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stuxnet opened a pandora's box of risk for the rest of the world

The absolute greatest threat to world stability is a threat that oddly receives virtually no publicity. It’s not nuclear arms, it’s not a US stock market crash, it’s not a global bond market crash and it’s not a real estate market crash. The greatest threat to world stability is one that originates within the realm of cyberwarfare. Before you state, “Yeah, I’ve heard that many times before” and dismiss this article, there is a very low probability that your understanding of the magnitude of this risk is anywhere near complete simply due to the fact that the great majority of people do not have a clear understanding of how much of their daily modern lives depend upon a functioning internet. There is a massive threat to all infrastructure that exists in virtually every modern nation in the world today, because of the invention of the Stuxnet virus by US and Israeli intelligence agencies that inadvertently spread around the world. And virtually no one is discussing the greatest threat to world stability, one much greater than the threat of conventional warfare, outside of the opaque confines of State intelligence agencies. In fact, due to the release of Stuxnet into cyberspace, the safest places in the world may be, as of right now, the least developed nations technologically, that possess few or no life-sustaining key infrastructure controlled by computers. On the contrary, the nations subject to the highest risk from the greatest threat to world stability are the most technologically advanced that possess all critical infrastructure controlled by computers and that are now at a fairly advanced stage of adoption in regard to the IoT (Internet of Things).

Why the Creation and Discovery of the Stuxnet Code in 2010 Forever Altered Global Security for the Worse

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cyber wars and all that

May 4, 2019

Cyber wars and all that

Behind the Huawei story, we must not forget there is a wider financial war being waged by America against China and Russia. Stories about China’s banks being short of dollars are incorrect: the shortage is of inward capital flows to support the US Government’s budget deficit. By attracting those global portfolio flows instead, China’s Belt and Road Initiative threatens US Government finances, so the financial war and associated disinformation can be expected to escalate. Hong Kong is likely to be in the firing line, due to its role in providing China with access to international finance.

Introduction

Huawei is hitting the headlines. From ordering the arrest of its Chief Financial Officer in Vancouver last December to the latest efforts to dissuade its allies from adopting Huawei’s 5G mobile technology, it has been a classic deep state operation by the Americans. Admittedly, the Chinese have left themselves open to attack by introducing a loosely-drafted cybersecurity law in 2016/17 which according to Western defence circles appears to require all Chinese technology companies to cooperate with Chinese intelligence services.

Consequently, no one now knows whether to trust Huawei, who have some of the leading technology for 5G. The problem for network operators is who to believe. Intelligence services are in the business of dissembling, which they do through political puppets, all of which are professionals at being economical with the truth. Who can forget Weapons of Mass Destruction? More recently there was the Skripal poisoning mystery: the Russians would have been bang-to-rights, if it wasn’t for Skripal’s links through Pablo Miller to Christopher Steele, who put together the dodgy dossier on Trump’s alleged behaviour in a Russian hotel.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NATO Coordinates Information War on Russia

October 15, 2018

NATO Coordinates Information War on Russia

The US, Britain and other NATO allies upped the ante this week with a coordinated campaign of information war to criminalize Russia. Moscow dismissed the wide-ranging claims as “spy mania”. But the implications amount to a grave assault recklessly escalating international tensions with Russia.

The accusations that the Kremlin is running a global cyberattack operation are tantamount to accusing Russia of “acts of war”. That, in turn, is creating a pretext for NATO powers to carry out “defensive” actions on Moscow, including increased economic and diplomatic sanctions against Russia, as well as “counter” cyberattacks on Russian territory.

This is a highly dangerous dynamic that could ultimately lead to military confrontation between nuclear-armed states.

There are notably suspicious signs that the latest accusations against Russia are a coordinated effort to contrive false charges.

First, there is the concerted nature of the claims. British state intelligence initiated the latest phase of information war by claiming that Russian military intelligence, GRU, was conducting cyberattacks on infrastructure and industries in various countries, costing national economies “millions of pounds” in damages.

Then, within hours of the British claims, the United States and Canada, as well as NATO partners Australia and New Zealand followed up with similar highly publicized accusations against Russia. It is significant that those Anglophone countries, known as the “Five Eyes”, have a long history of intelligence collaboration going back to the Cold War years against the Soviet Union.

The Netherlands, another NATO member, added to the “spy mania” by claiming it had expelled four members of Russian state intelligence earlier this year for allegedly trying to hack into the headquarters of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), based in The Hague.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cold War-Era ‘Arms Race’ With US Is Back On, Russian Official Warns

October 11, 2018

Cold War-Era ‘Arms Race’ With US Is Back On, Russian Official Warns

The Trump administration has successfully managed to replace Russia with China in the ongoing narrative of election hacking and economic and geopolitical aggression, a shift that was underlined by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen Tuesday morning when she declared that China was engaged in an “unprecedented effort” to “influence American Opinions”. But just because Russia has lost its place as the primary object of election hacking doesn’t change the reality that the US is enmeshed in a modern redux of the Cold War as the US and Russia threaten to leave longstanding arms control treaties amid a scramble to develop next-generation weapons like the hypersonic missile.

And as Russian and US diplomats met in Geneva on Wednesday to try and settle a dispute pertaining to a watershed arms control agreement called the INF (which each side has accused the other of violating), one senior Russian official warned that the ongoing hostilities between the two nuclear superpowers risked unraveling the decades-old arms control regime in its entirety.

Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said during an interview with the Financial Times that “complete malfunction of the American system” meant key treaties could lapse and leave nuclear powers “without constraint in the event of a conflict.”

In recognition of Russia’s annoyance at being accused of trying to assassinate former intelligence agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, Ryabkov dismissed allegations that Russia tried to hack the Netherlands-based headquarters of the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, saying these accusations would only further increase tensions.

Mr Ryabkov said Moscow would not be swayed by Dutch, British and US claims that its agents had also sought to hack into the computer network of The Hague-based Office for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons as it investigated the attack on Mr Skripal.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The UK Is Practicing Cyberattacks To Black Out Moscow As A Nuclear Deterrent

October 9, 2018

The UK Is Practicing Cyberattacks To Black Out Moscow As A Nuclear Deterrent

Britain’s military has engaged in a massive cyber-strike war game scenario which envisioned an attack on Russia’s power grid which would black out all of Moscow.

The non-conventional military exercise comes as British defense officials have expressed increasing concern that the UK would be outgunned if under attack by Russia.

An alarming new report in the Sunday Times begins as follows:

Defence chiefs have war-gamed a massive cyber-strike to black out Moscow if Vladimir Putin launches a military attack on the West, after concluding that the only other way of hitting back would be to use nuclear weapons.

Senior security sources have told The Sunday Times they are concerned that Britain has a capability gap that has left commanders with too few weapons to meet Kremlin aggression short of firing a Trident nuclear missile.

Britain’s military is said to be exploring a host of alternative measures and “more options” that could constitute a significant blow to Russia’s defenses short of launching nuclear war. The Sunday Times continues:

Planning exercises on the threat posed by Russia have left officials “ashen-faced” at the speed with which confrontation with Moscow could escalate.

Whitehall officials have vowed to step up offensive cyber-capability, including the ability to “turn out the lights” in the Kremlin.

Apparently the non-conventional and cyber-weapons strike readiness are part of growing growing tit-for-tat actions and tensions after UK and US officials have accused the Kremlin of aggressive actions ranging from cyberattacks on Western targets to election interference, to the poising of a former spy on British soil.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America’s Offensive Cyber Strategy

October 4, 2018

America’s Offensive Cyber Strategy

On September 20, 2018 the White House released the US National Cyber Strategy, which was signed by President Donald Trump.

It probably delighted both hawks and Democrats. The former were pleased that the strategy includes new components that clearly indicate an expansionist momentum. And the latter were gratified by the Trump administration’s renewed interest in the subject of cyberspace, since Donald Trump eliminated the position of White House cybersecurity coordinator after his election and significantly reduced spending in this area. But the president now seems to have reconsidered, as indicated by the fact that the 40-page document is in many respects a rehash of efforts from the Obama era.

US Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen noted in her statement that “[t]oday’s National Cyber Strategy — the first in fifteen years — strengthens the government’s commitment to work in partnership with industry to combat those threats and secure our critical infrastructure.”

Her press release went on to say, “With respect to securing federal networks, for example, we have used our authorities to ensure agencies are updating and patching systems, strengthening their email security, and removing Kaspersky antivirus products from their systems.”

Was this reference to the Russian company just a coincidence? Of course not. Even a cursory glance at this strategy drives home the point that Russia is being singled out as a militant enemy of the United States, and Washington is ready to start leaning hard on it.

It is also telling that several days before this document was released, an updated version of the US Department of Defense’s cyber strategy was published, which suggests that the Pentagon and the Trump administration are working in tandem to a certain extent. Their mutual interests are also evident from a comparison of statements from the summary of the two documents.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Drums Along the Potomac

March 16, 2018

Drums Along the Potomac

The amateur psychologist in me suspects that the more the USA heaps Russia with censorious opprobrium and punishments, the closer this floundering polity actually is to completely losing its shit. Friday morning’s front-page headline in The New York Times appears to have been written by Pee Wee Herman:

I can just hear Vlad Putin blowing a raspberry out of the Kremlin: “Nyah, nyah, nyah… I know you are, but what am I…?” We’re also informed today by that august journal that U.S. Accuses Russia in Cyberattacks on Power Plants. (Oh, wait a second, they changed the headline at 8:02 to Russia Wormed Its Way Into Access at Power Plants, U.S. Says.) Hmmmm… well, the amateur detective in me suspects that A) this is exactly the kind of bullshit that US intel excels at making up; plus B) the public was actually told last year that our intel has the ability to place any kind of cyber-footprint and time-stamp it wants on digital information, so that C) this assertion can be neither proved nor disproved.

The amateur international relations analyst in me sees in these shenanigans a desperate search for a casus belli, an excuse to go to war. But that only brings me back to amateur psychology: the US apparently wants to commit suicide. Wouldn’t war be a great idea a week after Russia announced it had new hypersonic missiles that the US can’t defend itself against? Hmmmm. Maybe the Russians made that shit up. And maybe they didn’t. Perhaps we’d like to test that, say, by bombing a bunch of Russian military personnel in Syria, just to see what happens.

There is also the matter of the poisoning in Salisbury, UK, of the Russian Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with a suspected nerve toxin, Novichok, first developed by the old Soviet military. The two remain in critical condition. A nasty bit of business. Skripal was a Russian-to-British double agent who was exchanged some years back in one of the infrequent swaps of captured intel “assets” by the so-called great powers. British Prime Minister Theresa May had a whack attack over the Skripal hit, reeling out new sanctions and booting a boat-load of Russian diplomats off-island.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Responding to Bernie’s Promotion of the New Cold War

February 2, 2018

Responding to Bernie’s Promotion of the New Cold War

In this op-ed, Caitlin Johnstone responds to Bernie Sanders’ promotion of unproven allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

In an otherwise fine video response to Tuesday night’s vapid, flag-waving State of the Union address, Bernie Sanders once again promoted the neocon think tank-generated and unproven claim that Russia interfered in America’s 2016 elections via “cyberwarfare,” and repeated the completely baseless insinuation that they colluded with Trump to do so.

Bernie Sanders’ video response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address.

“How can he not talk about the reality that Russia, through cyberwarfare, interfered in our election in 2016, is interfering in democratic elections all over the world, and according to his own CIA director will likely interfere in the 2018 midterm elections that we will be holding?” asked the Vermont Senator. “How do you not talk about that unless you have a very special relationship with Mr. Putin?”

This is not an exception to the rule for Sanders, but one more addition to an already consistent and deliberate pattern. In February of last year Sanders delivered a widely viewed video message to his massive online audience solely geared at promoting the Russiagate narrative. At the end of March, he did it again.

In May, he did it again. Over and over and over again, month after month after month, Sanders has been using his immense platform as the most popular and trusted politician in America to sell these world-threatening cold war escalations to the millions of Americans who adore him.

This is a big deal. This is not some petty quibble with Sanders’ policies like disagreeing with the specifics of his stance on free trade or fracking. This is not some minor detail which can be dismissed with accusations of purism and impracticality and “Hey, no politician is perfect.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Pandora’s Box of the Digital Age

November 17, 2017

The Pandora’s Box of the Digital Age

In the past year alone, a series of hacks and ransomware attacks by hostile governments and other malign actors have raised alarms about a major threat to global stability. Unfortunately, many governments are responding by developing still more cyber weapons, on the mistaken assumption that offense is the best defense.

STOCKHOLM – Is the world sliding dangerously toward cyber Armageddon? Let us hope not; but let us also apprehend the threat, and focus on what to do about it.

One country after another has begun exploring options for bolstering their offensive capabilities in cyberspace, and many other countries have already done so. This is a dangerous escalation. In fact, few other trends pose a bigger threat to global stability.

Almost all societies have become heavily dependent on the Internet, the world’s most important piece of infrastructure – and also the infrastructure upon which all other infrastructure relies. The so-called Internet of Things is a misnomer; soon enough, it will be the “Internet of Everything.” And our current era is not a Fourth Industrial Revolution; it is the beginning of the digital age, and the end of the industrial age altogether.

The digital age has introduced new vulnerabilities that hackers, cyber criminals, and other malign actors are already routinely exploiting. But even more alarming is the eagerness of national governments to conduct cyber-warfare operations against one other.

We have already reached the stage at which every conflict has a cyber dimension. The United States and Israel crossed the Rubicon in 2010 by launching the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Now, there is no telling where ongoing but hidden cyber conflicts begin and end.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

WikiLeaks Publishes CIA Hacking Tool Designed To “Impersonate” Russia’s Kaspersky Lab

November 9, 2017

WikiLeaks Publishes CIA Hacking Tool Designed To “Impersonate” Russia’s Kaspersky Lab

On September 18th, the US Senate voted to ban the use of products from the Moscow-based cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab by the federal government, citing national security risk. The vote was included as an amendment to an annual defense policy spending bill approved by the Senate on the same day and was written to bar the use of Kaspersky Lab software in government civilian and military agencies.

Alas, according to a new revelation from WikiLeaks this morning, any perceived “national security risk” from Kaspersky could have resulted from the fact that the CIA specifically designed hacking software, code-named ‘Hive’, which intentionally “impersonated” the Russian cyber security firm so that “if the target organization looks at the network traffic coming out of its network, it is likely to misattribute the CIA exfiltration of data to uninvolved entities whose identities have been impersonated.”

Here’s a summary of the hacking tool posted by WikiLeaks:

Today, 9 November 2017, WikiLeaks publishes the source code and development logs to Hive, a major component of the CIA infrastructure to control its malware.

Hive solves a critical problem for the malware operators at the CIA. Even the most sophisticated malware implant on a target computer is useless if there is no way for it to communicate with its operators in a secure manner that does not draw attention. Using Hive even if an implant is discovered on a target computer, attributing it to the CIA is difficult by just looking at the communication of the malware with other servers on the internet. Hive provides a covert communications platform for a whole range of CIA malware to send exfiltrated information to CIA servers and to receive new instructions from operators at the CIA.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

You Against the Government’s Tools

November 2, 2017

You Against the Government’s Tools

Julian Assange calls the events in Catalonia an “internet war.” The Spanish government has raided Catalonian government offices, arrested government officials, frozen telecommunications links, and censored hundreds of internet sites. The government has refused to accept that secession is happening, and that the people of Catalonia are tired of Spain’s reckless abuse of their tax dollars. Catalans contribute 21 percent of the country tax revenues, but don’t receive their fair share of government services. So in order to stop the bleeding of their tax dollars, they have taken the bold step of secession from Spain. Other parts of the world, such as China and Venezuela, have also faced oppressive government internet restrictions and similar retaliations for voicing opposition to government bureaucrats.

This internet war has grown in many of these non-English countries to an unlimited extent because most computer programming languages are English-based. For many non-native English speakers, learning computer programming and implementing the tools to navigate around oppressive government restrictions is almost an impossible task. This emboldens these countries’ public officials to continue to legislate more restrictive laws to a populace that isn’t equipped to navigate around those laws.

The following is a computer program written in Java, one of the most commonly used languages:

public class CallingMethodsInSameClass

{

public static void main(String[] args) {

printOne();

printTwo();

}

public static void printOne() {

System.out.println(“Hello World”);

}

public static void printTwo() {

printOne();

For most native English speakers, you might not understand the words in context, but you will be able to recognize every word used. However, a native Spanish speaker wouldn’t recognize the language and wouldn’t be able to use these codes without learning the English language to some degree.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bad Rabbit Ransomware: ‘This Is A Targeted Attack’

October 25, 2017

Bad Rabbit Ransomware: ‘This Is A Targeted Attack’

ransomware

The Bad Rabbit ransomware is spreading across Europe not long after the WannaCry and NotPetya outbreaks. But Bad Rabbit is a “targeted attack” with widespread implications.

A new cyber attack is affecting numerous computer systems around Europe. The new strain of ransomware known as “Bad Rabbit” is believed to be behind all of the trouble. Bad Rabbit has spread to Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, and Germany. Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, which is monitoring the malware, has compared it to the WannaCry and Petya attacks that caused so much chaos earlier in the year.

According to the Kaspersky Lab, the majority of victims are located in Russia, and the ransomware appears to have infected devices through the hacked websites of Russian media organizations. Interfax and Fontanka in Russia have both been hit by a cyber attack, as have Odessa Airport and the Kiev Metro in Ukraine.

“Based on our investigation, this is a targeted attack against corporate networks, using methods similar to those used in the ExPetr attack,” Kaspersky Lab has said. “However, we cannot confirm it is related to ExPetr.” According to Secure Lst, ExPetr is a wiper, not ransomware. “The dangerous aspect is the fact that it was able to infect many institutions which constitute critical infrastructure in such a short timeframe,” says Robert Lipovsky, a malware researcher at ESET, “which indicates a well-coordinated attack.”

Kaspersky also found strong evidence tying the new attack to the creators of NotPetya. After the June NotPetya outbreak, the company’s analysts found that one Ukrainian news site, Bahmut.com.ua, had been hacked to deliver the malware, along with dozens of other sites that were similarly corrupted—but hadn’t yet been activated to start infecting victims. Now Kaspersky has found that 30 of those hacked sites began to distribute the BadRabbit malware on Tuesday. –Wired

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Next Cyber Hurricane Is Coming And It’ll Take Down The Internet

October 24, 2017

The Next Cyber Hurricane Is Coming And It’ll Take Down The Internet

botnet mit bot herder 3D

Last year, the botnet Mirai caused a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in October, knocking popular websites off the internet for millions of users. Right now, the next cyber hurricane is on the way, and it could take down the entire internet.

According to ZD Net, the botnet, dubbed “Reaper” by researchers at Netlab 360, is appearing on the radar of security researchers. A little over a month ago, the researchers detected the sizable botnet of infected Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Now, just weeks later, it’s on track to become one of the largest botnets recorded in recent years.

The botnet is said to have ensnared almost two million Internet-connected webcams, security cameras, and digital video recorders (DVRs) in the past month, says Check Point, which also published research, putting its growth at a far faster pace than Mirai.

Mirai was “beautifully simple,” said Ken Munro, a consultant at UK-based security firm Pen Test Partners. The malware would scan the internet and infect connected devices with default usernames and passwords, which either weren’t or couldn’t be changed by the owner. The collective bandwidth from the huge number of “zombie devices” that were infected and enslaved was directed at Dyn, an internet infrastructure company, which overloaded the company’s systems and prevented millions from accessing popular websites.

Reaper, on the other hand, is much more complex. It’s “what Mirai could easily have been,” said Munro. It takes a slightly different, more advanced approach by quietly targeting and exploiting known vulnerabilities in devices and injecting its malicious code. This effectively hijacks the device for whenever the botnet controller is ready to issue their commands. Each time a device is infected, the device spreads the malware to other vulnerable devices just like a worm.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Pentagon Worried about Hackers Causing Stock Market Crash

October 16, 2017

Pentagon Worried about Hackers Causing Stock Market Crash

The Pentagon?! But no one’s worried when stocks get manipulated higher.

It’s funny, the all-out government effort to prevent a major decline of the stock market, or of individual stocks, via manipulation or hacking. Now even the Pentagon is looking into it.

What’s funny is that everyone cheers when manipulation, hacking, and other shenanigans cause the market or individual stocks to soar. It’s just declines they’re worried about at these precarious levels.

Manipulating stocks higher is a time-honored game that routinely receives kudos from all around. The Fed printed nearly $4 trillion and cut rates to zero for eight years – no matter what the damage to the real economy – for the sole purpose of manipulating up asset prices including stock prices. “Wealth effect,” Ben Bernanke called it. Corporate executives and analysts exaggerate future earnings only to deflate them at the last minute, because stock prices are “forward looking” and fake future earnings is all that matters, even if reality now sucks. And on and on. Whatever it takes to push stock prices up, by hook or crook, is cool. These are our heroes.

But when some lonely dude might hack into high-speed stock trading systems or spook the trading algos, quant-fund managers, and high-speed traders and throw algorithmic trading off track to where prices might actually fall in a major way, all heck breaks loose, and the Pentagon feels empowered to step in.

Trading by automated systems, such as used by quant funds and high-speed traders, is beginning to dominate stock trading. The risk of hacking into those systems or manipulating those systems in other ways is a real issue – but it should cut both ways. And the systems themselves are designed to manipulate prices, so….

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

DARPA Asks HFT Traders How Hackers Will Crash The Market

October 15, 2017

DARPA Asks HFT Traders How Hackers Will Crash The Market

Having been responsible for the biggest flash crashes in recent years, it is no surprise that when it comes to the market’s growing structural vulnerabilities, high frequency traders have emerged as the primary authority on how to crash the market in the blink of an eye. Which is perhaps why none other than the Pentagon is seeking advice from HFTs on how hackers could “unleash chaos” in the US financial system.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Department of Defense’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, has been consulting with executives at HFT firms and quant hedge funds as well as people from exchanges and other financial companies, over the past year and a half. Officials described the effort as an early-stage pilot project aimed at “identifying market vulnerabilities.” The WSJ notes that meeting participants described meetings as informal sessions in which attendees brainstorm about “how hackers might try to bring down U.S. markets, then rank the ideas by feasibility.”

Why approach HFTs? Because of all market participants, it is the “high freaks” who, better than anyone, know how to force a market crash at will. The WSJ was a bit more diplomatic:

High-speed traders and quant-fund managers, who use sophisticated computer programs to buy and sell stocks, sometimes in fractions of a second, form the core of the group. Such traders tend to have deep expertise in the inner workings of financial markets and the automated systems that account for huge swaths of trading activity today.

Among the potential scenarios probed by the Pentagon: Hackers could cripple a widely used payroll system; they could inject false information into stock-data feeds, sending trading algorithms out of whack; or they could flood the stock market with fake sell orders and trigger a market crash.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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