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Cyberwar Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 22, 2016 16 Comments
A Legal Insurrection reader who I know to be involved in internet security issues sent me the following explanation of yesterday's attacks that slowed down many major websites. That person asked to keep his name private because of his work position. Here is his explanation sent to clients of the firm he works at: Our entire senior technical team and I have read through the intelligence on the DDOS attack today against DYN. It resulted in massive internet outages on the east coast and eventually the west coast. This was actually several separate escalating attacks.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 21, 2016 26 Comments
I noticed the problem accessing Twitter. Tweets not loading fully, the site timing out. That wouldn't be the first time Twitter has had a hiccup, but it lasted a long time. Here's why, via Gizmodo, Today's Brutal DDoS Attack Is the Beginning of a Bleak Future:
This morning a ton of websites and services, including Spotify and Twitter, were unreachable because of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Dyn, a major DNS provider. Details of how the attack happened remain vague, but one thing seems certain. Our internet is frightfully fragile in the face of increasingly sophisticated hacks. Some think the attack was a political conspiracy, like an attempt to take down the internet so that people wouldn’t be able to read the leaked Clinton emails on Wikileaks. Others think it’s the usual Russian assault. No matter who did it, we should expect incidents like this to get worse in the future. While DDoS attacks used to be a pretty weak threat, we’re entering a new era....

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on April 26, 2016 10 Comments
Right in time for Passover as tiny Jewish student communities across Germany were preparing for the Jewish holiday, several University campuses all over the country were hit by a major anti-Semitic cyber-attack. Last week, printers and photo copy machines on college campuses across Germany began spontaneously shooting off flyers filled with anti-Semitic contents. The Spokesperson of Jewish Society at the University of Bonn says, "​Just imagine sitting in your university and suddenly, dozens of anti-Semitic fliers with hate speech fly out of the printer next to you. Your university has usually been a safe place but now you face death threats against you, your family, and your friends, and you can't do anything to stop the attack. On top of that, you find out that your school was one of several in the country that was targeted." Bonn-based German newspaper General Anzeiger reports:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 24, 2016 6 Comments
The Obama Administration issued a federal indictment charging seven Iranian officials with cyber crimes. Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon reports:
The Obama administration unsealed a federal indictment Thursday charging seven Iranian government-backed hackers with cyber crimes as the result of multiple attacks in recent years on several U.S. banks and a New York dam, according to officials. The indictment accuses the Iranian government and its Revolutionary Guards Corps of orchestrating and conducting a years-long cyber attack on at least 46 U.S. financial institutions and a dam based outside of New York City.

Posted by Taryn O'Neill on March 02, 2016 6 Comments
In early 2014, the Internal Revenue Service launched a new feature on its website referred to as 'Get Transcript.' This feature allowed taxpayers to view and download their transcript, or a document that lists most line items on a tax return and includes accompanying forms and schedules. In May of last year, the IRS announced its Get Transcript feature had been hacked by criminals using taxpayer information that was obtained by different means. At this time, the IRS had determined that a little over 114,000 taxpayers' returns were accessed and the Get Transcript feature was taken offline. By August, the IRS revised the original number to 334,000 breached or targeted tax returns. As of last Friday, however, the IRS added another 390,000 taxpayers to the list, upping the number of accounts effected to over 700,000. Not included in this number are 500,000 accounts the hackers targeted but were unable to obtain.

Posted by Taryn O'Neill on February 13, 2016 1 Comment
With the help of the FBI, British officials arrested a teen they believe may have ties to a series of hacks targeting the U.S. government and high level officials. The 16-year-old was arrested in the East Midlands, U.K. on Tuesday and has been accused of having connections to the hack of CIA Director John Brennan's personal email account in October of last year, along others. The identity of the teen has not been released, but he is believed to be the pro-Palestinian hacker known as "Cracka" that leads the hacktivist group known as "Crackas With Attitude," or CWA. Officials with the Thames Valley Police confirmed the arrest in a statement, saying that it had arrested a 16-year-old boy, "on suspicion of conspiracy to commit unauthorised access to computer material contrary to Section 1 Computer Misuse Act 1990, conspiracy to commit Unauthorised access with intent to commit further offenses contrary to Section 2 Computer Misuse Act 1990 and conspiracy to commit unauthorised acts with intent to impair, or with recklessness as to impairing operation of a computer contrary to Section 3 Computer Misuse Act 1990."

Posted by Taryn O'Neill on February 11, 2016 5 Comments
Following through with a threat made last week, a group of hackers released data pertaining to as many as 30,000 federal government employees. Hacktivists released the information in two waves via a Twitter account by the name of @DotGovs. The data was posted on the encrypted text-sharing website by the name of Cryptobank. The first release took place place shortly after kickoff on Super Bowl Sunday and included a directory of names, job titles, and contact information of 9,355 employees of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The second directory was released on Monday and contained subsequent information on 20,000 employees of the FBI. This is more than half of FBI personnel. Tweets from the @DotGovs account were filled with pro-Palestine hashtags. One tweet was directed towards the U. S., saying the hackers would not stop "until they cut relations with Israel."

Posted by Taryn O'Neill on January 27, 2016 10 Comments
A security breach discovered at a California-based software and hardware company has many officials worried, including U.S. Congressman Will Hurd of Texas. Rep. Hurd expressed his concerns over the breach in a Wall Street Journal op-ed explaining that foreign hackers may "have been reading the encrypted communications of U.S. government agencies for the past three years." Juniper Networks provides network equipment and routers to the U.S. government that are believed to be used by the Defense Department, FBI, Justice Department, and Treasury Department.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on November 03, 2015 20 Comments
China has been a global hub for manufacturing counterfeit electronics and consumer goods, but as the Asian giant asserts its dominance in the Asian Pacific and beyond, its defense establishment is using the same approach to modernise its vast armed forces.  Despite its large standing and reserve army, Chinese Armed Forces technologically lags behind US, Russian and NATO forces. China has decided to manufacture ‘counterfeit’ high-end defense technology on a large scale to overcome its existing strategic weakness. According to a recent report published by the US Naval Institute, China is using military espionage and reverse engineering to build a modern army with “cloned weapons.” Using cyber espionage and by making secret deals with US arms buyers, China has managed to obtain advance US weapons technology. China is reportedly also targeting Russia in its quest for high-end military technology. The Chinese often buy single units of Russian advanced military systems on a “trial” basis and reverse-engineer the weaponry to produce a large-scale Chinese version:

Posted by Amy Miller on October 22, 2015 3 Comments
Today, a controversial cybersecurity bill aimed at making it easier for corporations to prevent hacking attacks advanced in the Senate with bipartisan support. The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) in its current form would make it possible for corporations to share information about cyberattacks with each other---or the goverment---without having to worry about fielding privacy-based lawsuits. The bill enjoys bipartisan support in the Senate---and has languished under bipartisan opposition, led by Kentucky Senator and Presidential hopeful Rand Paul. From Reuters:
But many privacy activists and a few lawmakers, including Republican Senator Rand Paul and Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, vehemently oppose it. Several big tech companies also have come out against the measure, arguing that it fails to protect users' privacy and does too little to prevent cyber attacks.

Posted by Amy Miller on October 19, 2015 7 Comments
According to one California-based cybersecurity firm, China is already violating its new cybersecurity agreement with the United States. According to CrowdStrike founder Dmitri Alperovich, his firm has seen "no change in behavior" since President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the anti-hacking deal on September 25. CrowdStrike has documented seven attacks against US-based pharmaceutical and tech companies since then, "where the primary benefit of the intrusions seems clearly aligned to facilitate theft of intellectual property and trade secrets, rather than to conduct traditional national security-related intelligence collection." This, of course, is exactly why we signed this anti-hacking agreement to begin with. In addition to national security targets, cyberthieves most commonly target valuable intellectual property. Last month's deal did not (pretend?) to prevent cybersyping for national security purposes; instead, it prohibited "economic espionage," in which a hacker steals information from one company and sells it to a competitor.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on August 10, 2015 20 Comments
For the past five years, Chinese cyber spies have been reading the private emails of an undisclosed but presumably large number of top Obama administration officials. A report released Monday from NBC news sites an anonymous U.S. senior intelligence official and a secret document. Evidently, U.S. officials have been aware of the email security breech since April of 2010.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 06, 2015 21 Comments
After the Office of Personnel Management Chinese hacking, it seems that almost no government system is secure. Now another example. From NBC News:
U.S. officials tell NBC News that Russia launched a "sophisticated cyberattack" against the Pentagon's Joint Staff unclassified email system, which has been shut down and taken offline for nearly two weeks. According to the officials, the "sophisticated cyber intrusion" occurred sometime around July 25 and affected some 4,000 military and civilian personnel who work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sources tell NBC News that it appears the cyberattack relied on some kind of automated system that rapidly gathered massive amounts of data and within a minute distributed all the information to thousands of accounts on the Internet. The officials also report the suspected Russian hackers coordinated the sophisticated cyberassault via encrypted accounts on social media. The officials say its not clear whether the attack was sanctioned by the Russian government or conducted by individuals. But, given the scope of the attack, "It was clearly the work of a state actor," the officials say.

Posted by Amy Miller on July 22, 2015 7 Comments
The federal government has finally decided how to publicly handle an OPM data breach that compromised over 20 million federal employee records this past June. Rather, they've decided what they aren't going to do about it. Citing concerns over national security, the Obama Administration has decided that they will not publicly blame China for the hack, even though conventional wisdom (and a fair amount of now-public evidence) suggests that they were responsible. Officials fear that coming out in an official capacity against Beijing will compromise what evidence investigators have been able to assemble. More from WaPo:
“We have chosen not to make any official assertions about attribution at this point,” said a senior administration official, despite the widely held conviction that Beijing was responsible. The official cited factors including concern that making a public case against China could require exposing details of the United States’ own espionage and cyberspace capabilities. The official was among several who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

Posted by Amy Miller on July 09, 2015 7 Comments
Early last month, the news hit that the federal government's Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had been hacked, compromising the records of millions of federal employees. It was one of the largest thefts of government data ever recorded, and caused a panic amongst current and federal employees. In the wake of the breach, many experts said that the hack was likely worse than had been reported; it looks like they were right---to the tune of 21.5 million victims. Via Fox News:
Hackers swiped Social Security numbers from 21.5 million people -- as well as fingerprint records and other information from background check investigations -- in the massive breach earlier this year of federal personnel files, the government acknowledged Thursday. The Office of Personnel Management included the findings in a statement Thursday on the investigation into a pair of major hacks believed carried out by China. "The team has now concluded with high confidence that sensitive information, including the Social Security Numbers (SSNs) of 21.5 million individuals, was stolen from the background investigation databases," the agency said of the second breach, which affected background investigation files.
21.5 million is a big number. This makes it feel huge:

Posted by Amy Miller on June 18, 2015 22 Comments
The OPM mega-breach has created a nice bipartisan coalition in Congress---against the bureaucrats who allegedly did nothing to stop it. This week, members of Congress called for the resignation of OPM chief Katherine Archuleta after testimony revealed that security protecting OPM's databases is so inadequate that some believe the systems should be shut down entirely. During a 2-hour hearing before the House Oversight Committee, Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) let loose on Archuleta, calling the breach "most devastating cyberattack in our nation's history" and demanding to know why OPM was seemingly ambivalent about how vulnerable its systems were to attack. Via Ars Technica:
House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told Archuleta and OPM Chief Information Officer Donna Seymour, "You failed utterly and totally." He referred to OPM's own inspector general reports and hammered Seymour in particular for the 11 major systems out of 47 that had not been properly certified as secure—which were not contractor systems but systems operated by OPM's own IT department. "They were in your office, which is a horrible example to be setting," Chaffetz told Seymour. In total, 65 percent of OPM's data was stored on those uncertified systems. Chaffetz pointed out in his opening statement that for the past eight years, according to OPM's own Inspector General reports, "OPM's data security posture was akin to leaving all your doors and windows unlocked and hoping nobody would walk in and take the information."

Posted by Amy Miller on June 04, 2015 14 Comments
US officials suspect hackers in China are responsible for a cyber attack on the Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) computer systems that left the personal information of almost four million current and former federal government employees exposed. The breach, which was detected back in April, is now being described as one of the largest thefts of government data ever seen. DHS concluded back in May that the information had indeed been compromised and stolen, but so far neither OPM of the FBI have indicated exactly whose records have been exposed. More from WaPo:
“Certainly, OPM is a high value target,” said OPM Chief Information Officer Donna Seymour, in an interview. “We have a lot of information about people, and that is something that our adversaries want.” With that understanding, she said, within the last year “OPM has undertaken an aggressive effort to update our cybersecurity posture, adding numerous tools and capabilities to our networks. As a result of adding these tools, we were able to detect this intrusion into our networks.” “Protecting our federal employee data from malicious cyber incidents is of the highest priority at OPM,” said the agency’s director, Katherine Archuleta, in a statement.
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