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This week's 60 Minutes broadcast should make everyone afraid, very afraid, of the real, looming specter of cyberwarfare attacks. As I recently blogged, government agencies are already going full-bore to come up with guidelines to protect federal networks. So when an Admiral goes on national television to say hackers have the ability to take down our power grid, he's doing it to deliver a warning. I was actually poised to turn off the segment, which I happened upon by accident following Sunday's last-minute Giants loss. Half-expecting the usual security for dummies piece, I was surprised to see an unusually detailed...

SNIPPET: "After the 4 July DDoS attacks, wrongly attributed to North Korea, it’s wise to treat reports of DPRK security hacks with some caution. Nevertheless, The Korea Times reports the following: Classified Info on Dangerous Chemicals Hacked Hackers stole classified information on dangerous chemicals in their raid on the South Korean army computer network in what was believed to be an attack by North Korea, Yonhap News Agency reported Saturday, quoting government officials." SNIPPET: "The Sydney Morning Herald adds more information: A North Korea cyber warfare unit hacked into a South Korean military command earlier this year and stole some...

Security: A Senate bill lets the president "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "nongovernmental" computer networks and do what's needed to respond to the threat. Didn't they just collect our e-mail addresses?We wish this was just a piece of the fictional "Dr. Strangelove" that fell to the cutting-room floor, but it's not. It is a real piece of disturbingly vague legislation sponsored by Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. Senate Bill 773 would grant the administration emergency powers (where have we heard that before?) in the event of a cyberemergency that the president would have...

Hackers are becoming more organised as a new pool of talent coming from eastern European countries – Russia in particular – becomes available, writes CIARA O’BRIEN A number of attacks involving Russian hackers has hit the headlines in recent weeks. The most recent was the charging of Albert Gonzalez, a former US government informant who has already been jailed in connection with hacking cases. He is accused of stealing 130 million credit and debit card numbers. Two unnamed Russian co-conspirators were also charged in relation to the theft, said to the biggest case of identity theft seen yet. Mr Harbison,...

Perhaps the most nebulous area of national security is cyber defense. What constitutes an act of cyber war? What organization should take the lead when cyber events occur and it is unclear who is behind them? Between criminals, “hacktivists,” terrorists or rogue nation states, you really do not know when these events are unfolding so you cannot determine if it is a federal law enforcement issue or an issue for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or is it a Military (DoD) issue. For months and, in some cases years, many people and organizations involved in cyber defense and security...

WASHINGTON -- Russian hackers hijacked American identities and U.S. software tools and used them in an attack on Georgian government Web sites during the war between Russia and Georgia last year, according to new research to be released Monday by a nonprofit U.S. group. In addition to refashioning common Microsoft Corp. software into a cyber-weapon, hackers collaborated on popular U.S.-based social-networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook Inc., to coordinate attacks on Georgian sites, the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit found. While the cyberattacks on Georgia were examined shortly after the events last year, these U.S. connections weren't previously known. "U.S. corporations...

Profile of a real cyberwar Beware the mayhem of malware on the march By Aaron Mannes and James Hendler | Wednesday, August 5, 2009 The denial-of-service (DoS) attacks that started on July 4 garnered typical headlines about cyberwar, but in fact, from a technical standpoint, those "attacks" may be the opposite of real cyberwar. A much less noticed report in Israel's leading daily, Ha'aretz, on Israel's operations against Iran's nuclear program may give greater insight into how cyberwar actually will work. It is no secret that several countries, including the United States, China, Russia and Israel, have examined cyberwar capabilities....

South Korea's state intelligence organization said Friday it has discovered that a wave of cyber attacks carried out earlier this week into key government and private websites in South Korea and the United States was launched from computers in 16 countries, Yonhap News Agency reported. The National Intelligence Service made the report to a closed-door meeting with members of a parliamentary intelligence committee, Yonhap quoted committee members as saying. North Korea was not among the 16 countries, which include South Korea, the United States, Japan, and Guatemala, Yonhap said. The cyber attacks have been traced to 86 Internet Protocol addresses...

North Korea is suspected of launching a cyber attack that paralysed the websites of South Korean and United States government agencies, banks and businesses, the first such large-scale attack attempted by the isolated communist state.

In the late 1990s, a computer specialist from Israel's Shin Bet internal security service hacked into the mainframe of the Pi Glilot fuel depot north of Tel Aviv. It was meant to be a routine test of safeguards at the strategic site. But it also tipped off the Israelis to the potential such hi-tech infiltrations offered for real sabotage. "Once inside the Pi Glilot system, we suddenly realised that, aside from accessing secret data, we could also set off deliberate explosions, just by programming a re-route of the pipelines," said a veteran of the Shin Bet drill. So began a...

Congressional computers have been penetrated, probably by the Chinese. The avionics system of the F-22 fighter may be compromised. Computers of our presidential candidates were hacked into -- and probably not by teenagers...Last year's advance of Russian tanks into Georgia was accompanied by the disruption of Georgian government computer systems. ...Attacks on computer systems will be an integral element of future conflict, and the United States is more dependent on computer networks than any other nation. ...policymakers and the military are in the early stages of coming to grips with this. We need to take some important first steps to...

Cyberwar is now a fact of life in 21st Century wars. Actual and potential enemies of America already know the dimensions of Cyberwar and have moved into full combat. With a real world combat engagement in Georgia and Estonia, the Russians have shown skill. Make no mistake; in certain arenas the Russians are smart and capable, and as the invasion of Georgia shows, ruthless. They have world class scientists and engineers. It is well known they are excellent Cyber Warfighters who have now also apparently harnessed their criminal hackers to augment their worldwide reach. This melding of Russian conventional military...

WEST POINT, N.Y. — The Army forces were under attack. Communications were down, and the chain of command was broken. Pacing a makeshift bunker whose entrance was camouflaged with netting, the young man in battle fatigues barked at his comrades: “They are flooding the e-mail server. Block it. I’ll take the heat for it.” These are the war games at West Point, at least last month, when a team of cadets spent four days struggling around the clock to establish a computer network and keep it operating while hackers from the National Security Agency in Maryland tried to infiltrate it...

Blogger becomes casualty of Iran cyber-wars The Associated Press - ‎Apr 11, 2009‎ He was Iran's first known casualty in the skirmishes between bloggers challenging the Islamic regime and authorities striking back with the tools they know ...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=53850 Official Cites Value of Cyberspace to Warfighting Operations By Gerry J. Gilmore American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, April 8, 2009 – Maintaining and protecting the U.S. military’s worldwide computer network is a vital component of national security, a senior official said here today. “For the United States military, cyberspace is a warfighting domain and it is critical to our operations,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters. “And so, we do have to aggressively protect our networks and our ability to work in cyberspace.” It also is important, Whitman said, that the Defense...

Nato officials have told the BBC their computers are under constant attack from organisations and individuals bent on trying to hack into their secrets. The attacks keep coming despite the establishment of a co-ordinated cyber defence policy with a quick-reaction cyber team on permanent standby. The cyber defence policy was set up after a wave of cyber attacks on Nato member Estonia in 2007, and more recent attacks on Georgia - so what are they defending against and how do they do it? Tower of Babel Nato's operational headquarters in Mons is a low, drab three-storey building - part of...

Playing China Rules and The Illusions Of "Free Trade" November 22, 2008 by Dennis Sevakis My Fellow Americans, Included below is the entire "Executive Summary" of the 2008 USCC Report that was excerpted and reformatted from the complete, original "pdf" document available at the uscc.gov link. This executive summary consists of document pages 1 - 18 of the 393 page document. The Washington Post managed to publish a short Reuters piece at the time of the USCC report's release that did not include any direct reference to it, and was titled, "Cybercrime as destructive as credit crisis: experts." In this...

SAN FRANCISCO: Attackers bent on shutting down large Web sites — even the operators that run the backbone of the Internet — are arming themselves with what are effectively vast digital fire hoses capable of overwhelming the world's largest networks, according to a new report on online security. [ ... ] The report, which will be released Tuesday, shows that the largest attacks have grown steadily in size to over 40 gigabits, from less than half a megabit, over the last seven years. The largest network connections generally available today carry 10 gigabits of data, meaning that they can be...

How The West Was Won The rapid and unexpected decline of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq was officially recognized this week, when Maj. Gen. John Kelly, commanding the Marine Expeditionary Force, turned operational control of Anbar Province over to the Iraqi army and police. Anbar, a vast expanse of desert the size of North Carolina, had been the stronghold of the Sunni insurgency. For years, foreign fighters loyal to al-Qaida had sneaked across Iraq's northwestern border with Syria, into Anbar and down a "rat line" of safe houses in Haditha, Ramadi and Hit. From Fallujah, the arch terrorist Zarqawi...

Pentagon Makes Fighting Extremism Top Priority Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon on Thursday officially named "the long war" against global extremism as its top priority and pledged to avert any conventional military threat from China or Russia through dialogue. The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills...

Estonia has already sent around 50 army reservists to Georgia (though on a voluntary, non-uniformed basis) to conduct humanitarian work and now it has emerged that Estonia is also lending its cyber-warfare expertise to the Georgian cause. The Estonian Foreign Ministry has confirmed that it is sending two of its leading cyber-defense experts to Tbilisi to help stave off cyber-attacks emanating in Russia. Estonia successfully defended itself against similar attacks during the 'bronze soldier' riots of 2007. The experts are likely to be part of the new NATO cyber-defense center established in Tallinn, and if so, the move would be...

By Land, Air, Sea & PC, Georgia Tried to Match Russian Arsenal By David Axe Published on: August 13, 2008 Last Thursday, Georgian troops attacked pro-Russian separatists in the breakaway province of South Ossetia. Defying expectations and escalating the pitch of the battles to come, the Russian army fought back—with massive firepower. Tanks deployed, jets flew top cover, and the once-mothballed Black Sea fleet sailed toward Georgian ports, while Russian hackers took down Georgian networks. The fighting, which claimed as many as 2000 lives, represents a sort of hybrid war for the 21st century: a chaotic, fast-moving conflict that combines...

It started as a fairly predictable digital conflict, mimicking the one in the real world and displaying no shortage of “conventional” cyberwarfare: Web pages were attacked, comments were erased, and photos were vandalized. A typical prank on the Georgian Foreign Ministry’s Web site visually compared Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili with Adolf Hitler. As Russian tanks lumbered southward over mountainous Ossetian terrain, Russian netizens were seeking to dominate the digital battlefield. But sophomoric pranks and cyberattacks were only the first shots of a much wider online war in which Russian bloggers willingly enlisted as the Kremlin’s grass-roots army. For Russian netizens,...

Security researchers claim to have uncovered evidence pointing to a link between Russian state-run businesses and cyber-attacks against Georgia. Denial of service attacks against Georgian web-sites started a day before Georgian and Russian military units began fighting over the disputed region of South Ossetia. SecureWorks researcher Don Jackson said that logs showed that portions of the attack were run from command and control servers located on the networks of Russian state-operated firms Rostelecom and Comstar. These servers were not linked to previous botnet activity. "We know that the Russian government controls those servers theoretically, if they have not been 'pwned'...

Bombs and bullets are not the only things flying around in the Russia-Georgia war that broke out over the weekend. There is a flurry of battling electrons as well. According to a news story first reported in The Telegraph, the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that a "cyberwarfare campaign by Russia is seriously disrupting many Georgian websites, including that of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs." How these contributed to the country's crushing defeat and the extent of deliberate Russian "cyber-warfare" remains to be determined. This incident, however, is the latest reminder that Washington needs to get serious about...

By Neil Arun BBC News Underpaid post-Soviet youths became notorious hackers, analysts say Armed with computers, unseen ranks of hackers are fanning conflict in the Caucasus.Internet users in Russia and Georgia have attacked vital websites in each other's countries, in a virtual echo of battles being fought on the ground by troops and tanks. Several Georgian government portals have been defaced or forced offline by hackers allegedly based in Russia. Visitors to Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili's website were recently routed to a page portraying him as a modern-day Hitler. Georgia's parliament and foreign ministry sites have also repeatedly been...

The Shadowserver Foundation, which tracks serious hacking, confirmed: "We are now seeing new attacks against .ge sites - www.parliament.ge and president.gov.ge are currently being hit with http floods." Mr Armin warned that official Georgian sites that did appear online may have been hijacked and be displaying bogus content. He said in a post on his site: "Use caution with any web sites that appear of a Georgia official source but are without any recent news ... as these may be fraudulent." The Baltic Business News website reported that Estonia has offered to send a specialist online security team to Georgia....

<p>Weeks before bombs started falling on Georgia, a security researcher in suburban Massachusetts was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace.</p> <p>Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks in Lexington noticed a stream of data directed at Georgian government sites containing the message: “win+love+in+Rusia.”</p>

Cyber warfare officially arrived on Capitol Hill last week. Two Republican congressmen, Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia and Rep. Christopher Smith of New Jersey, went public last Wednesday with the news that in 2006 and 2007 their office computer networks had been breached by Chinese hackers. The cyber raiders were not looking for sensitive military or economic data. Instead, they apparently tried to steal political information about Chinese dissidents.

A Virginia congressman said today the FBI has found that four of his government computers have been hacked by sources working out of China. In remarks prepared for delivery this afternoon, Rep. Frank Wolf says he has been told by the FBI that four computers in his personal office were compromised. The Virginia Republican says that similar incidents — also originating from China — have taken place on computers of other members of Congress and at least one House committee. A spokesman for Wolf says the four computers were being used by staff members working on human rights issues. Wolf...

"Anonymous" While we go about our daily lives--surfing the web, using it to pay bills or catching up on the latest news and chatting with friends and family--little do we realize that just beneath the digital surface of the worldwide web a war is being waged: the first Cyber World War, between a modern-day David versus Goliath. Goliath is the Church of Scientology, a multi-billion dollar enterprise, who is being systematically unmasked by the group known as Anonymous, the modern day David. ALSO at DBKP.com: * 'Anonymous' Hackers Vow to Destroy Scientology * Anonymous Issues Warning Number III to...

Unconfirmed report raises questions, sets bloggers blogging The IT security blogosphere is burning up today, following an unconfirmed report that Osama Bin Laden and his followers are planning a massive cyber attack on Western targets in less than two weeks. DEBKAfile, an Israeli news organization, yesterday published a report stating that counter-terrorism sources have intercepted and translated an Arabic "Internet announcement" that proposes an attack on Western electronic targets to begin on November 11. The attack will begin with 15 targets and will expand to "untold numbers," according to the report. Dark Reading canvassed U.S. law enforcement agencies in an...

Several months ago, the Pentagon's network and e-mail system fell victim to computer hacking. After an internal investigation, Pentagon officials declared that the hack was perpetrated by the Chinese military. In particular, officials said the attack "was by China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) and that it led to the shutdown of a computer system serving the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates." Now, a Chinese company with ties to the country's military, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and the Taliban will gain access to U.S. defense-network technology under a proposed merger.According to a story in the Washington Times, Huawei Technologies...

BAGHDAD — U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, spokesman for Multi-National Force-Iraq held an operational update Wednesday at the Combined Press Information Center. Bergner began the conference by saying the surge of operations in Iraq continues to make progress. “These operations are increasing pressure on extremists by disrupting their networks, denying safe havens and reducing operating bases,” Bergner said. In particular, Bergner said Iraqi and Coalition force operations continue to disrupt al-Qaeda in Iraq leadership and undermine their abilities to conduct terrorist operations. Coalition forces captured Fatah Da’ud Mahmud Al Mashadani on July 4. Mashadani served first as the...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A hacker penetrated an unclassified Pentagon email system, prompting authorities to take as many 1,500 accounts offline, defense officials said Thursday. "Elements of the OSD unclassified e-mail system were taken offline yesterday afternoon due to a detected penetration," US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, using an acronym for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. "A variety of precautionary measures are being taken. We expect the system to be online again very soon," Gates said. Between 1,000 and 1,500 users of the system were taken offline, a defense official said. On Wednesday, a congressional panel disclosed that...

America prepares for 'cyber war' with China By Alex Spillius in Washington Last Updated: 2:06am BST 15/06/2007 China is striving to overtake the United States as the dominant power in cyberspace, according to a senior American general, in what is emerging as a new theatre of conflict between nation states and a growing priority for the Pentagon. The Chinese foreign ministry rejected the Pentagon report as 'brutal interference' Lt Gen Robert Elder, commander of the 8th Air Force, said that all of America's foes, including Iran, were looking at ways of hacking into US networks to glean trade and defence...

In a recent posting in Newsday, a reference that may have passed unnoticed was made to an incident occurring in the small Baltic nation of Estonia, once under the control of the Soviet Union. For three weeks this past April, the Russians engineered a massive cyber-attack on Estonia’s computer systems and web sites in retaliation for the removal of a World War II-era Soviet war memorial from downtown Tallinn, Estonia's capital. Russia’s massive state-controlled telecommunications companies paralyzed Estonian web sites by sending more than 5,000 hits a second of bogus requests for information. It was cyber-warfare in the form of...

The Russian authorities have been accused of buying time on illegal botnets to launch a denial-of-service attack against Estonia. The Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance (ATCA), which comprises arms groups and financial services companies, claims to have uncovered evidence of alleged collusion between Russia and the botnet owners. ATCA said that the botnets were only rented for a short period to boost the number of attacking computers to over a million. Russia has consistently denied any involvement in the attacks. "The attackers used a giant network of enslaved computers on 9 May, perhaps as many as one million in places as...

he Defense Department reports China is building cyberwarfare units and developing viruses. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) continues to build cyberwarfare units and develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems as part of its information-warfare strategy, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) warned in a report released on Friday. "The PLA has established information warfare units to develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems and networks," the annual DOD report on China's military warned. At the same, Chinese armed forces are developing ways to protect its own systems from an enemy attack, it said, echoing similar warnings made in previous...

As Estonia appeals to its Nato and EU partners for help against cyber-attacks it links to Russia, the BBC News website's Patrick Jackson investigates who may be responsible. One Estonian website was defaced to show a Soviet soldier Estonia, one of the most internet-savvy states in the European Union, has been under sustained attack from hackers since the ethnic Russian riots sparked in late April by its removal of a Soviet war memorial from Tallinn city centre. Websites of the tiny Baltic state's government, political parties, media and business community have had to shut down temporarily after being hit...

Parliament, ministries, banks, media targeted Nato experts sent in to strengthen defences A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications. While Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the collapse of the Soviet Union, (snip) disabling the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies. Nato has dispatched some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians...

Estonia has faced down Russian rioters. But its websites are still under attack FOR a small, high-tech country such as Estonia, the internet is vital. But for the past two weeks Estonia's state websites (and some private ones) have been hit by “denial of service” attacks, in which a target site is bombarded with so many bogus requests for information that it crashes. The internet warfare broke out on April 27th, amid a furious row between Estonia and Russia over the removal of a Soviet war monument from the centre of the capital, Tallinn, to a military cemetery. The move...

Has an Organized Campaign to Shut Down Islamist Websites Begun? Islamist Forums Claim It Has In the past weeks, several rumors have been spread over Islamist websites about Western intelligence agencies' intention to shut down Islamist forums. As one Islamist put it, "We are all aware of the Zionist-Crusader campaign that has been launched against the Islamist websites... The most recent [manifestation of this campaign] is... the effort of American intelligence to completely eliminate websites that distribute communiqués [by the mujahideen] and films [documenting] attacks of the Iraqi resistance, or which encourage so-called terrorism.... As part of this campaign, [the...

Introduction Alongside military jihad on various battlefields, Islamist organizations are engaged in another type of warfare: jihad on the media front. The media is viewed by Islamist organizations both as an important battlefield and as an effective tool, and they consequently make extensive use of it. The media platform favored by the Islamist organizations is the Internet, which they prefer for several reasons: firstly, for the anonymity it allows - anyone can enter and post to a site without divulging personal information; secondly, due to the medium's availability and low cost - all that is required is a PC and...

Islamist Forum Participants Discuss Threat to Islamist Sites and Ways to Avoid Exposure On-Line A recent discussion on an Islamist forum reflected Islamists' growing concern over the threat posed to their websites by Western intelligence agencies, and over the danger of exposure mujahideen face when online. Forum participants suggested various strategies for ensuring the circulation of Islamist materials and for protecting the Islamists' online anonymity. The following are the main points of the discussion: Addressing the issue of the threat to Islamist websites, one of the forum participants wrote: "We are all aware of the Zionist-Crusader campaign that has been...

December 21, 2006: Yet another U.S. Department of Defense organization is having its computer systems shut down and closely examined for evidence of successful hacker penetration. This time it's the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, DC. Last month, it was the Navy War College in Rhode Island. NDU is similar to the War Colleges each of the services have, but teaches subjects of use to all military officers, and at a somewhat higher level. The NDU situation is different from that of the Navy War College. There does not appear to be a hacker attack, or at least one...

The U.S. Naval War College (NWC) is still trying to repair the damage caused by a massive hack attack last month. The full extent of the penetration, and damage, is not yet known. The forensics people aren't sure when they'll be finished. What they do known so far is that the attack came from China, although the Chinese deny any involvement. Oddly enough, the attack targeted a part of the navy that did not contain a lot of current secrets. When it comes to developing new strategy, the NWC is pretty much out-of-the-loop. Very few of the CNOs (Chief of...

The federal governments Commerce Department admitted Friday that heavy attacks on its computers by hackers working through Chinease servers have forced the bureau responsible for granting export licenses to lock down Internet access for more than a month. Hundreds of computers must be replaced to cleanse the agency of malicious code including rootkits and spyware.

For several years, U.S. Cyber War officials have been conducting wargames, or simulations, to determine just how, and where, the United States is vulnerable to a major attack on its Internet resources. Currently, there are over a dozen nations known to have a credible Cyber War capability, and several of these nations (like China, North Korea and Iran) are some, or all the times, hostile to the United States. China always gets the most attention, because China has the most resources. These wargames usually expect those playing the Chinese to use their imaginations. Couple that with some geeks on the...

The US State Department said it was conducting a forensic probe Wednesday after hackers in East Asia tapped into computer systems at its Washington headquarters and diplomatic posts in the region. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said no classified government information was lost in the strike, which reportedly targeted the bureau in the department dealing with North Korea and China. "Our folks monitored this attempt and took immediate steps to prevent any loss of sensitive US government information," McCormack said, downplaying an incident he said has sparked "breathless reporting" by some outlets. He said the operation was "a textbook example...