Blitz Event Marketing » Net Security

LulzSec opens hack request line

Blitzer — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:49:03 +0000

The hacker group Lulz Security has opened a telephone request line so its fans can suggest potential targets. It claims to have launched denial of service attacks on several websites as a result, although it did not detail which ones. The unspecified hacks formed part of a wave of security breaches that the group called Titanic Takeover Tuesday. LulzSec has risen to prominence in recent months by attacking Sony, Nintendo and several US broadcasters.
The group publicized the telephone hotline on its Twitter feed. Callers to the US number are met with a recorded message, in a heavy French accent, by an individual calling themself Pierre Dubois. While the 614 area code appears to relate to the state of Ohio, it is unlikely that this is its real location.
Lulz Security said it had used distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) against eight sites suggested by callers. It also claimed to have hit the websites of gaming magazine The Escapist, and multiplayer games EVE Online and League of Legends. DDoS attacks typically involve crashing a website by inundating it with requests from computers under the attacker’s control.
It is unclear, in this instance, if LulzSec went beyond overloading the sites and sought to gain access to information stored on their servers.
Little is known about Lulz Security, other than their apparent “hacktivist’ motivation.

The organizations and companies that it targets are often portrayed as having acted against the interests of citizens or consumers. Its high profile attack on SonyPictures.com exposed, Lulz claimed, the company’s ongoing inability to secure users’ personal data. Along with Anonymous, LulzSec has raised the profile of hacker groups as a potential threat to online services.
Hacktivists see their role as staging valid protests in the most high profile way possible, according to Peter Wood, founder of security consultancy First Base.
“The things they are exploiting at the moment are the sort of mistakes that organizations seem to have been making ever since they connected to the internet. “Finally there are some players out there who are using them as a means to protest. Whether everyone agrees with them is a different question.”

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Hackers target business secrets

Blitzer — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 12:10:27 +0000

Social Security numbers and other personal information have been popular targets by cyber crooks. But a new report says thieves have shifted their focus to corporate data such as trade secrets and marketing plans, making it the “new currency” of the underworld economy.
Intellectual property and business secrets are fast becoming a target for cyber thieves, a study suggests. Compiled by security firm McAfee, the research found that some hackers are starting to specialize in data stolen from corporate networks. McAfee said deals were being done for trade secrets, marketing plans, R&D reports and source code. It urged companies to know who looks after their data as it moves into the cloud or third-party hosting centers.
“Cyber criminals are targeting this information based on what their clients are asking for,” said Raj Samani, chief technology officer in Europe for McAfee. He said some business data had always been scooped up when net thieves compromised PCs using viruses and trojans in a search for logins or credit card details.
The difference now was that there exists a ready market for the data they are finding. In some cases, said Mr Samani, thieves were running campaigns to get at particular companies or certain types of information.
The McAfee report mentioned cases in Germany, Brazil and Italy in which trade secrets were either stolen by an insider or cyber thieves tried to get hold of via a concerted attack. In some cases, said the McAfee report, companies made the job of the criminals easier because they did little to censor useful information about a corporate’s culture or structure revealed in e-mails and other messages. Such information could prove key for thieves mounting a “social engineering” in which they pose as employees to penetrate networks.
The report detailed efforts by firms to watch casual and contract employees and the use of behavioral analysis software to spot anomalous activity on a corporate network.

Thefts of intellectual property or key documents could be hard to detect, said Mr Samani. “You may not even know it’s stolen because they just take a copy of it,” he said.
Defending against these threats was getting harder, he said, because key workers with access to the most valuable information were out and about using mobile devices far from the defenses surrounding a corporate HQ. “Smartphones and laptops have crossed the perimeter,” said Mr Samani.
The report comes in the wake of a series of incidents which reveal how cyber criminals are branching out from their traditional territory of spam and viruses.
2010 saw the arrival of the Stuxnet virus which targeted industrial plant equipment and 2011 has been marked by targeted attacks on petrochemical firms, the London Stock Exchange, the European Commission and many others.

Mr Samani said that, as firms start to use cloud-based services to make data easier to get at, they had to work hard to ensure they know who can see that key corporate information. Otherwise, he warned, in the event of a breach, companies could find themselves losing the trust of customers or attracting the attention of regulators.
“You can transfer the work but you cannot transfer the liability,” said Mr Samani.

The McAfee virtual criminology reports reveals how a new class of criminals is using the Internet in new, systematic, and professional ways to commit illegal acts.

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Is cyber-warfare a genuine threat? Cyber attacks are already upon us but the rules of...

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Is cyber-warfare a genuine threat?

Blitzer — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 03:18:27 +0000

Cyber attacks are already upon us but the rules of digital warfare have yet to be agreed upon. Is it time, as an influential think tank believes, for a digital Geneva Convention? Is it even possible when the internet was designed without country borders and when defining what a “cyber-war” constitutes is near-impossible? “We come in peace” reads the tagline of the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.
The event, which attracts “thousands of hackers, scientists, artists, and utopians from all around the world”, is a timely reminder that not all hackers are obsessed with unearthing secrets or bringing down governments.
They are keen to point out that the definition of “hacker” can mean both a technical expert who modifies things as well as the increasingly common definition of someone who digitally intrudes.
But there are worries from governments around the world that a “cyber-war” is just around the corner, moving from conventional battlefields into the digital world. “Cyber-threats are not on the horizon, they are upon us,” says US Senator Robert Menendez.
He is introducing a bill to the US Congress, following reports of cyber attacks on Nasdaq OMX Group and both oil and gas companies, aimed at “strengthening cybersecurity”. Despite the concern, many still do not realise the effects this seemingly impending battle could have.
Most of our infrastructures rely on computer technology to function properly – from railways to electricity companies and national defence systems – so failure or malicious attacks on them matters more than just not being able to read an e-mail.
If these things were threatened, some commentators believe it is not just the internet at threat, but many lives. “The attackers are constantly developing new strategies,” John Bumgarner, chief technologist of the US Cyber Consequences Unit, told BBC Newsnight.
“There are thing out there right now that the public doesn’t really know about – technologies that can be embedded in systems that will run but you will never see. “Things already exist to do things like turn off the power grid, disrupt water systems, disrupt manufacturing processes… GPS [devices] in cars have the capability to give wrong directions and your car could catch fire potentially depending on how you program it.”
Others, such as Frank Coggrave, vice president of digital investigators Guidance Software, believe these sorts of comments are “edging towards hysteria”. But what even is a cyber-war? And how does anyone know when it begins or who is fighting who?

“There is no clear, internationally agreed upon definition of what would constitute a cyber-war. In fact, there is considerable confusion,” said a report released at the Munich Security Conference by think tank The EastWest Institute.
Its paper, titled Working Towards Rules for Governing Cyber Conflict, says that “the current ambiguity [about what constitutes cyber conflict] is impeding policy development and clouding the application of existing Convention requirements” and perhaps the idea of peace and war is too simple in the digital age when the world could find itself in a third, “other than war” mode.
In basic terms, it is calling for something similar to the Hague or Geneva conventions that govern conventional warfare.

While seemingly simple in theory, this could be very difficult to put into practice. “It’s a challenge and [governments are] doing a valiant job… but the whole area of cyberspace and cyber-attack is very difficult to quantify,” says Mr Coggrave. “Who is performing the attacks? Just look back over the last year at the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear reactors.”
The Stuxnet attack – where specific types of industrial controls were targeted and damage is believed to have been done to Iran’s uranium enrichment programme – was described as enemies of Iran “seeking to wage a cyber war” by the country’s communication minister. “It’s still questionable who actually did it,” says Mr Coggrave.

“Was it the Israelis, the Chinese, the CIA or M16? When you come to cyber-attacks, because of the inter-connectivity of the world, it is actually so difficult to attribute [responsibility for the attack to any one party] that putting in rules of engagement is valiant but probably flawed.”
Many experts believe that this attack, unlike most others before it, was carried out with some form of state involvement – citing the proficiency and scale of the attack.
While this attack was quite specifically targeted, it is very difficult to aim at one organization or country. Even the Stuxnet worm has affected computers in 10 countries. This means that neutral or humanitarian organizations online could be hit in the metaphorical crossfire. The job that the Red Cross does in “kinetic” – or traditional – warfare could be impossible to recreate in the virtual world.
“And there is blurring between cyber-warfare and cyber-terrorism… if you generate a virus that attacks a Windows machine for example, how can you make sure it’s a machine run by MI6 and not a machine run by the Red Cross?”

According to the Congressional Service, “US officials now consider cyberspace to be a domain for warfare, similar to air, space, land, and sea.” The difficulty is, with the global nature of the web, working out which territory belongs to whom and what bits of the web are friendly and which are hostile. But, if battle lines can be drawn and territory can be won or lost, those like the technical wizards at the Chaos Congress could find themselves as digital infantry on the virtual frontline.

Credits: Alex Hudson – BBC Click | Find the original report here…

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Kneber botnet attacks PCs worldwide

Blitzer — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:53:27 +0000

Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach. Starting in late 2008, hackers operating a command center in Germany got into corporate networks by enticing employees to click on contaminated Web sites, email attachments or ads purporting to clean up viruses, NetWitness found. In more than 100 cases, the hackers gained access to corporate servers that store large quantities of business data, such as company files, databases and email. They also broke into computers at 10 U.S. government agencies. In one case, they obtained the user name and password of a soldier’s military email account, NetWitness found. A Pentagon spokesman said the military didn’t comment on specific threats or intrusions.
At one company, the hackers gained access to a corporate server used for processing online credit-card payments. At others, stolen passwords provided access to computers used to store and swap proprietary corporate documents, presentations, contracts and even upcoming versions of software products, NetWitness said.

The new botnet that puts the potential threat of last year’s Conficker worm to shame is called the Kneber botnet, this new form of malware has infected more than 74000 computer systems across the world and is focused on stealing login credentials for e-mail systems, social networks and banking sites, according to Netwitness. Kneber is incredibly hard to detect and has reportedly compromised data from nearly 2500 corporate and government and corporate networks around the world. Here’s the latest on what’s going on and how you can protect yourself from joining the ranks of the Kneber botnet.
Netwitness says Kneber is a ZeuS Trojan botnet, a type of botnet known for its ability to target and steal key information stored on your computer such as login credentials.

More than half of the computer systems in the Kneber botnet also have the Waledac Trojan–a worm known to create e-mail spam botnets that was recently associated with Conficker.
Netwitness says Kneber controlled machines are in 196 countries. The five countries with the most significant instances of infected machines are Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States.
Kneber only targets Windows machines, and computers are running Windows XP Professional SP2 make up the majority of the botnet. Netwitness did not report on infections among Windows 7 machines. Kneber is primarily found on machines in corporate and government infrastructures, but home users can be affected as well.

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