Friday, February 26, 2016

The Coming Cyber War #2

Full Blown Cyber War:

Reports are the US military has launched a cyber attack on IS/Daesh.

The USA had plans to attack many different parts of Iran with cyber weapons if diplomacy had failed.  This planned operation was called Nitro Zeus.   It should be noted from the Times article:

At its height, officials say, the planning for Nitro Zeus involved thousands of American military and intelligence personnel, spending tens of millions of dollars and placing electronic implants in Iranian computer networks to “prepare the battlefield,” in the parlance of the Pentagon.
The cyber weapons are already present in Iran.  The trigger was simply not pressed.

The cutbacks to the US military may cause gaps in the cyber warfare sections.

How will the Navy fight in a cyber war? (part 2)   Part of the answer might be to unplug ships from each other in the event of a cyber attack.  It has released more cyber security guidelines.

The US military service chiefs are rejecting the idea of creating a fifth branch of the military to just handle cyberwarfare.  I could have sworn it already exists and is called the NSA.

Britain is putting an increased emphasis on cyberwarfare.

Australia is, too, adding significant capabilities (paywall), including hiring 1700 people just for its cyberwarfare group.

Hackers:

The Russian cyber espionage group, Pawn Storm, has released a vicious linux centric trojan called Fysbis, one that eats android phones, too.  Yet it will not infect phones and computers is Russia.

The US DHS has determined the power outage in Ukraine in December was definitely a cyber attack, but declined to name the source.  Others have stated it was the Russian group named 'Sandworm.'

Hackers are already making millions from their actions.

The Sony hackers were at it for years prior.

Another set of hackers held a hospital for ransom.  The hospital paid out $17,000 to get their computers back.

In a frightening test, a hospital was hacked.  The drug dispensaries, patient monitoring and elsewhere were found to be hackable.

A major security flaw was found in DNS, the giant 'yellow pages' of the internet, that could allow virtually the entire Internet to be infected.

A simple keylogger malware was released into the wild and, in an amusing twist, ended up infecting the original coders' computers 16 times.   This is the danger of cyberweapons.  They can inadvertently turn against you.

Those Between:

The German police are allowed to use a trojan malware.

CMU developed software to attack TOR for the DOD, but the FBI now ants the software.

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