U.S. networks too easy to hack, officials says
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About 140 foreign intelligence organizations are trying to hack into the computer networks of the U.S. government and U.S. companies, a top counterintelligence official said.
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A virus infection points up the dangers of making it all too easy for visitors to get onto the company network, Mathias Thurman finds.
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Denial-of-service attacks and bots are the top threats to network security, according to Arbor Networks' second annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report. The survey compiled information from 55 network operators.
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Companies, governments, and individuals are increasingly vulnerable to Internet attacks by terrorists and hackers.
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By James Derk Scripps Howard News Service  If you weren't worried enough about the security of your home computer and network, it may be time to step it up.
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It took Brian Baker only five minutes  to persuade a major U.S. television network that it needed his  company's technology to protect their programs from Web  pirates.
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Researchers in the U.S. say they've shown how a network designed to make it harder to trace Internet surfers could be compromised.
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Wiretapping Internet phones to monitor criminals and terrorists is costly and complex, and potentially a big burden on new businesses trying to sell the phone service.
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(InfoWorld) - The Chinese government has denied involvement in a series of hacks carried out against IT systems at the Pentagon in June this week, but the threat of technology-driven espionage has forced the FBI to push businesses and academic institutions to better prepare for such attacks. Little publicly-available evidence exists to prove that foreign governments have backed or planned to launch attempts to steal intellectual property from U.S. corporations and researchers, but officials with the FBI claim that the problem is real and that American organizations must begin policing their operations more aggressively today to prevent valuable data from being stolen tomorrow. In October, the FBI's Counterintelligence Domain Program -- which aims to foster cooperation between the agency and private entities to help organizations identify and protect potential intelligence risks -- will mark its first year in existence. The program is already making significant steps in helping to close the gap between businesses and law enforcement to defend intellectual property from being left vulnerable to potential theft, FBI officials maintain. "In the past, we've always been reactive to this type of scenario and essentially showed up after the fact to bring resources to bear on this type of crime, but we want to be more proactive to help businesses and academic institutions protect themselves before an incident occurs," said Tom Mahlik, who serves as chief of the Domain program for the FBI. "We've always responded aggressively to traditional espionage with investigation, such as with the theft of national secrets, but those cases really represent counterintelligence failures where the secrets are already in Beijing or Moscow and where valuable new technologies or intellectual property would already be gone," he said. Counterintelligence efforts rank second on FBI Director Robert S. Mueller's current strategic agenda, sandwiched below counterterrorism work and above the fight against all forms of cyber-crime, according to Mahlik. Thus far, the Domain project has materialized primarily in the form of relationships built between the leaders of the agency's 56 individual divisions and the leading corporate entities and research groups identified by those units as organizations that control data that criminals and governments could try to get their hands on. For instance, companies handling sensitive government work -- such as defense contractors and large IT systems integrators -- have already joined in the effort, Mahlik said. The program will be expanded over time to pull more companies into the fold that are developing cutting-edge technologies and other products that are considered to give the U.S. a technological or business-related advantage. Those relationships, and training seminars held by the FBI in the name of expanding Domain, are aimed at identifying any research, information, or technologies that might be targeted by U.S. adversaries -- and to establish an ongoing information exchange among the program's members to improve protections and reduce opportunities for theft. As for the current state of involvement of foreign nation states, including large terrorist groups, in intellectual property theft, the FBI refuses to share specific examples or hard data, but Mahlik said there should be little doubt that the problem exists. "The FBI is well aware of deliberate targeted attacks that were aimed at stealing sensitive data from organizations, including NASA, the Department of Defense, and individual defense contractors," said the FBI expert. "We're still trying to deduce the magnitude of the problem, and a lot of that has to do with what we've dealt with in terms of investigating any ex-filtration of data and where it has ended up." Mahlik said that two of the most significant trends feeding the need for corporate counterintelligence are offshore outsourcing and the heavy flow of foreign engineering talent into U.S. corporations and research institutions. While it remains hard to prove that foreigners are being trained specifically with the purpose of infiltrating U.S organizations to steal valuable data, he said that the concept is very real. "This isn't about traditional spies anymore; the engineer, student, or business partner are the threat now, and these people are being given increased access to corporate secrets, intellectual property, and pre-patent research information at universities," Mahlik said. "These types of people are being actively used to ex-filtrate key pieces of information back to their homelands as there is always a race to establish a competitive advantage." Data security in a global market David Drab, principal for the Information & Content Security group at Xerox, said that companies are increasingly coming to the imaging giant looking for new ways to label sensitive information and track its flow among users in the workplace and throughout their supply chains. Before joining Xerox, Drab served at the FBI for 27 years and observed, among other things, the flow of former KGB agents in former Soviet states into criminal organizations. A good number of those intelligence experts were trained in the art of finding holders of sensitive corporate and national defense information and trying to liberate the data, he said, and many are likely employed in efforts to steal whatever plans they can sell to others for a profit today. "This is why you have Wal-Mart hiring former government intelligence officers. It's not about spying so much as it's about identifying business risk and what is occurring with competitors in the global environment," Drab said. "These companies are creating separate entities from traditional security or IT security to allow management to identify people internally who might have access to high-level information or might be targeted by competitors or foreign entities." Drab points to the 2001 indictment of two Japanese-born individuals accused of stealing research on Alzheimer's disease from the Lerner Research Institute (LRI) in Cleveland as proof of the need for enterprise counterintelligence. One of the accused researchers subsequently pled guilty to charges of misleading investigators looking into the situation, while another, who returned to Japan to work for a quasi-government agency working on Alzheimer's research, was unsuccessfully sought for extradition to the U.S. to face trial. Among the tools developed by Xerox to help trace the use of paper documents, one of the hardest data formats to track, are gloss marks and infrared stamps used to create a trail of evidence as to who might have accessed, printed and walked off with sensitive data when copies of any stolen documents are recovered. Large companies like financial services institutions have also begun speaking publicly about the problem of international cyber-theft, saying that they are already working to deal with the problem. At the Usenix Security Symposium held in Boston in August, Jerry Brady, global head of IT security at New York-based financial giant Morgan Stanley, outlined the threat of foreign attack as a current business reality. He specifically cited emerging activity in the Far East as worrisome. "Sometimes the threats are coming from the governments themselves in different parts of the world," said Brady. "The people who want to harm us drives a lot about how we think of security awareness. We do a lot of monitoring and threat intelligence to tell who our adversaries are today and who they will be tomorrow." When asked if the government has done enough to help companies like Morgan Stanley deal with the issue, Brady said that the firm's relationship with law enforcement officials has improved over the last several years, specifically around intelligence gathering regarding new threats. However, he said that companies cannot rely on the government alone to watch out for their interests overseas. "It's popular to pin this issue on the government, but we in private industry need to play an even bigger role in addressing the problem," said Brady. "Every time we go into a new country we have to do a risk assessment, every country has its own IP protections and concepts and we know that; we know the countries where ex-KGB Soviet Bloc resources have ended up, and where we need to be even more vigilant."
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Hackers may have targeted DNS servers that form the backbone of the Internet--but no damage was done, experts believe.
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You can plan a new network, install everything, get it configured just so, and get your management act together, but with security, you're likely to be constantly rethinking your solution.
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Challenges to file-swapping sites seem to be spurring the creation of new networks harder to shut down.
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Law enforcement officials are targeting fewer than 100 people in the United States for secret court-approved wiretaps aimed at disrupting terrorist networks, the top U.S. intelligence official said in an interview published yesterday.
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If criminals were to target unsecured wireless routers, they could create an attack that could piggyback across thousands of Wi-Fi networks in urban areas like Chicago or New York City, according to researchers at Indiana University.The researchers estimate that a Wi-Fi attack could take over 20,000 wireless routers in New York City within a two-week period, with most of the infections occurring within the first day.&quot;The issue is that most of these routers are installed out of the box very insecurely,&quot; said Steven Myers, an assistant professor at Indiana University, who published the paper in November, along with researchers from the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Torino, Italy,The researchers theorize that attack would work by guessing administrative passwords and then instructing the routers to install new worm-like firmware, which would in turn cause the infected router to attack other devices in its range.Because there are so many closely connected Wi-Fi networks in most urban areas, the attack could hop from router to router for many miles in some cities.The team used what is known as the Susceptible Infected Removed (SIR) model to track the growth of this attack. This methodology is typically used to estimate things like influenza outbreaks, but it has also been used to predict things like computer virus infections, Myers said.Although the researchers did not develop any attack code that would be used to carry out this infection, they believe it would be possible to write code that guessed default passwords by first entering the default administrative passwords that shipped with the router, and then by trying a list of one million commonly used passwords, one after the other. They believe that 36 percent of passwords can be guessed using this technique.Even some routers that use encryption could be cracked, if they use the popular WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) algorithm, which security experts have been able to crack for years now. Routers that were encrypted using the more-secure WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) standard were considered impossible to infect, Myers said.Myers&#39; model is based on data compiled from the Wireless Geographic Logging Engine (WiGLE), a volunteer-run effort to map Wi-Fi networks around the world, which has over 10 million networks in its database.Using this data, they were able to map out large networks of made out of Wi-Fi routers that were each no more than 45 meters (49 yards) from the network -- in other words, close enough for an infection to spread. The largest such network in New York included 36,807 systems; in Boston it was 15,899; and in Chicago: 50,084.Because New York is such a dense city with a relatively low percentage (25.8 percent, according to the researchers) of encrypted routers, it was particularly susceptible to this type of attack. San Francisco, on the other hand, where 40.1 percent of routers are encrypted and which had a lower density of routers was less susceptible.Myers says that because the attack would be technically complex, he doubts that criminals will attempt it any time soon. There are simply too many other, easier ways to take over computers, he said.Still, he thinks hardware makers should take note. &quot;The bigger point for developers and people making wireless information technology is to realize that there are serious security issues.&quot;
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A wide-area network operated by an unnamed contractor has dozens of weaknesses that threaten data used in the government's Medicare and Medicaid programs, according to a report released Tuesday by the GAO.
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It's a hacker's nightmare but a dream for bankers and spies: A computer network so secure that even the simplest attempts to eavesdrop will interrupt the flow of data and alert administrators to the snooping.
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The alleged attackers may have been amateurish but they also showed the limits of the U.K.'s surveillance system