breaches, the rise and fall of the LulzSec Group and the beginning of the hot summer of Anonymous agsainst the Law Enforcement Agencies and Cyber Contractors. Korea was also affected by a huge breach. The total cost of all the breaches occurred inthis period (computed with Ponemon Institute’s estimates according to which the cost of a single record is around 214$) is more than 25 billion USD.
As usual after the page break you find all the references.
The China Cyber Attacks Syndrome
A w
eek ago, the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive published a report to Congress concerning the use of cyber espionage to attempt to gain business and industrial secrets from US companies. Easily predictable, the results present a frightening picture!
With no surprise it turned out that the biggest dangers and perpetrators of cyber-espionage operations against American business are China and Russia.
- Chinese actors are the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage. US private sector firms and cybersecurity specialists have reported an onslaught of computer network intrusions that have originated in China, but the Intelligence Community cannot confirm who was responsible.
- Russia’s intelligence services are conducting a range of activities to collect economic information and technology from US targets.
- Some US allies and partners use their broad access to US institutions to acquire sensitive US economic and technology information, primarily through aggressive elicitation and other human intelligence tactics. Some of these states have advanced cyber capabilities.
Unfortunately the predictions for the near future are not encouraging: the authors of the report judge that the governments of China and Russia will remain aggressive and capable collectors of sensitive US economic information and technologies, particularly in cyberspace.
This is mainly due to three factors: a technological shift with a growing number of devices connected to the Internet (according to a Cisco Systems study, the number of devices connected to the Internet is expected to increase from about 12.5 billion in 2010 to 25 billion in 2015). An economical shift driven by the Cloud Paradigm which requires the information to be ubiquitous and always available and, last but not least, a cultural shift which bring users to a growing use of social media for personal and professional use with a dangerous overlapping.
With these considerations in mind I decided to concentrate on a single table all the attacks with cyber espionage implications reported in 2011 for which China was directly or indirectly (or allegedly) considered responsible. The details (and links) of each single attack can be found on my 2011 Cyber Attacks Timeline Master Index (of course the list does not include the infamous Operation Aurora and the attack to G20 during the French Leadership since these events occurred during 2010).
U.S., Canada, Japan and Korea are among the countries hit by the Cyber Attacks from Far East. The most known attack is for sure the one perpetrated against RSA, whose wake affected several U.S. Contractors. Moreover the same attack was not an isolated episode, but the tip of an iceberg hiding 760 affected organizations worldwide.
Shady Rat and the IMF attack were other noticeable events as also the breach reported against the Cyworld the Korean Social Networks in which 37 million users were affected.
A frightening scenario that also generated some resounding fake attacks during 2011 (do you remember the Renault affair?)
A new cold (cyber)war at the gates?
Related articles
- Cyber-espionage attempts on US businesses are on rise (arstechnica.com)
Phoning Home to China
A couple of weeks ago, during the RSA Conference in London, Tom Heiser, president of RSA declared that two separate hacker groups already known to authorities were behind the serious breach affecting tbe Security Firm early this year in March, and were likely working at the behest of a government. Heiser also declared that the attackers possessed inside information about the company’s computer naming conventions that helped their activity blend in with legitimate users on the network, concluding that, due to the sophistication of the breach:
“we can only conclude it was a nation-state-sponsored attack.”
In a statement issued after the breach, the Security Firm declared that some information related to their two-factor authentication technology SecurID had been extracted during the attack, and that information could be used, as part of a broader attack, to decrease the effectiveness of the two-factor authentication.
Curiously RSA refused to name the involved nation, so not confirming the suspects directed to China. Regardless of the nation, among Security Professional it was immediately clear that the true target of the attack was not RSA but its customers: SecurID tokens are used by 40 million people in at least 30,000 organizations worldwide to allow secure access to IT systems. So it was not a surprise the fact that few weeks after the breach three Defense Contractor were attacked using compromised seeds, and although in two cases (L-3 Communications and Northrop Grumman) there was no direct evidence of a direct involvement of compromised tokens but only rumors, in one case (Lockheed Martin), RSA admitted the use of compromised tokens and offered to replace the tokens to affected customers.
Today another interesting piece of the puzzle: in his blog Brian Kerbs publishes a list of companies whose networks were shown to have been phoning home (i.e. connect to the C&C Server) to some of the same control infrastructure that was used in the attack on RSA. The first victims appear to have begun communicating with the attacker’s control networks as early as November 2010. According to the list 760 other organizations had networks compromised with some of the same resources used to hit RSA and almost 20 percent of the current Fortune 100 companies are on this list.
Scroll down the names on the list and you will find many interesting and surprising firms, even if the author correctly advises that:
- Many of the network owners listed are Internet service providers, and are likely included because some of their subscribers were hit;
- It is not clear how many systems in each of these companies or networks were compromised, for how long those intrusions persisted, or whether the attackers successfully stole sensitive information from all of the victims;
- Some of the affected organizations (there are also several antivirus firms mentioned) may be represented because they intentionally compromised internal systems in an effort to reverse engineer malware used in these attacks.
So at the end, what’s the matter with China? Simple, at the bottom of the article there is a chart reporting the location of more than 300 command and control networks that were used in these attacks. Guess where 299 of them were located…
(Thanks to @MasafumiNegishi for reporting the original blog post).
Related articles
Advanced Persistent Threats and Security Information Management
Advanced Persistent Threats are probably the most remarkable events for Information Security in 2011 since they are redefining the infosec landscape from both technology and market perspective.
I consider the recent shopping in the SIEM arena made by IBM and McAfee a sign of the times and a demonstration of this trend. This is not a coincidence: as a matter of fact the only way to stop an APT before it reaches its goal (the Organization data), is an accurate analysis and correlation of data collected by security devices. An APT attack deploys different stages with different tactics, different techniques and different timeframes, which moreover affect different portion of the infrastructure. As a consequence an holistic view and an holistic information management are needed in order to correlate pieces of information spread in different pieces of the networks and collected by different, somewhat heterogeneous and apparently unrelated, security devices.
Consider for instance the typical cycle of an attack carried on by an APT:
Of course the picture does not take into consideration the user, which is the greatest vulnerability (but unfortunately an user does not generate logs except in a verbal format not so easy to analyze for a SIEM). Moreover the model should be multiplied for the numbers of victims since it is “unlikely” that such a similar attack could be performed on a single user at a time.
At the end, however, it is clear that an APT affects different components of the information security infrastructure at different times with different threat vectors:
- Usually stage 1 of an APT attack involves a spear phishing E-mail containing appealing subject and argument, and a malicious payload in form of an attachment or a link. In both cases the Email AV or Antispam are impacted in the ingress stream (and should be supposed to detect the attack, am I naive if I suggest that a DNS lookup could have avoided attacks like this?). The impacted security device produce some logs (even if they are not straightforward to detect if the malicious E-mail has not been detected as a possible threat or also has been detected with a low confidence threshold). In this stage of the attack the time interval between the receipt of the e-mail and its reading can take from few minutes up to several hours.
- The following stage involves user interaction. Unfortunately there is no human firewall so far (it is something we are working on) but user education (a very rare gift). As a consequence the victim is lured to follow the malicious link or click on the malicious attachment. In the first scenario the user is directed to a compromised (or crafted) web site where he downloads and installs a malware (or also insert some credentials which are used to steal his identity for instance for a remote access login). In the second scenario the user clicks on the attached file that exploits a 0-day vulnerability to install a Remote Administration Tool. The interval between reading the malicious email and installing the RAT takes likely several seconds. In any case Endpoint Security Tools may help to avoid surfing to malicious site or, if leveraging behavioral analysis, to detect anomalous pattern from an application (a 0-day is always a 0-day and often they are released after making reasonably sure not to be detected by traditional AV). Hopefully In both cases some suspicious logs are generated by the endpoint.
- RAT Control is the following stage: after installation the malware uses the HTTP protocol to fetch commands from a remote C&C Server. Of course the malicious traffic is forged so that it may be hidden inside legitimate traffic. In any case the traffic pass through Firewalls and NIDS at the perimeter (matching allowed rules on the traffic). In this case both kind of devices should be supposed to produce related logs;
- Once in full control of the Attacker, the compromised machine is used as a hop for the attacker to reach other hosts (now he is inside) or also to sweep the internal network looking for the target data. In this case a NIDS/anomaly detector should be able to detect the attack, monitoring, for instance, the number of attempted authentications or wrong logins: that is the way in which Lockheed Martin prevented an attack perpetrated by mean of compromised RSA seeds, and also, during the infamous breach, RSA detected the attack using a technology of anomaly detection Netwitness, acquired by EMC, its parent company immediately after the event.
At this point should be clear that this lethal blend of threats is pushing the security firms to redefine their product strategies, since they face the double crucial challenge to dramatically improve not only their 0-day detection ability, but also to dramatically improve the capability to manage and correlate the data collected from their security solutions.
As far as 0-day detection ability is concerned, next-gen technologies will include processor assisted endpoint security or also a new class of network devices such as DNS Firewalls (thanks to @nientenomi for reporting the article).
As far data management and correlation are concerned, yes of course a SIEM is beautiful concept… until one needs to face the issue of correlation, which definitively mean that often SIEM projects become useless because of correlation patterns, which are too complex and not straightforward. This is the reason why the leading vendors are rushing to include an integrated SIEM technology in their product portfolio in order to provide an out-of-the-box correlation engine optimized for their products. The price to pay will probably be a segmentation and verticalization of SIEM Market in which lead vendors will have their own solution (not so optimized for competitor technologies) at the expense of generalist SIEM vendors.
On the other hand APT are alive and kicking, keep on targeting US Defense contractors (Raytheon is the latest) and are also learning to fly though the clouds. Moreover they are also well hidden considered that, according to the Security Intelligence Report Volume 11 issued by Microsoft, less than one per cent of exploits in the first half of 2011 were against zero-day vulnerabilities. The 1% makes the difference! And it is a big difference!
Related articles
- Information, The Next Battlefield (paulsparrows.wordpress.com)
Finally I Saw One!
Update: F-Secure posted in their blog the complete description on how the patient 0 was found: And here it is the infamous “2011 recruitment plan message”.
Have a look to the fake sender: a message from beyond…
Original Post follows:
I am working hard for the August 2011 Cyber Attacks Timeline (stay tuned it is almost ready! Meanwhile you may check the previous ones) while I stumbled upon this very interesting article. Yes, I may say that finally I saw one of the Emails used for spear phishing attacks against RSA customers, using compromised seeds.
As you will probably know everything started on March 17, 2011, when RSA admitted to have been targeted by a sophisticated attack which led to certain information specifically related to RSA’s SecurID two-factor authentication products being subtracted from RSA’s systems.
Of course the sole seed and serial number of the token (the alleged information subtracted) is not enough to carry on a successful attack, so the attacker (whose possible target were presumably RSA customers) had to find a way to get the missing pieces of the puzzle, that is the username and the PIN. And which is the best way? Of course Spear Phishing!
And here the example of a fake spear phishing E-mail targeting one of the One of America’s Most Secret (and Important) Agencies and in the same Time RSA customers:
Likely the same attack vector was utilized against three Contractors (RSA Customers) which were targeted by attacks based on compromised SecurID seeds between April and May (Lockheed Martin, L-3, and Northrop Grumman). What a terrible year for Contractors and DHS related agencies!
By chance today F-Secure revealed to have discovered the patient zero, that is the mail (“2011 Recruitment Plan”) used to convey the APT inside RSA. Someone (who decided to follow the best practices for anomalous e-mails) submitted it to Virus Total, a cloud based service for scanning files, and it looks like that F-Secure antimalware analyst Timo Hirvonen discovered the e-mail message buried in the millions of submissions stored in this crowd-sourced database of malicious or potentially malicious files.
Original Source of Spear Phishing E-mail: http://www.cyveillanceblog.com, Kudos to @yo9fah for reporting me the link.
Antisec hacks another Defense Contractor
Update August 19: As part of #FFF IV Antisec has released full torrent for Vanguard Defense Industries Hack.
The Antisec Typhoon seems unstoppable and has apparently hacked another Defense Contractor. Continuing their campaign against law enforcement agencies and related organizations, driven by the infamous hash #FFFriday, this time they have targeted Richard Garcia, the Senior Vice President of Vanguard Defense Industries (VDI). During the Breach nearly 4,713 emails and thousands of documents were stolen.
According to TechHerald, AntiSec targeted VDI’s website due to their relationship with several law enforcement agencies from Texas and other parts of the U.S., as well as their relationship with the FBI, the DHS, and U.S. Marshals Service. Moreover, with this hack Antisec (in)directly targeted FBI since Richard Garcia is the former Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s field office in Los Angeles. To those supporting AntiSec, this alone is reason enough to target VDI and release Garcia’s corporate email to the public.
As usual the attack had been anticipated by an enigmatic and threatening tweet:
The emails were taken after AntiSec breached VDI’s website, based on the popular WordPress platform. According to Antisec source, VDI had two outdated plugins installed on their website, which had its development outsourced to a local marketing company in Texas. Although the person from AntiSec did not disclose the exact method used to access Garcia’s email, he stated that the hack was performed through the VDI website, and that his password was rather weak.
VDI is the responsible for ShadowHawk, an unmanned helicopter that can be tasked with aerial surveillance or equipped for military usage. At its base, the ShadowHawk comes with CCD TV optics, or an upgraded version includes CCD TV optics and FLIR optics. A third version, for military or law enforcement usage only, can be equipped with a single or multiple shot 37 mm or 40mm grenade launcher, as well as a 12g shotgun, and thermal cameras.
The is only the last leak to Defense Contractor, scroll down the list for attacks targeting Defense Contractors in this very troubled year:
| Date | Author | Description | Organization | Attack |
| Feb 5 |
  |
Anonymous hacks HBGary Federal Web Site, copies tens of thousands of documents, posts tens of thousands of emails online and usurps CEO Aaron Baar’s Twitter Account. |
 |
? |
| Apr 6 |
? |
An E-mail dated April 6, sent to 5,000 employees of U.S. Defense Contractor L-3 warns of an attack attempt made with compromised SecureIDs. It is not clear if the attack was successful (it was revelead half a month later). This is in absolute the first attack perpetrated with RSA Seeds. |
 |
Compromised SecureID |
| May 21 | ? |
This is the first known (and the only officially recognized so far) attack perpetrated with compromised SecureID seeds targeting a U.S. Defense Contractor. This Attack was detected before any sensitive information could be stolen. 100,000 accounts were locked as a precaution. |
 |
Compromised SecureID |
| May 26 | ? |
Third U.S. Defense Contractor attacked using Compromised RSA Seeds. Attacked detected before any sensitive data was stolen. |
 |
SQLi? |
| Jun 3 |
|
As part of the FFFriday campaign, LulzSec steals 180 usernames, real names, hashed and plain text passwords, are acquired and posted publicily |
 |
N/A |
| Jul 8 |
 |
Anonymous attacks IRC Federal and dumps the content of the attack on a torrent available at The Pirate Bay. The dumped content include databases, private emails, contracts, development schematics, and internal documents for various government institutions. |
 |
SQLi? |
| July 11 | |
Anonymous attacks consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton and releases details of internal data including 90,000 military emails and passwords. Estimated cost of the breach is around $5,400,000.00. |
 |
SQLi? |
| Jul 11 | ? |
The Pentagon reveals to have suffered a breach of 24,000 documents in March, during a single intrusion believed to have been perpetrated by a Foreign Country. As a consequence of the Intrusion, a classified U.S. Military Weapon System will need to be redesigned after specs and plans were stolen during the breach. |
 |
? |
| Jul 28 |
|
Mantech International Corporation Anonymous hacks Mantech International Corporation, another FBI Contractor, as a consolidated tradition on Friday, and releases details of internal data and documsnts. |
 |
? |
| Jul 29 |
|
U.S. Law Enforcement Institutions As part of the Antisec operation and in retaliation for the raids and the arrest again alleged Anonymous and LulzSec members, Anonymous attacks 77 U.S. Law Enforcement Institutions, defacing and destroying their servers. |
 |
SQLi? |
| Aug 1 |
|
PCS ConsultantsAnother U.S. Government contractor, PCS Consultants gets hacked by Anonymous & Antisec. Hackers extract website Database and leak it on the internet via Twitter on Pastebin (as usual!). Leaked Data include Admin’s and 110 users emails, plus passwords in encrypted hashes. |  |
? |
| Aug 16 |
|
Antisec targets Richard Garcia, the Senior Vice President of Vanguard Defense Industries (VDI). During the Breach nearly 4,713 emails and thousands of documents are stolen. As consolidated tradtion, the torrent is released on Friday, August the 19th. |
 |
Vulnerability in WordPress Hosting Platform |
Related articles
- Vanguard Defense Industries compromised by AntiSec (thetechherald.com)
The Two Faces of Hacking
My colleague Massimo Biagiotti suggested me this interesting matrix from IEEE which originally indicated some of the biggest and best stories assessed along two dimensions: innovation and impact.
Actually I cleaned it up a little bit in order to show only some of the events happened in 2011, which were inserted in the original matrix. As a reference I left some events of the previous years (inserted in the original matrix as well) in order to have a kind of normalization. They include the infamous Ufo Hacker, the Greek Cellphone Caper, and finally the Palin’s Email Hacking.
As you may easily notice, Stuxnet deserves the Top of the Rock for Innovation and Impact. The infamous malware (the terror the nuclear power plants) has divided the infosec community in different factions: those who consider the malware as the first example of next-gen cyber-weapons developed (maybe by Israel and the U.S.) to seriously damage and delay the Iranian nuclear program (whose development took at least ten years of work), or those who consider it the work of an amateur, a script kid, possibly an astronomer with knowledge of the Holy Bible. Regardless of the real origin, because of its huge exploitation of 0-day vulnerabilities (which make it really contagious) the malware has established a new level, and probably a new standard for the information security landscape.
The RSA breach ranks in a considerable position as well. As known, compromised seeds were used to attack several main contractors of U.S. Defense (L-3, at the beginning of April but disclosed at the end of May, Lockheed Martin, on May, the 22nd, and Northrop Grumman on May, the 26th). As I told in one few posts ago I am afraid that also the Mother of All Breaches, that is the breach of 24,000 files by a Contractor, happened in March but disclosed by Pentagon last week, may be somehow related to the RSA Breach. As a consequence of the latter breach, a classified US military weapons system will have to be redesigned. Because of the impact, this breach should also be included in the matrix.
Probably the effects of the Epsilon Data Breach have been underestimated, since it is likely that security concerns, in terms of phishing, for the owners of breached e-mail addresses will last for years.
Obviously the matrix could not miss the infamous Anonymous and LulzSec Hacking groups. Their actions are considered quite simple with a major impact for the Lulz Boat. The Anonymous group is perhaps unfairly considered only for DDoS, and probably the matrix was drawn before the events of the last days such as the Monsanto Hack performed by Anonymous (whose impact is quite huge and denotes a growing interest of the group towards social problems), or the Sun Hacking (at this link some technical details on the hack).
Finally a quick consideration, of course it is a coincidence, but I could not help noticing that the author of the Ufo Hack, Gary McKinnon, has been diagnosed with the Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of Autism. Curiously the same disease has been diagnosed to Ryan Cleary, the alleged LulzSec member arrested in U.K. on June, the 21st. Probably some individuals suffering of autism spectrum disorders establish with machines the links and relationships they are not able to establish with the other human beings. This explains in part why they are so able with hacking…
Again, thanks to Massimo for reporting this really interesting (and enjoying) link.
Related articles
- The LulzSec Boat is Back (and sails under The SUN) (paulsparrows.wordpress.com)
The Mother Of All Breaches
Image via Wikipedia
Update July 15: Reuters reports that hat a classified US military weapons system will now need to be redesigned after specs and plans for the system were stolen from a defense contractor database during the breach of March,
According to an AP Statement, on Thursday the Pentagon revelead to have suffered a breach of 24,000 documents in March, during a single intrusion. Particularly interesting is the fact that sources believe the attack was perpetrated by a Foreign Country, confirming the fact that cyberspace has really become the fifth domain of war (earlier in this year China had been charged to have hacked some gmail accounts including those of senior US and South Korean government officials, and similarly at the end of 2009 some gmail accounts belonging to dissidents).
According to the original statement by AP:
William Lynn, the deputy secretary of defense, said in a speech outlining the strategy that 24,000 files containing Pentagon data were stolen from a defense industry computer network in a single intrusion in March. He offered no details about what was taken but in an interview before the speech he said the Pentagon believes the attacker was a foreign government. He didn’t say which nation.
“We have a pretty good idea” who did it, Lynn said the interview. He would not elaborate.
For the chronicle, DoD operates over 15,000 networks and seven million computing devices across hundreds of installations in dozens of countries around the globe.
It is not a coincidence that at the beginning of the year Pentagon declared that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that
for the first time opened the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force (probably at that time they were alre
ady aware of the above attack, which explains the change in strategy).
In the same wake, yesterday the Department of Defence announced its Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace, which relies on five strategic initiatives. At first glance the strategy aims to defend and prevent with a measured, reasonable approach focused on good network hygiene and data-sharing, rather than bombing hackers into submission.
- Strategic Initiative 1: Treat cyberspace as an operational domain to organize, train, and equip so that DoD can take full advantage of cyberspace’s potential;
- Strategic Initiative 2: Employ new defense operating concepts to protect DoD networks and systems;
- Strategic Initiative 3: Partner with other U.S. government departments and agencies and the private sector to enable a whole-of-government cybersecurity strategy;
- Strategic Initiative 4: Build robust relationships with U.S. allies and international partners to strengthen collective cybersecurity;
- Strategic Initiative 5: Leverage the nation’s ingenuity through an exceptional cyber workforce and rapid technological innovation.
Honestly Speaking I must confess that, as soon as I stumbled upon this report I could not help thinking (but this is a mere personal speculation) to the RSA Breach. Details of the Pentagon breach are not known so far, but I would not be surprised if they were somehow related. On the other hand the RSA breach happened in mid-March and was followed to attacks towards three US Defense Contractors (L-3, happened at the beginning of April but disclosed at the end of May, Lockheed Martin, discovered on May, the 22nd, and Northrop Grumman on May, the 26th). Only a coincidence?
Related articles
- Pentagon Files Breached (imperva.com)
- US Military Unveils Cyberspace Strategy – NPR (news.google.com)
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08/13/2011 - My Post on Android Malware Mentioned on Engadget.
04/14/2011 - The Article Smart Grid: L'ultima Frontiera del Cybercrime published on ICT Security Magazine May 2011.
03/14/2011 - Security Summit 2011: Paolo Passeri guest at Round Table "Mobile Security: Rischi, Tecnologie, Mercato"
02/14/2011 - The Article Gears of Cyberwar published on ICT Security Magazine January 2011.
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