Browsing Posts published in July, 2008
Sun has obtained Common Criteria EAL4+ certification for its Solaris 10 operating system.
Multiple sources have confirmed that China has openly threatened anyone who reuses or rebroadcasts the Beijing Olympics. Chinese officials publicly stated they will punish Internet Web sites, Re-broadcasters and other new media that replay the 2008 Olympic Games and related events without the authorization of state-run China Central Television.
Xu Chao, deputy director of the Copyright Management Division in the State Copyright Bureau said during the Olympic Games, many unauthorized broadcasts will flood into the market. We should initiate an attack against broadcast piracy. Xu went on to discuss some of their anti-piracy measures including a public hotline for reporting illegal broadcasting through the State Copyright Bureau website or by dialing the “12390″ anti-piracy hotline to collaborate with the government. People involved will be rewarded for the reports once the report is found to be true.
The International Olympic Committee granted CCTV the new media broadcast rights for the summer games exclusively. We were unable to obtain their exact definition of new media broadcast. However, in a statement by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, the National Copyright Administration and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, they said Web sites and mobile platforms using Olympic broadcast signals without getting permission from the CCTV will be punished.
They went on to say that Web sites may be shut down if they carry the events illegally. Olympics coverage is big business. The 2008 Summer Games in Beijing will mark the arrival of streaming content as a viable alternative to the Olympics television broadcast. Online video streaming is attracting an increasing share of ad spending and many believe is the future of advertising. NBCOlympics.com will offer 4,400 hours of on-demand streaming content plus 2,200 hours of live programming, making the Beijing Olympics the largest streaming media project to date. There is little doubt that carbon copies of the streamed media will be available from numerous sources on the web and in the physical world. So it appears China has a big challenge ahead.
Are they really threatening cyber attacks on public companies, private industry and individuals? That is the way one Cyber Security Expert we spoke to interpreted it. Only time will tell. What if a company in the United States, or any other country, is attacked? How will the government respond? One thing for sure, this is a sign of things to come.
Facts:
The Olympics have become a very, very big business. Worldwide media rights to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing sold for $1.7 billion, with NBC Universal paying $894 million for the U.S. media rights alone.
China Central Television (CCTV) said that Web sites may be shut down if they carry the events illegally. In addition, a Chinese Government spokesperson said Any individual without authorization who uploads recorded Olympic events or pirated Olympics video broadcasting websites will face up to 100,000 RMB in penalties. The statement in its entirety can be found here.
Researcher to demonstrate attack code for Intel chips
In the 2008 Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community for the Senate Armed Services Committee for the first time the threat of cyber attacks were addressed. (This is the first time the report available to the public).
The intelligence community listed “the vulnerabilities of the US information infrastructure to increasing cyber attacks by foreign governments, nonstate actors and criminal elements” as the fourth major bullet of the fourth page of the opening in the forty-five page report. The report goes on to state that due to the significance of computer and telecommunications to our country’s security defense and economy, threats to our IT infrastructure are an important focus of the Intelligence Community. Also stated were the trends seen over the past year, which included cyber exploitation activity that grew more sophisticated, more targeted, and more serious. Finally, DNI stated that the Intelligence Community expects these trends to continue in the coming year.
Most concerning was the following statement excerpted from the report.
“We assess that nations, including Russia and China, have the technical capabilities to target and disrupt elements of the US information infrastructure and for intelligence collection.” Nation states and criminals target our government and private sector information networks to gain competitive advantage in the commercial sector. The report went on to state that terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, HAMAS, and Hezbollah have expressed the desire to use cyber means to target the United States.
The information contained in the report represents the cumulative views of highly skilled professionals working on this critical issue. All the warning signs are there.
You may not have caught this but, the Intelligence Operations Center of Spy-Ops reported on June 18th the Palestinian Islamist movement, Islamic Jihad, said it has a new division of its armed Al-Quds Brigades: a cyber war unit that claims it has hacked into the websites of several Israeli media outlets. I am not sure how I missed it but when did terrorist organizations start making press releases?
It seems like everyone is beginning to get into the cyber war capabilities. This now included cyber arms dealers and organizations that lease attack capacity on their BotNets. Not to be left out, criminal elements continue to show growing sophistication in technical capability and targeting, and today operate a pervasive, mature, online service economy in illicit cyber capabilities and services available to anyone willing to pay. Cyber weapons can be purchased for as little as $300 and some have been reported to sell for $50,000.
A GPS unit and a Geographic Information System (GIS) program are a great team. With a GPS receiver in hand, you can tap into the network of government satellites to calculate your position on Earth to within meters. With a GIS on your desktop, you can import acquired GPS data onto to your desktop and combine it with other geospatial features such as maps, aerial photos and satellite imagery.
Cyber attacks from individuals, organized crime, extremist groups, terrorists as well as nation states pose a significant threat to the national security of the United States. While many believe that this is a government issue, closer analysis of the problem suggests otherwise. Any computer that is not properly protected can be compromised and used as a weapon against the system owner, businesses and our economy, the nation’s infrastructure or in some rare cases our defenses. Personal, business and government systems are constantly under attack and the frequency and sophistication of the attacks is rapidly increasing.
The number of new computer systems threat skyrocketed nearly 570 percent from those identified in 2006. According to one 2007 computer security study, the average annual loss reported by U.S. companies increased by nearly 210 percent to $350,424 (per occurence) in 2007. The top three primary sources of loss were financial fraud, losses due to computer virus and system penetration by outsiders. About 20 percent of the companies reporting security incidents said they have fallen victim to targeted malware attacks. Nearly 1.2 million different pieces of malware have been identified and reside in the malware repository. Malware is software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner’s informed consent. The term is a combination of the words malicious and software. The expression is a general term used by computer professionals to mean a variety of forms of hostile, destructive, intrusive, or annoying software. The bad news is malware is just one of the many threats to computers, systems and networks.
A reader of the blog asked me “Why with all the U.S. technological expertise are we so vulnerable to these threats?” That is a great question. Considering a recent report suggested that around 90 percent of breaches could have been prevented, why are our computer systems so at risk?
After giving this a fair amount of thought I came to the following realization. It is our attitude! For some reason there is an abundance of “I know more than they do” types in information security. If that is not bad enough, the second most prominent attitude is “It can’t happen here” followed closely by “I will address it when it happens to me.”
Example 1 – A $13 billion publically traded corporation has five full time staff assigned to information security. When I asked the Director how he spent his time he said by far most was in the Human Resources Department and with corporate lawyers.
Example 2 – A systems design and development organization that services part of our nation’s infrastructure was briefed on the issues and threats of cyber attack. Numerous examples were provided to that organization that showed their industry had already experienced cyber attacks. In addition, a high level overview of their operational procedures resulted in the identification of two critical vulnerabilities that exposed the systems to compromise. The organization addressed one of those issues and decided to take a wait and see approach to addressing the other.
Example 3 – A security consulting firm contacted me as an advisor. They were brought in to review security and recommend changes of a publically traded company. During their work they discovered the company had been breached. They had found a “bot” attached to an Oracle database. The “bot” collected information about the manufacturing cost of the company’s products. They approached the CIO with the facts and the Sarbanes-Oxley issues, he refused to communicate the issue to the senior executives and then cancelled their contract.
Well, we don’t know more than all the hackers do. This is a highly dynamic threat environment that even the top security professional say is “challenging.” The “it can’t happen here” attitude is insane. One veteran US Special Agent in cybercrime investigation publically stated how companies do their best to cover up corporate espionage and insider theft. He went on to say he had seen entire corporate networks of over 100,000 systems completely compromised and hundreds of thousands of files exfiltrated and not disclosed. The fact is, if all system breaches were reported the security metrics would be much worse that the ones reported earlier here. So it not only can happen here, it probably already did and got covered up.
[From Covering Up Cyber Assaults]
New research could allow ISPs to selectively block or slow down your encrypted traffic even if they cannot snoop on your transmitted data. Italian researchers have found a way to categorize the type of traffic that is hidden inside an encrypted SSH session to around 90% accuracy. They are achieving this by analyzing packet sizes and inter-packet intervals instead of looking at the content itself. Challenges remain for ISPs to implement this technology, but it’s clear that encrypting your traffic inside an SSH session or VPN connection is not a solution to protect net neutrality.
The FBI has confirmed to Popular Mechanics that it’s not only adding palm prints to its criminal records, but preparing to balloon its repository of photos, which an agency official says ‘could be the basis for our facial recognition.’ It’s all part of a new biometric software system that could store millions of iris scans within 10 years and has privacy advocates crying foul. Quoting: ‘The FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, which could cost as much as $1 billion over its 10-year life cycle, will create an unprecedented database of biometric markers, such as facial images and iris scans. For criminal investigators, NGI could be as useful as DNA some day — a distinctive scar or a lopsided jaw line could mean the difference between a cold case and closed one. And for privacy watchdogs, it’s a dual threat — seen as a step toward a police state, and a gold mine of personal data waiting to be plundered by cyber criminals.
My favorite group of federal Darwin Candidates are at it again.
Although its features and terminology may seem strange if you’re used to more traditional Linux filesystems, ZFS offers a great deal of flexibility.
[From ZFS on FUSE]
