China has made industrial espionage an integral part of its economic policy, stealing company secrets to help it leapfrog over foreign competitors to further its goal of becoming the world's largest economy. What has been happening over the course of the last five years is that China has been hacking its way into every corporation it can find listed in Dun& Bradstreet! http://venitism.blogspot.com
Chinese are stealing entire industries. This may be the biggest transfer of wealth in a short period of time that the world has ever seen. The hackers are part of a massive espionage ring codenamed Byzantine Foothold by U.S. investigators. They specialize in infiltrating networks using phishing e-mails laden with spyware, often passing on the task of exfiltrating data to others. The hacking is centrally coordinated in China. Byzantine Foothold is made up of one hundred hackers.
Chinese hackers provide unique room service, infiltrating internet service providers to the world's leading hotels, gaining access to millions of confidential messages of traveling executives, as well as to the victims' corporate networks. They've also infiltrated major brothels of the West, gaining personal information on top executives.
Governments and gangs realize malware is much cheaper than mainstream warfare.
Malware, short for malicious software, consists of programming designed to
disrupt operation, gather information that leads to loss of privacy or
exploitation, gain unauthorized access to system resources, and other abusive
behavior. Malware includes computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, spyware,
dishonest adware, scareware, crimeware, rootkits, and other malicious and
unwanted software or program. In law, malware is sometimes known as computer
contaminant. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a
computer. A virus can spread from one computer to another. Viruses can increase
their chances of spreading to other computers by infecting files. In order to
replicate itself, a virus must be permitted to execute code and write to memory.
For this reason, many viruses attach themselves to executable files that may be
part of legitimate programs. If a user attempts to launch an infected program,
the virus' code may be executed simultaneously.
The more sophisticated a virus is, the more exciting it is to crack its
algorithm. There's a little professional respect involved, too. But it has
nothing to do with enthusiasm. Every virus is a crime. A cyber war can't be
won; it only has perpetrators and victims. Out there, all we can do is prevent
everything from spinning out of control.
Based on the number of programmed viruses, Russia is in third place behind China
and Latin America. Russians are also among the most sophisticated
and advanced players in criminal cyber activity. These days, they invent viruses
and complex Trojan programs on demand. They launder money through the Internet.
However, the largest number of harmful programs are written in Chinese. This
means that they can be coming directly from the People's Republic, but also from
Singapore, Malaysia and even California, where there are Mandarin-speaking
hackers.
In general, the crime level in India is low. It's probably a matter of the
mentality. India and China have roughly the same population, the same computer
density, a similar standard of living and similar religious roots. But China
spits out viruses like they were coming off an assembly line.
Americans are now openly saying that they would respond to a large-scale,
destructive Internet attack with a classic military strike. But what will they
do if the cyber attack is launched against the United States from within their
own country? Everything depends on computers these days: the energy supply,
airplanes, trains. The Net has become a war zone, a platform for professional
attacks on critical infrastructure.
Governments are behind many of the virus attacks! Russian spammers directed
special computer networks known as botnets against Estonia. It became the
prototype of a belligerent cyber attack on a country. The attackers didn't just
cripple government websites; they also sent so many spam e-mails that the entire
Internet channel to Estonia quickly collapsed. The country was cut off from the
world. The banking system, trade, transportation, everything ground to a halt.
Stuxnet, a computer virus developed by CIA and Israeli Intelligence, can infiltrate
highly secure computers. Stuxnet entered the global political arena in June 2010. The virus had attacked computers at Iran's Natanz nuclear facility, where scientists are enriching uranium, and manipulated the centrifuges to make them self-destruct. It is a digital bunker buster. The virus represents a fundamentally new addition to the arsenal of modern warfare. It enables a military attack using a computer program tailored to a specific target.
Internet security firms have raised the specter of a new round of cyber warfare
with the detection of the Duqu virus, a relative of last Stuxnet. Duqu's
detection comes amid growing talk in Europe about launching pre-emptive strikes
to stop cyberattacks before they happen. But the nature of malware like Duqu and
Stuxnet make pre-emptive strikes unrealistic.
The problem is you can't really say where they come from. You need evidence
about who is behind an attack before you can strike preemptively, but you can
never be sure. You can't attack infrastructure, or even send in a stealth
bomber, because any information about a location could be a red herring.
Duqu is not spreading like Stuxnet. Duqu was carefully placed and can be
controlled remotely. Duqu has been used to target only a limited number of
organizations for the specific assets. Its warhead is not aimed at the
technology industry. Duqu is being used to steal information; it's industrial
espionage.
Flame is a new virus developed by CIA and Israeli Intelligence, much stronger than Stuxnet and Duqu. Flame can gather data files, remotely change settings on computers, turn on PC microphones to record conversations, take screen shots and log instant messaging chats. Both Flame and Stuxnet appear to infect machines by exploiting the same flaw in the Windows operating system and employ a similar way of spreading.
Flame stays hidden because it is so different to the viruses, worms, and trojans that most security programs are designed to catch. Flame tries to work out which security scanning software was installed on a target machine and then disguises itself as a type of computer file that an individual anti-virus program would not usually suspect of harboring malicious code. Flame also escapes detection because it is so tightly targeted. It's much much easier writing protection for a piece of malware than analyzing what it actually does. Dissecting Flame to find out all of its quirks and functionality will take time.
Kaspersky Lab unearthed Flame. While the espionage toolkit infected systems across the Middle East, Iran appears to have been its primary target. United States, UK, India, Israel, China and Russia are among the countries capable of developing such software, which costs at least a hundred million euros to develop. Software that manages industrial systems or transportation or power grids or air traffic must be based on secure operating systems.
Malware makers can hide their tracks using spoofing, VPNs, proxy services, and
other means to make it look like they are based in any number of countries -
when in truth they are somewhere completely different. http://venitism.blogspot.com
The government of China has made trillions of euros doing industrial espionage
with malware developed by Western corporations! This is an unfair and illegal
comparative advantage. Moreover, China has infiltrated all the infosystems of
all governments and all international organizations! Now Uncle Chen knows
everything about Uncle Sam, Uncle Ken (UK), and Fourth Reich (EU)! But nobody
can penetrate the Firewall of China, which was developed by Cisco!
The West has developed electronic weapons that could be used to defend the West
against cyber attacks or prevent them. The West is prepared to strike first in a
cyber conflict. Cyber arms grow out of control. No government can guarantee it
can protect a country or entity against cyber attack. In future wars, there will
be a cyber element. Countries hope that if they threaten to use missiles to
retaliate against a cyber attack, others will think twice about launching one.
After security experts learned that Flame had infected computer networks in Iran and even systems in neighboring Arab countries, its creators have dispatched a suicide command that killed off the virus.
The suicide code was designed to completely remove Flame from the compromised computer, but in doing so it does more than just eliminate the infection. The prompt that kills off Flame removes so much of the virus' information that researchers will be unable to study the outbreak.
The module contains a long list of files and folders that are used by Flame. It locates every file on disk, removes it, and subsequently overwrites the disk with random characters to prevent anyone from obtaining information about the infection. This component contains a routine to generate random characters to use in the overwriting operation. It tries to leave no traces of the infection behind.
Very early on there was some sharing between authors of both Stuxnet and Flame. Obama authorized the continuation of a cyberwar program aimed at Iran that had been initiated during the presidency of George Bush. Given the ties between the two malicious programs, the killing off of Flame could very well be an attempt by the government to give researchers less time to further find a relationship between the viruses.
Eugene Kaspersky declares that cyber terrorism can bring the end of civilization! Doomsday scenarios are a common occurrence now, but coming from Kaspersky they should raise alarm bells. A global Internet blackout and crippling attacks against key infrastructure are among two possible cyber-pandemics. Kaspersky is afraid cyber terrorism is just beginning. Very soon, many countries around the world will know it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Kaspersky is afraid it will be the end of the world as we know it! http://venitism.blogspot.com
Kaspersky believes the evolution from cyber war to cyber terrorism comes from the indiscriminate nature of cyber weapons. Very much like a modern-day Pandora's Box, Flame and other forms of malware cannot be controlled upon release. Faced with a replicating threat that knows no national boundaries, cyber weapons can take down infrastructure around the world, hurting scores of innocent victims along the way.
