Could U.S. be at risk for cyberwarfare?
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Experts are warning that last May's cyberattacks against Estonia could be a precursor to larger and more damaging attacks against other nations, including the U.S.
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The US leads other technologically advanced nations in the reported incidences of cyber bullying, the latest trend to threaten youngsters who use the Internet.
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U.S. intelligence officials are cautioning that popular Internet services that enable computer users to adopt cartoon-like personas in three-dimensional online spaces also are creating security vulnerabilities by opening novel ways for terrorists and criminals to move money, organize and conduct ...
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A cybersecurity standard proposed for the U.S. would leave critical gaps in system safety, and one congressman warned Wednesday that if issues are not addressed in short order, "the future isn't going to be pretty" for the nation's infrastructure.
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Post Sept. 11 cyberterrorism predictions haven't materialized. But U.S. power plants, trains and oil pipelines are nonetheless more vulnerable than ever before.
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Computer security expert says Russia's infrastructure could be vulnerable to electronic warfare.
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Report outlines challenges governments face and the actions they can take to counter cybercrime.
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(InfoWorld) - May was not a good month for geeks in Estonia. The tiny Baltic republic weathered aÂ month-long cyberattackÂ that shuttered Internet servers nationwide. At the height of the crisis, people who wanted to use payment cards to buy bread or gas had to wait, as the onslaught crippled Estonia's banks. InvestigatorsÂ traced the attack to RussiansÂ angered by Estonia's decision to relocate the statue of a Red Army soldier erected during the Soviet era. Tensions over the incident led to rumors of Russian state involvement in the cyberattacks. Even if these suppositions are never corroborated, Estonia's experience may be repeated elsewhere. "Estonia shows us how, as we become more networked and more wired, our vulnerabilities increase," says James Mulvenon, the director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, a Washington, D.C., think tank. With a population of just over 1.3 million, Estonia is one of the most wired countries on earth. Elections, banking, and point-of-sale systems have largely moved to the Web, so cyberattacks such as the one in May can have a profound effect on its commerce. United States at risk TheÂ United States faces many of the same dangersÂ as Estonia. And with public utilities such as hydro-electric plants and nuclear power plants moving away from proprietary (and more secure) systems toward open-standards-based systems that use common Internet protocols such as TCP/IP to connect to one another, the list of potential targets is increasing. Attacks on U.S. systemsÂ have never been linked directly to state-sponsored cyberwarfare, but in 1999 Chinese hackers took down three U.S. government sites after NATO bombers mistakenly attacked the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Though identifying adversaries in cyberwarfare is difficult, preparing for computer network attacks involves many of the same steps as preparing for other online threats, according to Gregory Garcia, assistant secretary for cybersecurity and telecommunications with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. "For our purposes, we really need to focus on reducing our vulnerabilities so those attacks don't happen in the first place," he says. Planning ahead Last November the U.S. Air Force set up a new cyberwarfare group, called the Cyberspace Command, as part of the Eighth Air Force. "The aim is to develop a major command that stands alongside Air Force Space Command and Air Combat Command," says Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne. Though much of the U.S. Department of Defense's cyberplanning is classified, some aspects of its strategy are public knowledge. According to the Washington Post, President George W. Bush signed a secret directive in July 2002 that set down guidelines for determining when and how the United States would attack foreign computer systems. Fifteen months later, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved a 74-page "Information Operations Roadmap" outlining his department's plan to develop cyberwarfare capabilities. The cyberwarfare sections of the plan remain classified, but a March 20, 2007, report prepared by the Congressional Research Service states that the Pentagon has proceeded cautiously with these capabilities, "since a cyber attack could have serious cascading effects, perhaps causing a major disruption to networked civilian systems." The U.S. military decided not to launch a cyberattack in Iraq as part of its 2003 invasion, the report states. Concern that any such attack might have rolled over into civilian networks outside Iraq may have played a part in its decision. Civilian spillover a danger Estonia's situation aptly illustrates this key problem with cyberwarfare, according to Mulvenon, who has tracked cyberskirmishes between attackers in China, Taiwan, and the United States. "None of the cyberwars that I've seen in the last 10 or 15 years has been clean," he says. This characteristic complicates matters for states that engage in cyberwarfare because an attack may reach beyond its original objectives into civilian territories or neighboring countries. Nations must also contend with rogue agents, such as the ones in Russia and China who may have acted without their government's approval. One official who helped coordinate Estonia's response says the attack on Estonia's computer infrastructure amounted to a cyberriot. "In war you have definite targets," says Hillar Aarelaid, manager of Estonia's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT). "In a riot you don't care, you're just breaking windows." Aarelaid was struck by the sheer variety of the attacks Estonia endured. Some assailants had simply downloaded software on their home computers that repeatedly sent information requests to Estonian servers, while others had marshaled sophisticated botnet armies. Are civilian attackers part of any nation's cyberwar strategy? Perhaps. "I tend to think that the government views them as useful idiots," Mulvenon says. For now, Mulvenon predicts, fears of unintended consequences -- whether in the form of civilians joining in the fight or of a cascading network failure -- will keep cyberwarfare planners cautious, especially in conflicts with powerful nation-states. But that won't prevent attacks like the ones in Estonia, where civilian irregulars pile on in hopes of serving their nation's interests. .
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Attackers trounce defenders Simulated internet attacks in the US have uncovered gaps in the nationâs cybersecurity defences. In particular, cyber-defenders struggled to understand if simulated hack attacks were isolated or part of a more co-ordinated assault.â¦
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Congress interests itself in cyber security Long an afterthought for U.S. lawmakers, cybersecurity has received renewed attention in some parts of Congress.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Two months after much of Estonia's online infrastructure wasÂ targeted by an online attack, the U.S government is sending cyberinvestigators to help the Baltic state better understand what happened. A representative from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's US-CERT (U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team) division is heading to Estonia this week to help analyze the large volume of data that was generated by the attacks, said Gregory Garcia, assistant secretary for cyber security and telecommunications with the DHS. "We are sending someone from our organization ... to help them with forensic analysis and to do some additional training on how to secure their infrastructure," he said. Additionally, a member of the U.S. Secret Service will be there to help with training on incident response and computer crime investigations, according to a DHS spokesman. In April, a widespread DDOS attack struck Estonia and affected government and banking Web sites. Early press reports linked the attacks to Russia, exacerbating tensions between the two countries, but investigators now say thatÂ it is unclear who exactly was behind the incident. "The data that we have does not speak to who's behind it. There's no smoking gun," said Jose Nazario, senior security engineer with Arbor Networks, who has studied the attacks. Unlike other Internet conflicts, the Estonian attacks do not seem to have been backed by a particular hacking group, said Gadi Evron, a security evangelist with Beyond Security. "They were of immense variety [and came] from the population of the Russian-speaking blogosphere," he said. Some attackers ran simple scripts on their PCs, while others trained sophisticated groups of botnet computers at the Estonian systems, Evron said. "Many of the attacks were from fake sources and compromised computers around the world," he added. During the incident, several international organizations helped the tiny country repel the online attacks, Garcia said. "This was -- at least in the aftermath -- a good news story in the sense that Estonia looked to NATO for assistance and together the NATO countries came to the aid of Estonia," Garcia said. "It showed that the relationships we have internationally and across the federal government are paying off so we can respond in real time to attacks that are happening." Garcia said that members of US-CERT could learn how the U.S. should respond if faced with a similar attack. "It's a little bit more complicated than conventional warfare," he said. "It's a little difficult to trace back where a particular attack is coming from, which makes it more difficult to respond." Arbor Networks' Nazario agreed that investigators will get a much clearer picture of how the attacks evolved over time. "They can basically learn what ... technologies and what techniques worked under those attacks," he said.
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By Fred Reed, The Washington Times  Jun. 9--CRIME ONLINE EASY TO SIDESTEP: I don't get it. I keep reading  that cybercrime is out of hand, even that national security is being  compromised.
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China has been the target of a big  increase in cyber-attacks in recent years and faces more of a  threat from hackers than any country in the West, a military  researcher said on Saturday.
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Governments and businesses face a variety of cybersecurity threats, but they also need to allow for increasing demands from computer users across the globe, the former information security advisor for the U.K. Ministry of Defense said Wednesday.
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The practice of cyber-espionage is rapidly moving beyond the government sector and finding its way into the world of international business, according to experts with SANS Institute, one of the world's top IT security training organizations.While the United States and Chinese governments, most notably, have accused each other in recent years of carrying out surreptitious hacking campaigns aimed at stealing strategic information from their respective IT systems -- and many security experts believe that both countries, and many others, are actively engaging in such electronic warfare -- leaders with SANS maintain that the practice has recently begun to spill over into the private sector with greater frequency.According to the training institute's latest research, cyber-espionage efforts funded by "well-resourced organizations" -- including both government-backed and private efforts -- will expand significantly during 2008, in particular as overseas companies look to gain an upper hand in negotiating business deals with large companies based in the U.S. and Europe.In one common scenario, said Alan Paller, director of research for SANS, organizations in the process of establishing legitimate partnerships with such companies are willing to pay hackers to break into those firms' IT systems to gather competitive information to gain an advantage at the bargaining table.More companies than ever before are finding out that they have been victimized in such a manner based on the discovery of their sensitive data in the hands of hackers and other fraudsters who have been apprehended by law enforcement officials, the expert contends."Cyber-espionage is clearly growing across the board. It was much bigger in 2007 than in previous years, and it is expanding slowly into economic espionage involving both businesses and government entities," Paller said. "This really has a lot of significant implications because people who have never thought of themselves as targets for this type of attack have suddenly become a sweet spot, and many are not prepared to defend themselves."Paller said that federal law enforcement agencies have been contacting private industry firms directly to inform them that their data may have been compromised. From closely-protected product designs to company financials, the expert said that cyber-espionage is already working its way into many different areas of business."If you live in a foreign country and you want to do business with a big American company, you want to negotiate the best possible deal, and we're seeing more evidence of instances where parties have clearly been paid to break into a companies' computers, as well as those of their accountants, consultants and lawyers, to find information that can be used to tilt deals in their favor," Paller said. "In some cases, it's fair to say that the people who are negotiating these deals overseas end up with more information than the people that are being paid to negotiate with them."Paller said that while in many cases the business data being stolen is being used to the advantage of private industry players, the training organization believes that a fair amount of the corporate espionage activity may be backed by government sponsors.While such attacks have been somewhat common among government and defense contractors for years, he said, the process is highlighting a lack of perception regarding security risks inside other major U.S. businesses.SANS reported that the attack of choice in many cases of cyber-espionage is a targeted spear phishing campaign that attempts to dupe workers into opening tainted attachments made to appear as if they come from people they work with.The content of the virus-laden attachments is often tailored to look exactly like legitimate materials that the employees involved might send to each other, making it more likely that users will open the messages and remain unaware that they may have been compromised, Paller said.Attackers crafting the messages most often use newly discovered Microsoft Office vulnerabilities, also known as zero day flaws, to further hide their activities and to circumvent anti-virus systems, according to the expert."This type of business-driven cyber-espionage is already happening a lot more frequently than some people might think," said Paller. "We're only finding real evidence because more companies are hearing from law enforcement when someone finally discovers the stolen data."On the flip side, SANS is also predicting that so-called insider data theft carried out against U.S. businesses by trusted employees will also continue to flourish.One of the factors accelerating that trend is the ability for attackers to attempt to attack their employers both from inside their networks and from the outside using known vulnerabilities they discover in their work, the group said.With traditional security perimeters increasingly being taxed by the use of mobile devices that are allowed to come onto corporate networks from outside the workplace, SANS said that workers are finding many new opportunities to sneak information out the door and sell for a profit.One of the key strategies that organizations need to embrace to thwart the insider problem is to put into place more substantial defenses that limit access to various IT systems and data stores based on the specific level of admission to those assets that individuals need to do their jobs, the training group said.
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After two wars, thousands of deaths and many billions of dollars, the United States is still vulnerable to terrorists. That painful reality has ignited a political frenzy over who's to blame and who's best qualified to protect Americans.
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In a new survey by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), about 30% of all respondents, and 40% of those under 25 years-old, underestimate their chances of facing a cyber threat.