The cyber conflict age has begun, as it is natural for those hostile to any particular group to include cyber at key points in their plans, including debilitating entire systems, says Chris C. Demchak, a professor of strategy at the US Naval War College.
While the popularity of social networking sites has continued to show up the darker aspect of the internet, Stuxnet a surprisingly sophisticated, precisely targeted, and undoubtedly expensively produced worm in large industrial control systems have recently appeared in the cyber space. As a malicious piece of software, it came as a surprise despite having floated around a year doing nothing but stealthily copying itself. The worm’s initial target was the program controlling centrifuges in Iranian nuclear reprocessing plants. Spread by infected USB thumb drives and the software in printer spoolers, it bypassed the Internet security controls in place against hackers and did not act maliciously until finding the precise computer DNA of Iranian nuclear reactors as Stuxnet’s designers intended. While the worm infiltrated a wide variety of protections and Windows operating systems, the sophisticated Stuxnet authors demonstrated a new level of threat to cyber security. Despite early denials, the Iranian nuclear community ultimately admitted its plants were infected and its centrifuges unstable, says a US military source.
In early 2010, the vice president of an IT company hired two well-known hackers via IRC to hack his customer’s services. The objective of the attack was to gain administrator rights on some Internet sites. In April 2010, the vice president asked the hackers to find and analyze loopholes of 180 small and medium-sized companies. Once the vulnerabilities were found, the IT Company reported it to the concerned enterprises and proposed that they buy security consulting services from the company in order to find suitable security measures to counter to these breaches.
Until Stuxnet, however, it was not entirely clear if all the access points, malware, and rampant penetrations would lead to serious strategic harm. The consensus among states changed after Stuxnet. If such malicious software can take down whole energy systems at once, states have no choice but to respond if they are to protect their own governmental and military operations and uphold their responsibility to protect citizens and corporations. The Stuxnet method and its success thus changed the notion of vulnerability across increasingly internetted societies and critical infrastructures.
In 2007, government websites were the targets of hackers. The hacked sites were all affiliated with the government, including those of the Department of Justice, the Department of Arts, Culture and Technology, the Films and Publications Board, the main Government Information portal, and the Government’s open source website. The group of hackers, claiming to come from a specific country, attacked the most important government server from which it was easy to shut down all the websites hosted on it. The hackers left a insulting message. Once the websites were operational again, some were hacked again by another group which left the following message “hacked by just for fun”45. The main damages were the slowing down of the public trust in e-Government services and the possible negative impacts on the Government’s reputation.
Meanwhile, the days of cyber spying through software backdoors or betrayals by trusted insiders, vandalism, or even theft had suddenly evolved into the demonstrated ability to deliver a potentially killing blow without being anywhere near the target. Forcing nuclear centrifuges to oscillate out of control from an unknown and remote location suggests that future innovations might be able to destroy or disrupt other critical infrastructures upon which modern societies depend. As proof of concept as well as a model to be copied, the Stuxnet worm offers the possibility of distant enemies spending hundreds of staff hours and expertise to insert such applications throughout the nation—from oil pipelines to dam turbines to nuclear and fossil fuel energy plants to any other large-scale critical service controlled by computers. As the designers of Stuxnet demonstrated, being disconnected from the Internet will never again be a guarantee of security.
In 2009, a group of hackers attacked an official country website designed to show the progress of an ongoing vote count. The attackers changed the names of political parties into fake names, such as “Pink Grandfather Party”, “the Party of Bottled Mineral Water”. Investigation showed that more than 13 other political group’s names have been attacked. In 2003, hackers defaced the website of a country Police Department and made it into a pornographic site with obscene pictures on the first page. “The links – and the pop-up screens – connect to websites where more pictures and invitations to “live shows” are waiting”.
In 2008, a group of hackers attacked a country Defense Ministry website. This website was designed to provide scholarships to military personnel. The Internet homepage was attacked twice within a few weeks, and this lead to a temporary shut down. Possible damages were the theft of stored personal information of military personal such as bank account numbers, registration numbers, and addresses.
In 2000, hackers attacked a country telecommunication regulatory agency website. Investigation showed that the attack was launched from two countries. The hackers launched a denial of service attack leading to the outage of the website; the site received 600 hits per second in the first 90 minutes of the attack. The main damage was the downtime of the site, which lasted around 6 hours. In 2003, a satellite television network was the target of distributed denial of service attack. A large amount of traffic was send to the name servers responsible for the targeted websites, leading to the breaking down of services. This attack aimed to disrupt television network servers and thus to shut down all related services. The main negative consequence was the decision of hosting companies to stop hosting the site in order to maintain service to their other customers.
In July 2006, some people hacked a government website of a country and left the following sentences: “www.C0RRUPT.com …. Defaced by xxx” ….. “It looks like this country needs some help securing their shit while they are killing their whole goddamned country! Register
on our forums and we’ll help you upgrade and secure your database”. In 2001, a hacker attacked two local government websites and defaced their homepages with obscene pictures. He substituted the name of a local representative by an discourteous name and the name of a major by “Idiot”. He also changed the title of the greeting message into “We are a Bunch of Hogs”. The damages are important as the hacker also attacked commercial entities such as stock-exchange network. In 2002, a hacking group defending some militants attacked the official website of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of country Y. They left the following message “regulatory authority of country Y has been defaced by … for the freedom of”. In 2006, a specific hacking group attacked the website of Country Z National Institute and defaced the website by substituting the historic research documentation of Country Z Genocide by Country L propaganda. In 2001, some national websites, including Country V’s Education Ministry and Political Party, were the target of hackers for online protest. The latter launched a denial of service attack using email bombs. Hackers, who were mostly Country S students, attacked these websites because of a new history textbook glossing over atrocities
committed during World War II and the occupation of specifics countries. The website of the publishing company for this textbook was also attacked.
According to IT analyst, Stuxnet is an exquisite example of the advantages afforded attackers in the current global cyberspace. Attackers freely choose the scale of their organization, the proximity of their targets, and the precision of their target group, all with near impunity. They may take all the time they need in capitalizing on these advantages and in using the Internet itself to collect more data on the intended targets. The ease of relatively risk-free conflict between adversaries within the global web is so apparent even bot net gangs of criminals controlling secretly hacked personal computers fight among themselves technologically, often seeking to destroy and replace the other’s malicious software.
The Stuxnet worm marks a turning point into a new cybered conflict age in which states need to define territorial spaces of safety to reassure their citizens’ safety and economic well-being. When it is widely accepted that critical systems can no longer be trusted if they are open to the web, political leaders will demand ways to eliminate the threats from entering their territory. The cybered conflict age has begun, and it is natural for those hostile to any particular group to include cyber at key points in their plans, including debilitating entire systems. Equally expected, leaders of the threatened group will have to consider what responses keep critical functions secure.
In 2010, some hackers hacked a Defense Ministry Network and inserted a fake press release denouncing a big bribery scandal. Everything was planned to spread this lie on a large scale in order to damage the public image of the country’s government. When the security team discovered the intrusion, it was already too late. Newspapers had already related the scandal, affecting the image of the Ministry.
In 2007, a hacking group, called CCC Security Team attacked the official website of the Ministry of Trade and Industry of a country. They defaced the homepage and left the following message: “we are the better race and u: You are the people who own nothing. You only know how to work with computers due to some special teaching you are being given”: In 2006, a hacking group called un-root launched massive defacement attacks on the governmental websites of a country, including the Health Ministry, the Council of Ministry, and the Ministry of Parliament Relations. In total, they hacked 25 official websites.
Controlling cyber crimes
Defense analysts argues that, it is technologically possible for governments to require source tagging of bytes at some point to assure the passage of legally acceptable streams of data or applications or volumes of requests as a way to curtail attacks on their soil or emanating from their soil illegally. Changing the mix by social accord via government action changes the system as we access it, know it, and use it. If key cable junctions are broken, the Internet fails or slows to a crawl for whole nations. If the same cables are merely redirected through an extra set of computers which reject or delete unwanted patterns of data, then the Internet at the far end of the redirect will seem to be all that it was. Deleted material will simply never show up. With sufficient investment in leading-edge speed cables, inserted filtering servers, and capable transmission lines, it is possible to have a border that is not visibly intrusive to the vast majority of citizens and conceivably even faster than today. For example, while it is widely known China controls its Internet, it is not widely known that this control rests on having only three main Internet gateways between its one-billion-plus population and the rest of the globe. For the kinds of controls exerted by the Chinese government to go unnoticed by users is one piece of evidence that a border for every state, each with different security goals, is within technological reach, if not yet legally and formally sought.
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