Cyber assassination is when an individual is unaware that he or she is the subject of a cyber attack designed to discredit them and to call into question his or her credibility or loyalty.
Here’s a possible scenario: A senior person in the CIA is working on a case and is disrupting the enemys activities or getting closer to uncover covert enemy operatives. A smart enemy might attack the leader or others involved in the investigation in an effort to slow down or derail the efforts to expose them. They may choose to hack the individuals laptop and place damaging emails that allude to a pay-off on their hard drive. Then all that is required is a subtle leak that gets back to the CIA and you can imagine the rest.
A second example could be a politician who is pushing for sanctions against a country and they hack their computer and put pornography on the hard drive. A covert leak of this information results in an investigation and public disclosure of the porn on the hard drive. This individuals ability to gain or maintain support for their interest in sanctions would be undoubtedly damaged.
You can prove a computer has been compromised (hacked). However, it is virtually impossible to say definitively that a computer has not been hacked. Our ability to defend against this type of assault on individuals in the political, academic, business or industrial spotlight is very limited. For whatever reason people believe the bad and explaining how the compromising materials unknowingly got on their computer hard drive would be almost impossible. Who knows, many of these individuals may have already been set-up and their computers hacked and the damaging evidence planted. Now the enemy patiently waits for the time they need to leak this information to further their cause. Who will be their target now?
[From Cyber Assassination]
Browsing Posts published on February 1, 2008
A few clueless individuals lately have proclaimed that SECURITY & PRIVACY are a Zero Sum Game. Those associated with the White House, FBI, Congress, TELCOs, DHS and DNI may need to re-read some basic American Constitutional documents. Maybe there should be a special “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader” version just for them.
Bruce Schneier has a great blog post on Security vs. Privacy
Tom’s Hardware has a nice roundup of some of the new shiny hardware for February ’08. Everything from a screaming fast 2 GHz DDR3 to liquid cooled cases and back again. “Unlike previous Zalman cases that used a heat pipe assembly, the LQ1000 has a traditional water pump and flexible hose for connecting the case’s sinks to CPU and graphics coolers. A passively-cooled finned side panel and fan-assisted rear radiator remove heat, while a lighted flow indicator shows the bottom-mounted pump in action.
