Archive for the ‘CyberSec’ Category
Complexity in Networks and Systems: Analyzing the Intersection of Human Influence and Vulnerability Exploitation
Summary:
“Complexity in Networks and Systems: Analyzing the Intersection of Human Influence and Vulnerability Exploitation” delves into the intricate relationship between the evolving complexity of digital networks and systems, the unpredictable nature of human interaction with these systems, and the consequent emergence of security vulnerabilities. It identifies the increasing complexity inherent in modern digital infrastructures—fueled by a continuous push for innovation and integration of diverse functionalities—as a double-edged sword that, while showcasing human ingenuity, also paves the way for disorder and vulnerabilities.
The paper outlines how the systemic complexity arises from the relentless pursuit of advancements and efficiency, leading to a web of inter-dependencies that can be difficult to navigate and secure. This complexity, exacerbated by human errors such as misconfigurations or oversight, becomes a fertile ground for adversaries to exploit, posing significant risks to data security and service continuity.
In addressing these challenges, the summary emphasizes the necessity for comprehensive cybersecurity strategies that include advanced threat intelligence platforms, defensive mechanisms, and a shift towards simplifying system designs. Tools and methodologies from organizations like InfraGard, DHS CISA, and VirusTotal, along with defensive tactics like Proofpoint Emerging Threats Rules and the CINS Score, are highlighted as critical components in the cybersecurity arsenal.
The conclusion underscores the pressing need for an integrated approach to manage and mitigate the risks presented by the intertwining of complex systems and human influence. By advocating for the reduction of unnecessary complexity and the promotion of cybersecurity awareness, the paper suggests a path forward to enhance the resilience of networks and systems against the backdrop of increasing complexity and vulnerability exploitation.
Emergence of Systemic Complexity
The evolution of systemic complexity is a consequence of the relentless drive for innovation and enhanced efficiency within digital infrastructures. Each incremental addition or modification, aimed at improving or expanding capabilities, contributes to an escalating level of complexity. This progression, while reflective of human ingenuity, inadvertently facilitates a breeding ground for disorder. The intersection of human error, such as misconfiguration or oversight, with the complex inter-dependencies of modern systems introduces a layer of unpredictability, underscoring the challenges in maintaining orderly and secure digital environments.
Vulnerability Through Complexity
The inherent vulnerabilities of complex systems stem from their multifaceted nature, compounded by the unpredictable variables introduced through human oversight and errors in control. Adversaries exploit these vulnerabilities, leveraging sophisticated techniques to navigate and manipulate the labyrinthine structures of modern networks. The implications of such exploitation are far-reaching, potentially compromising sensitive data and disrupting essential services, thereby underscoring the critical need for robust security measures in the face of complexity-induced vulnerabilities.
Mitigating Complexity-Induced Vulnerabilities
In response to the vulnerabilities introduced by systemic complexity and human influence, cybersecurity strategies encompass a comprehensive suite of tools and methodologies. The deployment of advanced threat intelligence platforms, such as those provided by InfraGard, DHS CISA, and VirusTotal, alongside the implementation of defensive mechanisms like Proofpoint Emerging Threats Rules and the CINS Score, exemplifies the multifaceted approach required to address these challenges. Furthermore, the pursuit of simplicity within system design and operation emerges as a pivotal principle in mitigating the risks associated with complexity. By reducing unnecessary intricacies and promoting cybersecurity awareness, the potential for vulnerability exploitation can be significantly diminished.
Conclusion
The intricate dynamics between the escalating complexity of networks and systems, coupled with the unpredictable nature of human interaction, significantly compound the landscape of cybersecurity challenges. The emergence of security vulnerabilities as a byproduct of these interactions underscores a pivotal concern that demands a nuanced and proactive response. This analysis underscores the imperative for a holistic approach towards mitigating the risks inherent in sophisticated digital infrastructures. It posits that the key to navigating the tumultuous waters of complexity and human-induced chaos lies in a strategy that encompasses the reduction of system complexity, the deployment of advanced security protocols, and the empowerment of users with cybersecurity knowledge.
Reducing the complexity of systems entails a deliberate effort to streamline and simplify the architecture and functionalities of digital infrastructures. This initiative involves critically evaluating existing systems to identify and eliminate redundant processes, consolidating functionalities to minimize points of failure, and adopting minimalist design principles that prioritize efficiency and security. Simplification not only makes systems more manageable and less prone to errors but also reduces the attack surface available to adversaries, thereby diminishing the likelihood of successful exploits.
Parallel to simplification, the implementation of sophisticated security measures is indispensable in the defense against cyber threats. This involves leveraging state-of-the-art technologies and frameworks designed to preemptively identify, neutralize, and mitigate vulnerabilities. Advanced encryption methods, real-time threat detection systems, and robust authentication protocols represent the cornerstone of a defensive strategy that can adapt to and counteract the evolving tactics of cyber adversaries. Additionally, integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence into cybersecurity efforts can provide predictive insights, enhancing the ability to preempt threats before they materialize.
Moreover, cultivating an informed user base is critical in fortifying the first line of defense against cyber threats. Human error remains one of the most significant vulnerabilities in cybersecurity. Educating users on best practices, potential risks, and the critical role they play in maintaining system security is paramount. This involves regular training sessions, simulations of phishing and other common attacks, and fostering a culture of security awareness within organizations. Empowered with knowledge and vigilance, users can become a potent force in detecting and preventing security breaches.
In essence, navigating the complexities and challenges posed by modern digital infrastructures requires a concerted and multifaceted approach. By embracing the principles of system simplification, implementing cutting-edge security measures, and fostering a well-informed user community, it is possible to enhance the resilience of networks and systems significantly. This integrated strategy not only addresses the immediate threats posed by complexity and chaos but also lays the foundation for a more secure and sustainable digital future, where the potential for exploitation is significantly reduced.
Navigating the Cybersecurity “Lottery”: Understanding Corporate Risks and Cognitive Biases
This post was created in tandem between Scot Terban and the ICEBREAKER A.I. Intel Analyst, created and trained by Scot Terban.
In the realm of corporate cybersecurity, the prevalence of a “lottery mentality” is a significant concern. This mindset reflects a strategic miscalculation where organizations treat the prospect of a cyberattack as a remote possibility, akin to winning a lottery. This underestimation leads to a dangerous complacency towards investing in robust cybersecurity measures. Far from being a mere oversight, this approach is deeply rooted in cognitive biases that distort rational decision-making within corporate cultures.
Firstly, the “lottery mentality” is underpinned by an optimism bias—the tendency to believe that one is less at risk of experiencing a negative event compared to others. This bias can lead companies to believe that they are unlikely to be the targets of cyberattacks, despite growing evidence to the contrary. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) emphasizes the importance of adopting heightened cybersecurity practices across all organizations, regardless of their size, to protect their critical assets against sophisticated cyber actors and nation-states.
Moreover, this mentality is often reinforced by the anchoring bias. In decision-making processes, initial information—such as previous years’ cybersecurity budgets or the perceived rarity of cyberattacks—serves as an anchor that influences subsequent judgments and decisions. This can result in static or inadequate cybersecurity budgets that fail to account for the evolving landscape of threats.
Another cognitive bias at play is the availability heuristic, where decision-makers overestimate the likelihood of events based on their ability to recall examples. Ironically, in the context of cybersecurity, this may lead to underestimation of threats because companies that have not experienced significant breaches firsthand might believe such incidents are less common than they actually are.
The “lottery mentality” also interacts with the action-oriented bias, where the urgency to act leads to decisions based on overconfidence or excessive optimism about controlling future outcomes. This bias can manifest as an unwarranted confidence in existing security measures or an underestimation of the capabilities of potential attackers.
Countering these biases requires a multifaceted approach. Adopting the “outside view,” for instance, involves looking at a broader set of data or cases to inform decisions, helping to adjust overly optimistic projections about cybersecurity risk management. Recognizing uncertainty and embracing more deliberative decision-making processes that account for a range of outcomes can also mitigate action-oriented biases.
Ultimately, overcoming the “lottery mentality” in corporate cybersecurity necessitates a shift in mindset from seeing security as a cost center to viewing it as a critical investment in the organization’s resilience and sustainability. Leadership plays a crucial role in fostering a culture that values cybersecurity awareness and proactive defense, ensuring that decision-making processes are informed by the real risks and necessary investments to safeguard digital assets effectively. This shift involves recognizing and actively mitigating the influence of cognitive biases, fostering an organizational culture that prioritizes comprehensive and informed cybersecurity strategies over complacency and wishful thinking.
The Underestimated Risk of Cyberattacks
The common belief that cyberattacks are rare events grossly underestimates the persistent and evolving threat landscape that businesses face today. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) underscores the critical need for organizations, regardless of their size or sector, to implement comprehensive cybersecurity measures to safeguard their most valuable assets【6†source】. This necessity stems from the relentless efforts of sophisticated cyber criminals and nation-states, who are continually seeking to exploit any vulnerabilities to perpetrate theft, fraud, and disruptions. These adversaries are not only motivated by financial gain but also by the desire to undermine the integrity and availability of critical services. The failure to acknowledge and prepare for these threats not only endangers sensitive information but also exposes organizations to financial and reputational ruin.
The repercussions of underestimating the risk of cyberattacks are far-reaching and can have catastrophic consequences for organizations. Financial losses from such incidents can be staggering, not only due to the immediate theft or fraud but also because of the subsequent costs associated with recovery efforts, legal fees, fines, and the long-term impact on customer trust and business reputation. Moreover, the disruption of essential services can have a profound effect on society, especially when critical infrastructure sectors are targeted. These include utilities, healthcare, finance, and transportation systems, whose compromise could lead to significant societal disruptions. As such, CISA’s emphasis on the adoption of robust cybersecurity practices highlights the urgent need for a proactive and comprehensive approach to cybersecurity, aimed at thwarting the efforts of cyber adversaries and mitigating the potential damages of cyberattacks.
The True Cost of Neglecting Cybersecurity
Neglecting cybersecurity not only poses a significant risk to an organization’s operational integrity but also incurs substantial financial and reputational costs that can profoundly impact its long-term viability. Misconfigurations in cloud infrastructure, as highlighted, have emerged as a primary vulnerability, leading to some of the most consequential data breaches. These incidents expose sensitive information and can result in losses amounting to billions of dollars. The swift adoption of cloud technologies, while beneficial for scalability and efficiency, has simultaneously broadened the attack surface accessible to cyber criminals. This evolution demands a corresponding escalation in the rigor and proactivity of cybersecurity measures to protect against potential threats effectively.
Furthermore, the financial repercussions of a cyberattack extend beyond immediate loss of assets or ransom payments. Companies face additional costs related to system remediation, increased insurance premiums, legal fees, fines for regulatory non-compliance, and potential litigation from affected parties. The reputational damage from a breach can erode customer trust and loyalty, leading to lost revenue and a decline in market value. This reputational impact is especially devastating in a digital age where consumer confidence is paramount, and news of security breaches spreads rapidly online. Therefore, investing in comprehensive cybersecurity practices is not just about mitigating direct financial losses but also about preserving the long-term reputation and trustworthiness of the organization in the eyes of its customers, partners, and stakeholders.
Cognitive Biases in Corporate Decision-Making
The “lottery mentality” is further exacerbated by cognitive biases that distort rational decision-making:
- The “Inside View” Bias: Executives often rely on specific, optimistic projections without adequately considering broader data from analogous situations. This bias leads to overestimation of outcomes and underestimation of risks.
- Anchoring: Initial figures, such as last year’s budgets, unduly influence current decisions, preventing necessary adjustments in cybersecurity investments.
- Action-oriented Biases: The need to act can result in decisions based on overconfidence or excessive optimism, underestimating the sophistication of potential attackers.
The prevalence of cognitive biases in corporate decision-making significantly impacts the strategic approach to cybersecurity, leading to the under-preparation and underestimation of risks that are far too common in today’s business environment. The “Inside View” bias encourages a narrow focus, causing executives to base decisions on their optimistic projections rather than on a comprehensive analysis of historical data and analogous situations, thereby skewing the perceived risk-reward ratio of cybersecurity investments. Similarly, the “Anchoring” effect causes past figures, like previous budgets, to unduly shape current financial commitments to cybersecurity, often to the detriment of necessary enhancements in response to the evolving digital threats landscape. Action-oriented biases further complicate the issue, driving decision-makers to prefer immediate, confident action over cautious deliberation, potentially underestimating the complexity and capability of cyber adversaries.
Addressing these biases demands a multifaceted strategy aimed at enhancing the decision-making framework within organizations. Broadening perspectives through the inclusion of diverse viewpoints and external data, acknowledging and planning for uncertainty, and fostering a culture that values deliberative, evidence-based decision-making can significantly mitigate the adverse effects of cognitive biases. This shift towards a more balanced and informed approach in strategic planning and resource allocation is crucial for developing a robust cybersecurity posture capable of defending against the sophisticated and varied threats that characterize the modern cyber landscape. By consciously striving to understand and counteract these cognitive biases, leaders can make more rational, effective decisions that bolster their organizations’ cybersecurity defenses and resilience.
Challenges Exacerbating the Lottery Mentality
Several challenges compound the lottery mentality in cybersecurity:
- The Skills Gap: A significant portion of employees are underqualified for their cybersecurity roles, highlighting a critical need for skilled professionals.
- Rapid Technological Changes: The fast pace of technological advancement and cloud adoption expands attack surfaces, making proactive security measures even more critical.
- Targeting of Critical Infrastructure: The vulnerability and impact of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, such as food, gas, financial, and transportation sectors, underscore the pressing need for enhanced cybersecurity measures.
The challenges exacerbating the “lottery mentality” in corporate cybersecurity are multi-faceted and significant, each adding layers of complexity to an already daunting issue. The skills gap represents a critical vulnerability, as the shortage of qualified cybersecurity professionals leaves organizations ill-prepared to detect, respond to, and mitigate cyber threats effectively. This gap is not just about the number of professionals in the field but also encompasses the need for ongoing training and development to keep pace with evolving threats.
Rapid technological changes further intensify these challenges. The swift adoption of new technologies, such as cloud computing, IoT devices, and mobile platforms, has expanded the attack surface dramatically. Each new technology introduces unique vulnerabilities, requiring specialized knowledge and proactive security measures to defend against potential breaches. As technology continues to advance at a breakneck pace, the need for vigilant and adaptive cybersecurity strategies becomes increasingly paramount.
Moreover, the targeting of critical infrastructure sectors—such as energy, healthcare, financial services, and transportation—by cyber adversaries highlights the significant risk that cyberattacks pose not only to individual organizations but to national security and public safety. The potential for disruption in these essential services underscores the urgent need for enhanced cybersecurity measures across all sectors. Cybersecurity is no longer just an IT concern but a strategic imperative that requires a coordinated effort from both the public and private sectors to protect critical infrastructure and ensure the resilience of national and global systems.
Case Studies: A Wake-Up Call
Real-world examples, like the ransomware attacks on Colonial Pipeline and JBS Foods, illustrate the tangible risks and consequences of inadequate cybersecurity measures. These incidents highlight the necessity for organizations to reevaluate their cybersecurity strategies and invest in protecting their assets and infrastructure against cyber threats.
In addressing cognitive biases in corporate decision-making, it’s crucial to understand how these mental shortcuts significantly skew cybersecurity strategies. The “Inside View” bias often leads executives to base decisions on overly optimistic projections, neglecting a comprehensive analysis of historical data and similar incidents that could offer a more realistic assessment of risks and outcomes. For instance, ignoring the frequency and impact of cyberattacks on organizations within the same industry can lead to under-preparedness against potential threats.
The anchoring effect, where initial figures or past budgets heavily influence future spending decisions, can result in static cybersecurity investments that fail to evolve with the increasing sophistication of cyber threats. This bias can hinder the necessary financial adjustments required to enhance cybersecurity defenses in response to an ever-changing threat landscape.
Action-oriented biases push organizations towards premature decisions, often fueled by overconfidence in their existing security measures or underestimation of attackers’ capabilities. This bias towards action, without a thorough risk assessment, may lead to inadequate defenses against sophisticated cyber adversaries who continually evolve their tactics.
Addressing these biases demands a deliberate shift towards inclusive decision-making processes that account for a wide range of data, encourage dissenting opinions, and foster a culture of continuous learning and adaptation. Incorporating diverse perspectives and challenging preconceived notions can help mitigate the risks associated with these cognitive biases, leading to more robust and effective cybersecurity strategies.
Conclusion
The dangers of the lottery mentality and cognitive biases in corporate cybersecurity are clear. Organizations must adopt informed and proactive cybersecurity strategies to protect against the ever-evolving threat landscape. By recognizing and mitigating the influence of cognitive biases, companies can make more rational, comprehensive decisions regarding their cybersecurity investments, ensuring their operations and critical infrastructure remain secure.
This discussion sheds light on the critical importance of addressing both the underestimated risks of cyberattacks and the cognitive biases that influence corporate decision-making. By understanding these factors, organizations can better navigate the cybersecurity landscape, making informed decisions that protect their assets and ensure their long-term success in the digital age.
Links:
- Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Cybersecurity Best Practices
- Cloud Infrastructure Security: Meaning, Best Practices & More | StrongDM
- Understanding Five Key Challenges to Security, Compliance, and IT Ops | Tripwire
- 8 Cyber Attacks on Critical Infrastructure – CyberExperts.com
- How cognitive biases can torpedo your decisions | McKinsey & Company
- The case for behavioral strategy | McKinsey & Company
THE CYBER WAR THREAT!
Nova had a program on this week about the impending cyber war threat that the media loves so much to go on about and scare the populace. I had hoped that it being Nova they would do a better job at covering such a topic but in the end this show was no better than a 20/20 episode and this is very disappointing. The show was remedial at best and I understand the need for that given the audience base concerned but really did you have to just talk to the beltway bandits like Richard Clarke and Former General Hayden? This is a disservice to the viewing public and frankly consists of scare programming out of PBS in the hopes of ratings?
I and others have railed about the cyber war rhetoric in the government and the media but this is PBS! Come on and do a better job of journalism would you? Look, here are the problems with your broadcast that I want you to pay attention to;
- Is cyber war possible? Sure, but on limited scales and really it would have to be truly backed up by kinetic warfare (i.e. boots on the ground) otherwise this is all just tit for tat espionage. You –rm a bunch of computers at Sony and we maybe shut down whatever is working in Pyongyang. This is not an existential threat and Nova failed to really get that across amongst the scary music and voice overs.
- The focus on the grid is one that we have seen many times before and yes, if a nation state made a concerted effort on 9 (count them NINE) choke points in the US they could in fact cause an outage on a national scale. How long would we be down? I am not sure but it would not be the end of the world and if you do such a thing you had better have C-130’s in our air space dropping troops at the same time to make it a war.
- The complexity of the systems and their semi interconnected nature makes an all out cyber attack on a national scale less likely and you did not cover that at all. There are many disparate systems in the grid and the pipeline systems. You could not likely without a great effort and a lot of luck have everything go down from a cyber attack alone. Simply put, you would have to have a kinetic aspect to the attacks to work. Something along the lines of the attacks on the transformers in the Silicon Valley area a year ago when they were shot with AK-47 fire.
- Lastly you did not cover at all the fact that there are many people out there securing this stuff where they can. I personally have been on assignments assessing the security of the grid and other systems that have SCADA/PLC’s and yes I can tell you there have been times where I was just flabbergasted by the idiocy. Why connect these things to the internet I will never understand. Why connect them via WIFI in the field makes my head explode.
Anyway, at the end of the day this show only made my head explode again at the poor quality of journalism, this time by a favorite of mine, Nova. It was one sided and just a scare piece. Has the government owned you so much that you need to be the cyber war mouthpiece for them? Did you guys lose a bet? What the holy hell were you thinking? Just stop, for the love of God stop.
Post Script Screed:
After watching this episode of Nova I went online looking for the “Aurora Test” documentation that they mentioned in the piece. The fact that they showed pages of the report redacted on air got me thinking about whether or not it was all still on the net. Well, yes yes it is and it’s all here. 840 pages of unredacted love from DHS who in their infinite wisdom through a FOIA request, released the WRONG documents. These were CLASSIFIED and they show the choke points to attack were you wanting to attack the US grid or pipeline as well as a full description of all kinds of data you would want to do so.
*hangs head*
Yes, DHS, the people who brought you the TSA and other fun security theater programs have managed to single handedly pass out the keys to the kingdom because some asshat could not think their way out of a government provided thin wet paper bag. So there you have it kids, if you want to attack the grid have at it because in the scare-o-rama that was the Cyber War Threat they say nothing has been done to secure those choke points! Yes! Complete with shadowed anonymous speakers afraid to go on the record for fear of reprisals because they are telling the truth about our security fail!
Sweeeeet.
If you are a reader here you have seen my stuff in the past on this as well as my digging around with Google to find all kinds of shit on the net that could lead to compromise of the grid. Truly, if the terrorists or anarchists or anonymous or even the fucking 13 year old down the street wanted to, they could do some damage with this stuff. How long until such a thing happens because some idiot can use Google and a COTS hacking program?
Talk about your black swans…
Yours in everlasting head-desk
K.
Digital Jihad: The Great Irhabi Cyber War That Won’t Be.
Islamic State militants are planning the creation of a ‘cyber caliphate’ protected by their own encryption software – from behind which they will launch massive hacking attacks on the U.S. and the West.
Both Islamic State and Al Qaeda claim to be actively recruiting skilled hackers in a bid to create a team of jihadist computer experts capable of causing devastating cyber disruptions to Western institutions.
They are now boasting it is only a matter of time before their plan becomes a reality.
The Great Cyber Jihad
Since Junaid Hussain escaped over the border to the new lands of jihad (aka Syria) he has been vocal on Twitter showing off his great cyber manhood in classic irhabi bloviating online. That Junaid made some inroads by hacking into the prime minister’s email address at Gmail only lends him dubious credit to his hacking skills to a person involved in the security field. This however is not how the great unwashed within the media and certain quarters of the government and the military seem to perceive the threat posed by Junaid today now that he is an ISIL irhabi.
Islamic State militants are planning the creation of a ‘cyber caliphate’ protected by their own encryption software – from behind which they will launch massive hacking attacks on the U.S. and the West.
Both Islamic State and Al Qaeda claim to be actively recruiting skilled hackers in a bid to create a team of jihadist computer experts capable of causing devastating cyber disruptions to Western institutions.
They are now boasting it is only a matter of time before their plan becomes a reality.
The above text came from just one of the spate of recent reports on the great “Cyber Jihad” that is being touted to come from the likes of Junaid and ISIS/L as they attempt to expand their reach from the Middle East globally. This ls.particular commentary makes the bile rise within my gut on so many levels though. But that kind of pales in comparison to the one right below…
“We’re in a pre-9/11 moment with cyber,” John Carlin, assistant attorney in charge of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, warned at a July conference in Aspen. “It’s clear that the terrorists want to use cyber-enabled means to cause the maximum amount of destruction as they can to our infrastructure.”
PRE-9/11 OMG!!! Look you fuckwit if that were the case then China would have already put us out of our misery really. For that matter some half assed pot sodden kid who happened to hack into our grid would have taken us down years ago. There is just no need for this posturing and certainly above all coming from someone without a clue in their head about how things really work in the world of computer security. This kind of scare tactic aimed at getting people to respond in fear to allow for the government to do anything in the name of protecting us is vile.
Meanwhile you have other players such as the one below making statements of “ALL OUT CYBER WAR” while commenting on Anonymous’ operation against ISIS. I laughed and I laughed and I laughed until I just wanted to cry at the sheer stupidity of it all. Look, Anonymous can’t get their shit together enough to be both leaderless and effective so really, how much of an “ALL OUT CYBER WAR” can there be there huh? Do you even know what a cyber war really means? Cyber warfare is both digital and kinetic in it’s purest form and what kinetics did Anonymous really carry out in this operation to DoS ISIS offline?
Lemme give you a clue… None.
“Anonymous announced late last week a full scale cyber war against the Islamic State (Operation Ice ISIS), intended to attack ISIS supporters using social media for propaganda purposes”
So aside from the bloviating and the scare tactics coming out of ISIS itself we also have our responses from the government and the media with all their so called experts on cyber war and jihad. There is a lot of wankery going on here but finally this guy makes a little sense in the middle of his post on this mess…
ISIS’s main effort to date in cyberspace has focused on psychological warfare by generating fear through flooding the internet with video clips portraying the brutal acts of beheading and mass executions, as well as victory parades, as part of developing deterrence and creating an illusion of force in excess of the organization’s actual strength. The essence of its online activity, however, is broader. It enables its supporters to obtain operational information, including training in preparing explosives and car bombs, and religious rulings legitimizing massacres in regions under ISIS control. In tandem, it distributes indoctrination materials, such as a maagzine called Dabiq: The Return of Khilafah, which focuses mainly on topics relating to formation of the new Islamic state headed by ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. However, ISIS’s technological expertise is not the only factor. Perhaps the public, which is revolted by the organization’s deeds but closely follows these clips and photos as a kind of reality show, is contributing a great deal to the organization’s popularity.
Yes, there it is.. ISIS has been carrying out a PROPAGANDA war primarily and with that comes from PSYOPS as well. This is the first true set of statements I have seen to date over this whole debacle. Ok, they are waging a propaganda war and a recruitment drive for sure but really, a cyber caliphate? I mean to date I have not seen this show up verbatim anywhere on the boards or on twitter so who’s leaping logic here? Seems to me that there’s a sucker born every minute and about 99% of them want to go into journalism nowadays.
A propaganda war using Twitter does not a cyber war make.
Cyber Warfare and Jihad
So let’s chat about the realities here about the capabilities of the Irhabi (ISIS/L or AQ or SEA) in a context of what we have seen so far. What have we seen you ask? Well, DoS, some data thievery, some malware use and phishing, but generally nothing spectacularly scary. Certainly nothing on the level of a nation state actor like China has been seen out of any of the loose groups that claim some jihadi notions online to date. So where do we get all this BOOGA BOOGA over the likes of Junaid Hussain and ISIS taking down our grids and things?
*squint*
Yeah, there’s no there there. I am sorry but even if ISIS/L used it’s monies that it has stolen over the last months to set up a “cyber team” they still would be LIGHT YEARS behind the likes of China.. Hell they would even be way behind Iran for that matter so really, there is nothing to fear here. Never mind that many of these guys like Junaid are working in countries that are actively being bombed and shooting is happening so really, how much longer does Juny have anyway before he gets a Hellfile missile up his ass?
Truly the cyber jihad is a non starter for me and it should be for you too. On the other end of that equation though is the fact that they are actively recruiting and getting their message out using social media and this is a problem. Now don’t get me wrong, it is not a clear and present danger kind of thing because really, 100 Americans out of how many people seeing their online drivel have actually left the country to go to jihad pretty much gives a sense of the threat. You have to be pretty unbalanced to want to do this shit to start with so if you get up and leave the country to join up you are a truly unbalanced person to start. One so easily swayed by the propaganda wing of ISIS needs help and what they will certainly get is a bullet instead while fighting. Even ISISL really doesn’t care about the Takfiri, you see kids, they are just bodies to be used… Nothing more. They may call you brother but under their breath they call you fodder.
Much Ado About Nothing
The reality is that ISIS is more a conventional force than anything else. They are not as well planned as AQ and they tend to be one dimensional thinkers. I will admit that their propaganda war has been interesting to watch but I don’t see that it is an existential threat. In fact, I concur with the assessment that AQ is still the real player here who can strike at the US and had a better track record thus far. Surely if ISIS continues to carry out the propaganda war they may garner more recruits but I just don’t see them being that inspirational to get lone wolves to activate/radicalize. I certainly don’t see them being able to put teams together to hack our infrastructure and take us down either. In fact I am not a proponent of that line of thinking anyway as a great threat. Our systems are too complex and fragmented to allow for such a spectacular attack.
So please news media… STFU.
K.
So here’s my thing….
VQX HWMVCUSE JQJFASSNTG QV! X HQ JD ISIAVVE!
Face it.. We are all PWND six ways to Sunday
Every frigging day we hear more and more about how the NSA has been emptying our lives of privacy and subverting the laws of this land and others with their machinations. It’s true, and I have been saying as much since the day Mr. Klein came out of his telco closet and talked about how the NARUS system had been plugged into the MAE West back in the day. We are all well and truly fucked if we want any kind of privacy today kids and we all need to just sit back and think about that.
*ponder ponder ponder*
Ok, I have thought about it and I have tried to think of any way to protect myself from the encroachment of the NSA and all the big and little sisters out there. I am absolutely flummoxed to come up with any cogent means to really and truly protect my communications. Short of having access to the NSA supercloud and some cryptographers I don’t think that we will not truly have any privacy anymore. If you place it on the net, or in the air. We have reached in my opinion the very real possibility of the N-Dystopia I have talked about before in the Great Cyber Game post.
As the pundits like Schneier and others groan on and on about how the NSA is doing all of this to us all I have increasingly felt the 5 stages of grief. I had the disbelief (ok not completely as you all know but the scope was incredible at each revelation) Then the anger came and washed over me, waves and waves of it as I saw the breadth and scope of the abuse. Soon though that anger went away and I was then feeling the bargaining phase begin. I started to bargain in my head with ideas that I could in fact create my own privacy with crypto and other OPSEC means. I thought I could just deny the government the data. I soon though began to understand that no matter what I did with the tools out there that it was likely they had already been back door’d. This came to be more than the case once the stories came out around how the NSA had been pressuring all kinds of tech companies to weaken standards or even build full back doors into their products under the guise of “National Security”
Over time the revelations have all lead to the inescapable truth that there is nothing really anyone can do to stop the nation state from mining our communications on a technological level. Once that had fully set in my mind the depression kicked in. Of late I have been more quiet online and more depressed about our current state as well as our future state with regard to surveillance and the cyberwarz. I came to the conclusion that no matter the railing and screaming I might do it would mean nothing to the rapidly approaching cyberpocalypse of our own creation arriving. ….In short, we can’t stop it and thus the last of the five stages for me has set in. I accept that there is nothing I can do, nay, nothing “we” can do to stop this short of a bloody coup on the government at large.
I now luxuriate in my apathy and were I to really care any more I would lose my fucking mind.
OPSEC! OPSEC! OPSEC!
Speaking of losing one’s mind.. Lately people all have been yelling that OPSEC is the only way! One (the gruqq) has been touting this and all kinds of counterintelligence as the panacea for the masses on these issues. Well, why? Why should we all have to be spies to just have a little privacy in our lives huh? I mean it’s one thing to be a shithead and just share every fucking stupid idea you have on FriendFace and Tweeter but really, if you can’t shut yourself up that is your problem right? No, I speak of the every day email to your mom telling her about your health status or maybe your decision to come out etc. Why should the government have the eminent domain digitally to look at all that shit now or later?
If you take measures to protect these transactions and those measures are already compromised by the government why then should you even attempt to protect them with overburdened measures such as OPSEC huh? I mean, really if you are that worried about that shit then go talk to someone personally huh? I know, quite the defeatist attitude I have there huh? The reality is that even though I claim not to be caring about it (re: apathy above) I actually do but I realize that we no longer have privacy even if we try to create it for ourselves with technical means. If the gov wants to see your shit they will make a way to do so without your knowing about it. I fully expect someday that they will just claim eminent domain over the internet completely.
Fuck OPSEC.. I want my government to do the right thing and not try to hide all their skirting of the law by making it classified and sending me an NSL that threatens to put me in jail for breaking the law.
Fuck this shit.
CYBERWARZ
Then we have the CYBERWARZ!! Oh yeah, the gubment, the military, and the private sector all have the CYBERWARZ fever. I cannot tell you how sick of that bullshit I am really. I am tired of all the hype and misdirection. Let me clear this up for you all right here and right now. THERE IS NO CYBERWAR! There is only snake oil and espionage. UNTIL such time as there is a full out kinetic war going on where systems have been destroyed or compromised just before tanks roll in or nukes hit us there is no cyberwar to speak of. There is only TALK OF cyber war.. Well more like masturbatory fantasies by the likes of Beitlich et al in reality. So back the fuck off of this shit mmkay? We do not live in the world of William Gibson and NO you are not Johnny Mnemonic ok!
Sick. And. Tired.
I really feel like that Shatner skit where he tells the Trekkies to get a life…
Awaiting the DERPOCALYPSE
All that is left for us all now is the DERPOCALYPSE. This is the end state of INFOSEC to me. We are all going to be co-opted into the cyberwarz and the privacy wars and none of us have a snowball’s chance in hell of doing anything productive with our lives. Some of us are breaking things because we love it. Others are trying to protect “ALL THE THINGS” from the breakers and the people who take their ideas and technologies and begin breaking all those things. It’s a vicious cycle of derp that really has no end. It’s an ouroboros of fail.
RAGE! RAGE! AGAINST THE DYING OF THE PRIVACY! is a nice sentiment but in reality we have no way to completely stop the juggernaut of the NSA and the government kids. We are all just pawns in a larger geopolitical game and we have to accept this. If we choose not to, and many have, then I suggest you gird your loins for the inevitable kick in the balls that you will receive from the government eventually. The same applies for all those companies out there aiding the government in their quest for the panopticon or the cyberwarz. Money talks and there is so much of it in this industry now that there is little to stop it’s abuse as well.
We are well and truly fucked.
So, if you too are feeling burned out by all of this take heart gentle reader. All you need do is just not care anymore. Come, join me in the pool of acceptance. Would you care for a lotus blossom perhaps? It’s all good once you have accepted the truth that there is nothing you can do and that if you do things that might secure you then you are now more of a target. So, do nothing…
Derp.
K.
Book Review: An Introduction to Cyber-Warfare: A Multidisciplinary Approach
IJPFRH CPAGP EIIL!
CYBER CYBER CYBER!
CYBER CYBER CYBER! or “CRY HAVOC AND LET SLIP THE DIGITAL DOGS OD CYBER WAR!”” is often what you hear from me in a mocking tone as I scan the internet and the news for the usual cyber-douchery. Well this time kids I am actually going to review a book that for once was not full of douchery! Instead it was filled with mostly good information and aimed at people who are not necessarily versed at all in the cyberz. I personally was surprised to find myself thinking that I would approve this for a syllabus (as it has been placed into one by someone I know and asked me to read this and comment)
The book really is a primer on IW (Information Warfare) and Cyber-Warfare (for lack of a better nomenclature for it) which many of you reading my blog might be way below your desired literacy level on the subjects. However, for the novice I would happily recommend that they read the book and then spend more time using ALL of the footnotes to go and read even more on the subject to get a grasp of the complexities here. In fact, I would go as far as to say to all of you out there that IF you are teaching this subject at all then you SHOULD use this book as a starting point.
I would also like to say that I would LOVE to start a kickstarter and get this book into the hands of each and every moron in Congress and the House. I would sit there and MAKE them read it in front of me *surely watching their lips move as they do so* There are too many people in positions of power making stupid decisions about this stuff when they haven’t a single clue. I guess the same could be said about the military folks as well. We have plenty of generals who have no idea either.. That’s just one man’s opinion though.
As we move further and further down the cyber-war road I think that books like this should be mandatory reading for all military personnel as well as college level courses in not only IW/INFOSEC but also political and affairs of state majors as well. We will only continue down this road it seems and it would be best for us all if the next wave of digital natives had a real grasp of the technologies as well as the political, logical, and tactical aspects of “Cyber”
I have broken down the book into rough chapters and subject areas as it is within the book (mostly) It really does cover more of the overall issues of cyber-warfare and methods used (not overly technical) The modus operandi so to speak of the actual events that have taken place are laid out in the book and give you a picture of the evolving of IW to what we see today as “cyber-warfare” I will comment on those sections on what I thought was good and what I thought was derpy of course, I mean would you all have it any other way?
IW (INFORMATION WARFARE) RUSSIA
The authors cover early IW with the Russian saga’s over Georgia and Estonia. There is a lot in there that perhaps even you out there might not know about the specifics of the incidents where Russia is “alleged” to have attacked both countries at different times with different goals and effects. Much of this also touches on the ideas of proxy organizations that may or may not be state run that were a part of the action as well as a good overview of what happened.
In the case of Georgia it went kinetic and this is the first real “cyber-warfare” incident in my mind as cyber-war goes. I say this because in my mind unless there is an actual kinetic portion to the fighting there is no “war” it is instead an “action” or “espionage” so in the case of tanks rolling in on Georgia we have a warfare scenario outright that was in tandem with IW/CW actions.
OUR CHINESE OVERLORDS
Ah Chairman Meow… What book on Cyber would be complete without our friends at the MSS 3rd Directorate huh? Well in the case of this primer it gets it right. It gets across not only that China has been hacking the living shit out of us but also WHY they are doing it! The book gives a base of information (lots of footnotes and links) to ancillary documentation that will explain the nature of Chinese thought on warfare and more to the point Cyber-Warfare. The Chinese have been working this angle (The Thousand Grains of Sand etc) for a long time now and there are more than a few treatises on it for you to read after finishing this book.
The big cases are in there as well as mention of the malware used, goals of the attacks and some of the key players. If you are out to start teaching about Chinese electronic/cyber/IW then this is a good place to start. Not too heavy but it gets the point across to those who are not so up to speed on the politics, the tech, or the stratagems involved.
ANONYMOUS/SEA/LULZSEC
Anonymous, as someone on my Twitter feed was just asking me as I was writing this piece, is also a part of this picture as well. The idea of asymmetric online warfare is really embodied by these groups. The book focuses more on Lulzsec and their 50 days of sailing but it doesn’t go too in depth with the derp. Suffice to say that all of them are indeed important to cyber-warfare as we know it and may in fact be the end model for all cyber-warfare. How so? Well, how better to have plausible denyability than to get a non state group to carry out your dirty war? Hell, for that matter how about just blame them and make it look like one of their ops huh?
Oddly enough just days ago Hammond wrote a piece saying this very thing. He intoned that the FBI via Sabu were manipulating the Anon’s into going after government targets. This is not beyond comprehension especially for places like China as well. So this is something to pay attention to. However, this book really did not take that issue on and I really wished that they had. Perhaps in the next updated edition guys?
THE GRID
OY VEY, the “GRID” this is one of the most derpy subjects usually in the media as well as the books/talks/material on cyber-warfare out there. In this case though I will allow what they wrote stand as a “so so” because they make no real claim to an actual apocalypse. Instead the book talks about the possible scenarios of how one could attack the grid. This book makes no claim that it would work but it is something to think about especially if you have an army of trained squirrels with routers strapped to their backs.
It is my belief that the system is too complex to have a systematic fail of apocalypse proportions and it always has been so. If the book talked about maybe creating a series of EMP devices placed at strategic high volume transformers then I would say they’d be on to something. However, that said, the use of a topological attack model was a good one from a logical perspective. They base most of this off of the Chinese grad students paper back years ago so your mileage may vary. So on this chapter I give it a 40% derp.
WHAT’S MISSING?
All in all I would have liked to have seen more in the political area concerning different countries thought patterns on IW/CW but hey, what can ya do eh? Additionally I think more could have been done on the ideas of offense vs. defense. Today I see a lot of derp around how the US has a GREAT OFFENSIVE CAPABILITY! Which for me and many of you out there I assume, leads me to the logical thought conclusion of “GREAT! We are totally offensive but our defense SUCKS!” So much for CYBER-MAD huh?
I would have also like to have seen more in the way of some game theory involved in the book as well concerning cyber-warfare. Some thought experiments would be helpful to lay out the problems within actually carrying out cyber-war as well as potential outcomes from doing so more along the lines of what I saw in the Global Cyber-Game.
OVERALL TAKE
Well, in the end I think it is a good start point for people to use this in their syllabus for teaching IW/CW today. It is a primer though and I would love to see not only this end up on the list but also the Global Cyber Game as well to round out the ideas here. To me it is more about “should we do this?” as opposed to “LETS FUCKING DO THIS!” as the effects of doing so are not necessarily known. Much of this territory is new and all too much of it is hyped up to the point of utter nonsense. This is the biggest problem we have though, this nonsense level with regard to the leaders of the land not knowing anything about it and then voting on things.
We need a more informed populace as well as government and I think this book would be a good start. So to the person who asked me to review this..
K.
The Global Cyber Game
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The Global Cyber Game:
I had been meaning to write about this before when I had originally read the text but things got in the way as usual (work, more work, some more work after that, Defcon/Bsides) Now though I am in a space where I can reflect back on this paper and write about it here for you all to see. The Defence Academy (UK) put this together to describe how we might approach “cyberwar” on the level of game play or game theory. They constructed a board and began to set to the task of creating game play and tactics given certain scenarios in the cyber world. (see image of game board below) You can actually play this game if you create a board from this design and work within the rules of game theory but this is not why I find this treatise so important.
What I find most interesting is the actual scenario’s that play out within the game play as well as the end game status that the paper puts it all down to in the end of N-Utopia and N-Dystopia. As one can gather from the inherent meaning of the words, N-Utopia means that we all work out our problems globally and work on bettering society (which in the Nash equations is the best play) or we end up with N-Dystopia, a Balkanization of the net, and warfare that scales all levels up to kinetic and will be the death of us all. Can you guess where I think we are right now on the N-scale? Yes, you’d be right to lean toward the N-Dystopia area. In fact I would even like to see that idea rendered in a new way with an older iconography, that being the Doomsday Clock analogy. Perhaps someone can take that up online and create one for the cyebrwarz eh?
Power Dimensions:
What must be taken into account in the great cyber game is that all of this is centered around power plays. The use of information as power, the use of information to effect actions vis a vis “power” and the varying types of power that are being wielded by the players. This paper covers this idea pretty well and should be required reading for anyone looking to study cyber-warfare along side Clausewitz and other more well known pieces of doctrine. Some however may already be familiar with the ideas of hard and soft power but let’s take that into the electronic warfare arena which is a bit harder to scope today.
- Hard power
- Overt threats and rewards
- Kinetic action
- Coercion
- Soft power
- Cooperation
- Co-Option
Both of these types of dynamic play off of one another and work in tandem. There actually is a whole spectrum of power plays that can be derived from these basic premises but I will not go into all that here. To date I have seen an abundance of hard power tactics being employed on the game board and I fear that that seems to be what the governments of the world have locked on to as their aegis. I would love for more to try the soft power tactics and methods but I am too much of a realist to hope that it will ever really happen.
The game play today that we are all seeing unfold before us is the hard power of Stuxnet or the ramping up of every piece of malware and 0day conceivable being purchased by the US government or others in an effort to be superior when the battle comes. That is though when they are not using those said same exploits in the darker games of realpolitik that they are prosecuting now. As I see it now we are hurtling towards a massive cyberfail of our own making and the real cost of the bad play will be economies around the world and other collateral damage that may not be an apocalypse as we currently understand them to be.
The power dimensions portion of this paper is quite enlightening and you should broaden the scope of how those plays are made with information and the internet. One must understand the playing field as well as the weapon you wield. This is the main problem I have of late is that all too many people and governments are not understanding the game play, the field of play, nor the tools they are using (pieces) well enough to play the game well. This makes not only for bad play, but in this game there are real world consequences for us all when some government or actor does something immensely stupid.
Cyber Games Today:
So what are we seeing today that has me worried? Well, we have the cybergames with Stuxnet and other malware to start. I liken the release of Stuxnet as skin to the release of a biotoxin or virus that eventually will be re-worked or manipulated into a more fearsome weapon. These are not one use tools, they are in fact re-usable and re-tune-able. Once these things are out there is no controlling them and with the idea of Stuxnet you have something that was used against one target but could affect hundreds more in friendly countries if they had the same configuration.
Another cybergame being played today is the new surveillance state that we find ourselves in. It seems in the case of the US we have people who are interpreting our Constitution to suit their needs under the rubric of protecting the homeland. This cybergame is all about information and the power dimension of controlling it. I have been watching this Snowden affair unfold and frankly I am frightened of the capabilities that the NSA has but I am much more scared that they claim that they are protecting us while a Snowden subverts the very systems they are saying cannot be misused. This particular cybergame when looked at, show’s all of the hard and soft power dimensions at play with the media and the law. This should also be brought into the cyber game play as well.
Yet another cybergame going on is within the public/private sector and I call the “Patriot Games” What I mean by this is that we have non state actors playing rolls of asymmetric warriors online to effect whatever change they see fit. A certain un-named clown for one is a primary actor in this space and really started the trend in my opinion. The cybergamers here are vigilantes nothing more and nothing less and may or may not have an effect on the grander scheme of things on the net and in public policy. For the most part however, these players are on the hard power end of the spectrum and thus just mostly come off as thugs.
Lastly, the cybergame that seems to be the one with the most chance of playing in the larger space is that of Anonymous. Anonymous has been able to leverage many players into semi cogent action and could in the future have a real effect on policy and other dimensions within the cybergame play. The only reason that I place Anon into this game is because of that mobilizing force that they seem to carry. If motivated and able to be cohesive enough this group could affect the greater games being played and have on a microcosmic scale thus far in recent history.
In all, the games that are being played, and they are games, all serve as a means to an end for those paying attention to understand and perhaps help those in the seat of power how not to play the game at all. Our petty squabbling on the internet is just that. The reality is that the net is important and much of our lives today require it to run smoothly but if the net were to go down permanently our society would not utterly collapse. We would survive and we would re-build. The question then becomes would we have learned from it and do things better the next time around?
Cyber-Utopia and Cyber-Dystopia:
The idea of Cyber-Utopia is a far fetched one in my mind and probably many others out there. This would be a great thing if we could make it happen but given the petty nature of our.. well nature.. We will only see this ideal wash up on the rocks and sink into the ocean rather quickly. In the Cyber-Utopia we all work together, we cooperate, and we work towards a better day. … And I just don’t see this happening barring some kind of alien intervention frankly.
Cyber-Dystopia though I am afraid is already the case in many respects. We are seeing an almost Balkanization of the internet today as it is never mind the games being played in reality with Stuxnet and cyberwar. If the N-Dystopia comes to pass we will find ourselves at war with each other constantly in a “cyberworld” much like the episode of STOS “A Taste of Armageddon” where all warfare is carried out via computer simulations and only the casualties report to be disintegrated as a means to balance it all out. Today though we will see attacks on economies as well as infrastructures to effect “war” (economic, political, or other) on our enemies and the real world costs will have to be measured in profit loss or perhaps even actual loss of human life.
The cyber-dystopia though is more than just an outcome of war. It is the outcome from our own inabilities to work with each other and our ability to rationalize warfare through a non apocalyptic destruction of life. It will be a tit for tat war of attrition that will not lead to any clear victories and certainly not elevate our societies in any way and that is the sad truth of it. Ladies and gents we are already in the dystopia. We just may not understand that yet.
Understand the game:
So, I leave you with the paper: The Global Cyber Game pull it down and read it. Learn from it, play the game if you like, and spend some time thinking about it all. We are on the cusp of another evolution in our society that we have seen repeated in every other evolution we have had. We create something, then we weaponize it. Perhaps if more of us understand it and the pitfalls we can prevent the N-Dystopia from becoming any worse.
K.
Cyberwar, Cyberdouchery, and Where The Rubber Meets The CyberRoad
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CYBER CYBER CYBER CYBER WAR! (A new song by Culture Club soon!)
I have been more quiet lately due to being a little burned out on the whole INFOSEC scene. The usual groups of factions are bellowing their usual bloviations and rutting like wild animals online, locking horns with others for dominance. It all frankly makes me just want to step back into my blind and clean my weapon, but, it also gives me pause to think and reflect on it all. It has been in this mode that I have sat and watched the “cyberwars” continue to amp up with the Kaspersky’s of the world finding more and more malware to write neat little papers on how they work and how “nation-statey” they are (oddly though never Russian in origin.. Gee I wonder why?)
Others out there are writing treatises on how “Cyberwar” will work all the while there has been no real definition put down and agreed upon by the masses as to what “cyberwar/Cyber-War/Cyber-Warfare” really is. It has not been codified really, even with the recent UN Tallinn document:
“A cyber attack is a cyber operation, whether offensive or defensive, that is reasonably expected to cause injury or death to persons or damage or destruction to objects.”
Tallinn Manual on The International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare – Michael N. Shmitt
Without a common definition we are all left with a great amount of confusion and gray area to move forward and commit actions that may or may not be “war” because there is no set ground rules, law, or definitions. So, here we are, we have all these people making a great hue and cry, plans and deeds, all without really understanding perhaps the potentials for their actions, all eager to get in on the ground floor of the “new war” and yes, you gentle INFOSEC reader are also part and parcel, willing participants to it all as well. The “cyberdouchery” it seems cannot be washed from your hands as well, and this includes me I think.
Mea culpa.. Mea culpa…
While reflecting in my recently infected state (pre-con flu) I sat down with the laptop and watched “Cyberwar: Not what we were expecting” a BruCon presentation that I had a hand in with Josh and Brian. The presentation went well, and as I had seen and thought about the material before, having had discussions with both in the process of creation, I began to have a bit of a paradigm change in thought on this after the final presentation. I looked back at my own mind set and writings on the douchery and realized my own shortsightedness, I too had fallen prey to the “cyberwars” and the only conclusion I could have now is that they are upon us, no matter the definition and I had better think on that.
Let’s face facts here… No matter how many times we call douchery, it’s here…
For all of the high handed railing that I have done in the past, I perhaps had missed the salient fact that people are people, and that we as a society will always latch on to the new “thing” that is super cool, but may in fact be the worst thing for us (think of the iPhone madness) We as a species, tend to go, like many other creatures, say parrots or cockatiels, for the “shiny things” It’s just our nature. So how much more shiny than anything else is the notion of a clean “cyberwar” where we take out the enemy with a click of the button, no, not with kinetic explosions but instead with the lights just going out or a centrifuge breaking.
Yeah, sound familiar?
This neat idea though could in fact cause some dystopian scenarios to happen and yes, in the idea of “war” as we commonly know it, kinetic actions (i.e. tanks and planes and bombs) would likely be employed as well, but, this in fact may not be the end goal of “cyberwar” in the minds eye of those dreaming and plotting it. After all, I would say that we are in the era of the “cyberwars” now in fact, and the only use of kinetic force seems to be only taking place in the non declared wars in Afghanistan and now the Horn of Africa right?
The “cyberwars” though, have been playing out mostly quietly, bits and bytes doing their non kinetic (mostly) damage, stealing data for financial gain or other espionage goals. Both nation state as well as personal, group, non nation state, whatever you decide to name the actors as, they are doing it, right now.. You can almost hear the clicks of the hard drives now right?
It’s really just a war of packet attrition… But then again I hear you thinking,
“But, you said war.. and well, that’s not war.. That’s espionage and maybe sabotage”
Well, yes, but, then there’s this notion of “Cold War” to deal with.
“Christ, I miss the Cold War.” (Cold War vs. Hot War)
The above quote was one of my favorites from “Casino Royale”, the recent re-boot of the James Bond story line. I find it apropos to this discussion as even with Josh and Brian, the idea of the nomenclature of war has been somewhat nebulous really. The idea of a “cold war” seemed elusive to them and perhaps even to me in some way, though I lived through the cold war and was actually in East Germany briefly just before the wall fell. Seeing the “cold war” first hand kind of gives you a new perspective I guess, so I was a little more pliable to the idea that a cold war was in fact a war, just not one where we have outright battles being fought in the “open” and that’s the key here.
Cold War Noun:
A state of political hostility existing between countries, characterized by threats, violent propaganda, subversive activities, and…
The state of political hostility that existed between the Soviet bloc countries and the US-led Western powers from 1945 to 1990.
Cyberwar, is the new “black” of Cold War.
See what I am getting at here? Sure, there can be an all out war that employs a “digital aspect” to it, (i.e. disrupting comms and supply chains) but also, the mainstay thus far of digital warfare is “information war” and this is much closer to “cold warfare” as it has ever been as you can see from the standard definition. Case in point, we are trying to contain Iran from having its own nuclear weapons. What have we been doing? Well, sanctions, propaganda, espionage, and now, post Stuxnet, digital sabotage of their programs as well as great swaths of digital thievery of their data to see just how far along they are.
Now, look up at that definition again and think about it… See what I’m saying here? Of course this is one element though and there are others like the kinetic typical warfare also described. Actions in tandem (digital and physical/kinetic) like that of Estonia but you get the point. It’s mostly, at this point, about cold war tactics to manipulate an enemy without committing to all out warfare and that’s the rub. Of course there are many war planners out there looking at plans to do more than just manipulate an enemy politically, that’s more the bailiwick of the likes of the CIA and other three letter agencies.
Diplomacy it seems, has a new tool in it’s little black bag…. As does the military sector.. Truly “Dual use” technology here.
State vs. Non State, War vs. Non War (What’s in a name?)
In the rubric though of “cyberwar” lately, we have seen arguments made (some unqualified, some quite qualified) about just what it constitutes and one of those factors has been whether or not the actors are “state or non state” actors. I would put it to you right up front, who’s to say who is or is not state actors to start with? Have none of you ever heard about proxy wars? I mean come on people, we lived through the 80’s and the wars being fought by proxy and still you guys don’t get it?
Iran Contra
Afghanistan and the Mujahideen
The War on Drugs
The Current War on Drugs with boots on the ground in Mexico (CIA/MIL)
So, you are going to quibble over nation state and non nation state actors in cyber warfare? What’s more, you are going to do so when attribution is so damned hard? Wow, the hubris of it is just stunning on some people’s parts within this community. Talk about douchery, just take a look around people. Sure, there is a lot of douchery going around, but I just have to say look in the mirror here and take a good long look. I think we all could be blamed just as equally here.
Actions taken by entities, in this arena (cyber-warfare) no matter the attribution, which may be wholly wrong mind you, can always have a sliver of doubt attached to them as to whether they are a proxy of a nation. It’s as simple as that. So, in the case of say the Georgia DDoS that happened, who can be sure, unless they have a really solid HUMINT report in hand, that this attack was not in some way or shape condoned or sponsored by the Russian government or factions thereof?
*silence.. baleful stare*
All I’m really saying is that the world is grey and to make great pronouncements of “I know shit” isn’t going to cut it in reality, and that even goes for me. Like they say on the internets, photo’s or it never happened. What can be said though, is that it would seem, from all evidence within the media machine and the rhetoric of the governments of the world, that the Dr. Cyberlove’s of the world are beating the drums for “cyberwar” pretty damn hard… And that the governments are scurrying to get a piece of the action.
“A fool with a tool.. Is still a fool” (Or: Simians flinging digital poo)
Which brings me to my next diatribe. As the title above says, a fool with a tool.. Is still a fool. Folks, we have all kinds of work going on developing 0day’s and plans of action by various warfighting units new and old. It seems that whenever we, as a race, come up with a new way to get over on the other guy, we mass produce and refine it without really thinking about the ramifications of our actions. It’s just human nature it seems, but in cases like this we just rush headlong into it, like we did for so long with biological warfare.
“Surely digital warfare and code is nothing as bad as biological warfare” is what some of you are thinking out there now as you read these lines, and yes, you are right I think on the whole, but, there is always wiggle room for disaster right? The potentials for malware and unforeseen consequences are there and unlike Jericho’s take on the dangers of “cyberwar” now, I can give it a little more room for possible bad outcomes from what’s being created now. What will happen as we all reach the singularity that some are postulating as we network everything? Currently the grid is a big topic as we make the “smart grid”, a model that is already being attacked by hackers as well as perhaps nation states trying to gather intelligence on how it works/will work and how to manipulate it. This type of attack alone could be dual use, like the Stuxnet attack, it could be a way to manipulate a country and its policies, or the prelude to a further physical attack. Who’s to know until it happens right?
All in all, I just have to look on in wonder at the hubris of the whole affair. We truly are monkeys with digital guns. Unfortunately today we have political systems that are short sighted and, in the case of our own here in the US, groups of diametrically opposed morons in a political election cycle that looks much more like a high school election campaign for prom queen. These are the people in the political office that direct the policies and war plans for us, which now include the idealistic ideas of “clean cyber warfare, targeted and with little blowback or collateral damage”
Monkeys with digital guns…
Cyberwar and YOU
Well, so here we are, we are in the age of the “Cyberwars” as much as the term might stick in the craw of many in the community. I would put it to you that as a person with anything online, you are a target. Whether it be the cyberwarfare of the state, or the cyber machinations of the criminal gang seeking to steal your money or your data, we all are under the same threats. Infrastructure as well as your personal PC are targets within a larger game of digital Stratego. Face the fact, live with it a while, and then think about what you can do to insulate yourselves a bit better.
It seems that even if you do not have a computer (some don’t.. no, really!) you still have a digital presence online because the companies that you do business with have one. The governments have their records online and those records are your records! There is no escaping it really, you are a part of the picture and you should get used to the idea. The power that you suck up every day with your digital toys is somewhat vulnerable and a target, and even if the adversary cannot take out the whole country, let me tell you from experience, just take out one state and see the shit fly because people don’t have power. Where I live we had that big storm a year ago and when people could not get their gas to power their generators it started getting hairy, and that was with the power only being out a week or so. Imagine if it were in fact long term? It’s the people’s reactions (base and territorial) that worries me more than the power being off.
So, whether it’s your data, your power, or your money, you too are a cog in the vast cyberwar machine that is all the rage. Will bad things happen? Maybe. Will epic and tragically bad things happen? Maybe. I am not short sighted enough to say it won’t ever happen, nor can I say that these attacks will not be employed by some foreign power or Bondian villain. I’m just saying it is possible, not overly likely, but look at all the work going on at DARPA and other places looking into how to make it a reality.
The cyberwar is upon us and we had best start taking it seriously because people in power are making plans, and like biological warfare, it seems perhaps there could be unforeseen cirucmstances that could trigger bigger and worse things.
Plan accordingly and think a bit more cogently.
K.
Malware Wars!… Cyber-Wars!.. Cyber-Espionage-Wars! OH MY
X
Flame, DuQU, STUXNET, and now GAUSS:
Well, it was bound to happen and it finally did, a third variant of malware that is ostensibly connected to the story that Mikko Hypponen posted about after an email he got from a nuclear scientist in Iran has come to pass as true. The email claimed that a new piece of malware was playing AC/DC “Thunderstruck” at late hours on systems it had infected within the labs in Iran. I took this with a grain of salt and had some discussions with Mikko about it offline, he confirmed that the email came ostensibly from a known quantity in the AEOI and we left it at that, its unsubstantiated. Low and behold a week or two later and here we are with Eugene tweeting to the world that “GAUSS” is out there and has been since about 2011.
Gauss it seems had many functions and some of them are still unknown because there is an encryption around the payload that has yet to be cracked by anyone. Eugene has asked for a crowd sourced solution to that and I am sure that eventually someone will come out with the key and we will once again peer into the mind of these coders with a penchant for science and celestial mechanics. It seems from the data provided thus far from the reverse R&D that it is indeed the same folks doing the work with the same framework and foibles, and thus, it is again easily tied back to the US and Israel (allegedly per the mouthiness of Joe F-Bomb Veep) and that it is once again a weapon against the whole of the middle east with a decided targeting of Lebanon this time around. Which is an interesting target all the more since there has been some interesting financial news of late concerning banks and terror funding, but I digress…
I am sure many of you out there are already familiar with the technology of the malware so I am leaving all of that out here for perhaps another day. No, what I want to talk about is the larger paradigm here concerning the sandbox, espionage, warfare, and the infamous if not poorly named “CyberWar” going on as it becomes more and more apparent in scope. All of which seems to be centered on using massive malware schemes to hoover data as well as pull the trigger when necessary on periodic digital attacks on infrastructure. Something that truly has not been seen before Stuxnet and seems to only have geometrically progressed since Langer et al let the cat out of the bag on it.
Malware Wars:
Generally, in the information security sector, when I explain the prevalence of malware today I often go back to the beginning of the Morris worm. I explain the nature of early virus’ and how they were rather playful. I also explain that once the digital crime area became profitable and firewalls became a standard appliance in the network environment, the bad actors had to pivot to generally tunnel their data from the inside out home through such things as a firewall. This always seems to make sense to those I explain it to and today it is the norm. Malware, and the use of zero day as well as SE exploits to get the user to install software is the the way to go. It’s a form of digital judo really, using the opponents strength against them by finding their fulcrum weakness.
And so, it was only natural that the espionage groups of the world would turn to malware as the main means of gaining access to information that usually would take a human asset and a lot of time. By leveraging human nature and software flaws it has been a big win for some time now. I was actually amused that Henry Crumpton in the “Art of Intelligence” talks about how the CIA became a very early adopter of the network centric style of warfare. I imagine that some of the early malware out there used by spooks to steal from unprotected networks was CIA in origin and in fact that today’s Gauss probably has some relatives out there we have yet to see by people who have been doing this for some time now and we, the general public had no idea.
Times change though, and it seems that Eugene’s infrastructure for collecting data is creating a very wide dragnet for his people to find these infections and then reverse them. As we move forward expect to see more of these pop up, and surely soon, these will not just be US/UK/IL based attempts. Soon I think we will see the outsourced and insourced products of the likes of Iran and other nation states.. Perhaps we already have seen them, well, people like Mikko and Eugene may have at least. Who knows, maybe someday I will find something rooting about my network huh? Suffice to say, that this is just the beginning folks so get used to it.. And get used to seeing Eugene’s face and name popping up all over the place as well.. Superior showman that he is.
An Interesting Week of News About Lebanon and Bankers:
Meanwhile, I think it very telling and interesting as we see the scope of these malware attacks opening up, that not only one or two countries were targeted, but pretty much the whole of the Middle East as well. Seems its an equal opportunity thing, of course the malware never can quite be trusted to stay within the network or systems that it was meant for can we? There will always be spillage and potential for leaks that might tip off the opposition that its there. In the case of Gauss, it seems to have been targeted more at Lebanon, but, it may have been just one state out of a few it was really meant for. In the case of Lebanon though, and the fact that this piece of malware was also set to steal banking data from that area, one has to look on in wonder about the recent events surrounding HSBC.
Obviously this module was meant to be used either to just collect intelligence on banking going on as well as possibly a means to leverage those accounts in ways as yet undetermined by the rest of us. Only the makers and operators really know what the intent was there, but, one can extrapolate a bit. As terror finances go, the Middle East is the hotbed, so any intelligence on movement of money could be used in that light just as well as other ways to track the finances of criminal, geopolitical, and economic decisions being made there. Whether it be corporations or governmental bodies, this kind of intelligence would be highly prized and I can see why they would install that feature on Gauss.
All of this though, so close to the revelations of HSBC has me thinking about what else we might see coming down the pike soon on this front as well. Cur off the funding activities, and you make it much harder to conduct terrorism huh? Keep your eyes open.. You may see some interesting things happening soon, especially given that the Gauss is out of the bag now too. Operations will likely have to roll up a bit quicker.
Espionage vs. Sabotage vs. Overt Warfare of Cyber-Warfare:
Recently I have been working on some presentation stuff with someone on the whole cyberwar paradigm and this week just blew the lid off the whole debate again for me. The question as well as the rancor I have over the term “Cyberwar” has been going on some time now and in this instance as well as Stuxnet and Flame and DuQu, can we term it as cyberwar? Is this instead solely espionage? What about the elements of sabotage we saw in Stuxnet that caused actual kinetic reactions? Is that cyberwar? If there is no real war declared what do you term it other than sabotage within the confines of espionage and statecraft?
Then there is the whole issue of the use of “Cold War” to describe the whole effect of these operations. Now we have a possible cold war between those states like Iran who are now coding their own malware to attack our systems and to sabotage things to make our lives harder. Is that a war? A type of war? All of these questions are being bandied about all the while we are obviously prosecuting said war in theater as I write this. I personally am at a loss to say exactly what it is or what to term it really. Neither does the DoD at this point as they are still working on doctrine to put out there for the warriors to follow. Is there a need for prosecuting this war? It would seem that the US and others working with them seem to think so. I for one can understand the desire to and the hubris to actually do it.
Hubris though, has a funny way of coming back on you in spectacular blowback. This is my greatest fear and seemingly others, however, we still have a country and a government that is flailing about *cough the Senate cough* unable to do anything constructive to protect our own infrastructure even at a low level. So, i would think twice about the scenarios of actually leaking statements of “we did it” so quickly even if you perceive that the opposition has no current ability to strike back.. Cuz soon enough they will. It certainly won’t be a grand scale attack on our grid or telco when it does happen, but, we will likely see pockets of trouble and Iran or others will pop up with a smile, waving, and saying “HA HA!” when it does occur.
The Sandbox and The Wars We Are Prosecuting There by Malware Proxy:
Back to the Middle East though… We have been entrenched in there for so so long. Growing up I regularly watched the news reports about Lebanon and Israel, Iran and the hostages, Iraq, Saddam, Russian Proxy wars via terrorism, Ghadaffi and his ambitions as well as terror plots (which also hit close to home with the Lockerbee bombing) You kids today might think this is all new, but let me tell you, this has been going on for a long long time. One might even say thousands of years (Mecca anyone? Crusades?) So, it’s little wonder then that this would all be focused on the Med.
We are conducting proxy wars not only because of 9/11 but also economic and energy reasons as well. You want a good taste of that? Take a look at “Three Days of the Condor” a movie about a fictional “reader” for the CIA who stumbles on to a plan to disrupt governments in the Middle East to affect oil prices and access. For every person that said the Iraq war and Afghanistan wasn’t about oil, I say to them look at the bigger picture. There are echoes there of control and access that you cannot ignore. Frankly, if there wasn’t oil and money in the region, I think we would have quite a different story to look on as regards our implementing our forces there.
So, with that in mind, and with terrorism and nuclear ambitions (Iran) look at the malware targeting going on. Look at all of the nascent “Arab Springs” going on (albeit really, these are not springs, these are uprisings) we have peoples who want not to live under oppressive regimes not just because they aren’t free to buy an iPhone or surf porn, but they are also oppressed tribes or sects that no longer wish to be abused. All of this though, all of the fighting and insurgency upsets the very delicate balance that is the Middle East. Something that we in the US for our part, have been trying to cultivate (stability) even if that stability came from another strongman that we really don’t care for, but, who will work with us in trade and positional relevance to other states.
In goes the malware.. Not only to see what’s going on, but also to stop things from happening. These areas can be notoriously hard to have HUMINT in and its just easier to send in malware and rely on human nature to have a larger boon in intelligence than to try and recruit people to spy. It’s as simple as that. Hear that sucking sound? That’s all their data going to a server in Virginia. In the eyes of the services and the government, this is clearly the rights means to the ends they desire.
We Have Many Tigers by The Tail and I Expect Blowback:
Like I said before though, blowback has a nasty habit of boomeranging and here we have multiple states to deal with. Sure, not all of them has the ability to strike back at us in kind, but, as you have seen in Bulgaria, the Iranians just decided to go with their usual Hezbollah proxy war of terrorism. Others may do the same, or, they may bide their time and start hiring coders on the internet. Maybe they will hire out of Russia, or China perhaps. Hell, it’s all for sale now in the net right? The problem overall is that since we claimed the Iran attack at Natanz, we now are not only the big boy on the block, we are now the go to to be blamed for anything. Even if we say we didn’t do it, who’s gonna really believe us?
The cyber-genie is out of the cyber-bottle.
Then, this week we saw something new occur. A PSYOP, albeit a bad one, was perpetrated by the Assad regime it seems. Reuters was hacked and stories tweeted/placed on the net about how the rebel forces in Aleppo had cut and run. It was an interesting idea, but, it was ineffective for a number of reasons. The crux though is that Reuters saw it and immediately said it was false. So, no one really believed the stories. However, a more subtle approach at PSYOPS or DISINFO campaigns is likely in the offing for the near future I’d think. Surely we have been doing this for a while against them, whether it be in the news cycles or more subtle sock puppets online in social media sites like Twitter or Facebook. The US has been doing this for a long time and is well practiced. Syria though, not so much.
I have mentioned the other events above, but here are some links to stories for you to read up on it…
- PSYOPS Operations by the nascent Syrian cyber warfare units on Reuters
- Hezbollah’s attack in Bulgaria (bus bombing) in response to STUXNET and other machinations
- Ostensible output of INTEL from Gauss that may have gotten HSBC in trouble and others to come (Terrorism funding and money laundering)
All in all though, I’d have to say that once the players become more sophisticated, we may in fact see some attacks against us that might work. Albeit those attacks will not be the “Cyber Pearl Harbor” that Dr. Cyberlove would like you to be afraid of. Politically too, there will be blowback from the Middle East now. I am sure that even after Wikileaks cables dump, the governments of the Med thought at least they could foresee what the US was up to and have a modicum of statecraft occur. Now though, I think we have pissed in the pool a bit too much and only have ourselves to blame with the shit hits the fan and we don’t have that many friends any more to rely on.
It’s a delicate balance.. #shutupeugene
Pandora’s Box Has Been Opened:
In the end, we have opened Pandora’s box and there is no way to get that which has escaped back into it. We have given the weapon framework away due to the nature of the carrier. Even if Gauss is encrypted, it will be broken and then what? Unlike traditional weapons that destroy themselves, the malware we have sent can be easily reverse engineered. It will give ideas to those wishing to create better versions and they will be turned on us in targeted and wide fashions to wreak as much digital havoc as possible. Unfortunately, you and I my friends are the collateral damage here, as we all depend on the systems that these types of malware insert themselves into and manipulate.
It is certainly evident as I stated above, our government here in the US is unable to come up with reasonable means to protect our systems. Systems that they do not own, Hell, the internet itself is not a government run or owned entity either, and yet they want to have an executive ability to shut it down? This alone shows you the problem of their thinking processes. They then decide to open the box and release the malware genie anyway… It’s all kind of scary when you think about it. If this is hard to concieve, lets put it in terms of biological weapons.. Weapons systems that have been banned since Nixon was in office.
The allusion should be quite easy to understand. Especially since malware was originally termed “Virus” There is a direct analogy there. Anyway, here’s the crux of it all. Just like bioweapons, digital “bioware” for lack of a better term, also cannot be controlled once let into the environment. Things mutate, whether at the hand of people or systems, things will not be contained within the intended victims. They will escape (as did all the malware we have seen) and will tend to have unforeseen consequences. God forbid we start really working on polymorphics again huh? If the circumstances are right, then, we could have a problem.
Will we eventually have to have another treaty ban on malware of this kind?
Time will tell.. Until then, we all will just be along for the cyberwar ride I guess. We seem to be steadily marching toward the “cyberwar” everyone is talking about… determined really to prosecute it… But will it get us anywhere?
K.
Krypt3ia 
SONY: The Laughing Man Effect
with one comment
Preface:
In the past I have written about “The Ghost In The Shell” referring to current incidents online and the future of network warfare. I mostly wrote about the anime show’s prescience with regard to the fact that many of us in the business of computer security it seems gravitated to it because of those very scenarios in the first place and a certain cool factor to them. Of course all of that was science fiction and it could not happen in the real world could it?
Well, once upon a time the idea of a plane flying in the air or a submarine for that matter were pure SCIFI and now we take them for granted. So it is too with some of the ideas put forth by G.I.T.S. where online culture and warfare are concerned. If you are not familiar with the G.I.T.S. franchise I suggest you go to Amazon or Hulu and watch them all. If you are familiar with them, then you might have the same “Ah ha!” reaction that I did watching the evolving story of the Sony hack.
SONY HACK
So to catch you all up, Sony it seems got hacked. Not just hacked, but utterly hacked, penetrated, compromised, whatever adjective you would rather use all of them applies here. Suffice to say that Sony was taken down in such a way that absolutely nothing electronic should be trusted within its environment whether it be a router, switch, desktop, laptop, server down to USB sticks. The hackers had complete control over what seems to be all of their infrastructure and for an indeterminate amount of time.
The adversary, once gaining access began to plunder all of Sony’s secrets, ex-filtrating them out of their networks to the tune of one hundred and eleven terabytes of data. This is an astounding amount of data to take and one has to wonder just how they got it out of there. I mean, did they move it on TB drives? Did they FTP that out? What? You also have to wonder just how long that would take if they were being sneaky about it. It also begs the question of whether or not the attackers had to be sneaky at all because perhaps Sony had not learned it’s lessons from previous attacks and just was not watching traffic at all to see the immense amounts of data leaving their domain.
It gets worse though for Sony… If that were even conceivable to many. The adversary then inserted a special feature to the malware they were using to compromise systems with to destroy the MBR section of hard drives on systems that were infected. This poison pill was then activated when the attackers were done to perform the coup de grâce that would take Sony down hard. As it was described the malware changed the login screen for all the users and then the game was on. Sony knew something was up and then systems went BOOM. Or did they? I am not too sure on this fact because I have not seen much out of Sony as to what happened next.
The net effect here is that Sony cannot trust anything and anyone potentially within their walls and had to shut down their whole network. They handed people pens and pencils and continued working as best they could as they called in Mandiant to perform the incident response for them. Meanwhile, the adversary had made contact with Sony either with the screen change (see below) or other means to say that they had that 111tb of data and laid out terms of what they wanted to not let it out on the net. That was around Nov 24 and it’s now December 6th. Since then there has been two data drops by a group calling themselves the GOP (Guardians of Peace) One drop was small, around a gig and the next was 27 gig. Within those files were found great swaths of Sony data that included numerous SSN’s and personal data for people who worked with or for Sony. In short, it’s a nightmare for all involved really.
Then things got… Weird.
Suddenly Variety (the Hollywood trade rag) was reporting that Sony thought that their adversary was in fact the DPRK and Kim Jong Un. Why? Because Sony was going to release a film that KJU did not appreciate. That film is called “The Interview” and it’s a comedy whose premise is that two Hollywood types are invited to DPRK to interview KJU and are asked “humorously” to whack KJU by the CIA.
Eh.. It could be funny. I really don’t think it would have nor will be but that’s just me. I am not a big fan of the two major stars of the film and of late Hollywood has mostly been the suck anyway, but yeah I digress…
So yeah, Variety is reporting that DPRK hacked Sony and with Mandiant being signed on HOLY CHINA! We all in INFOSEC began popping the popcorn and waiting on Tao to start talking about where DPRK touched him. It was and is still, rather unreal. The modus operandi for some of the hacking does match what DPRK has done before with wiper malware, or shall I say “has been attributed to have done before” and attribution as you all know is hard. However, the data kinda looked like maybe it was possible but with the lens of time it seems less likely that it was a nation state actor especially if the reason for the attack was in fact over this movie.
Since the advent of the DPRK theory, this whole story has just become a media frenzy about “CYBER CYBER CYBER WAR PEARL HARBOR BE AFRAID!!” The reality though seems to be a bit different from the popular media fallderall in that the GOP has all along said that this attack was in response to Sony’s bad practices and they needed to be taken down for them.
The Laughing Man Effect
This is the juncture where the Ghost In The Shell comes in and a certain arc in the story line from the Standalone Complex. If you are a fan you might remember the series of episodes concerning “The Laughing Man” In these episodes we are introduced to a hacker who appears from nowhere and begins a campaign of attacks against corporations for their misdeeds. In particular one company that was colluding in surveillance and stock manipulation but I will leave all that to you to watch.
What happens though is that The Laughing Man takes on the corporation and through hacking exposes them for what they had done as well as effects their bottom line greatly financially as well as damaging their reputation. It was the spectacular nature of the hack though, on live TV in this future Japan that got others completely obsessed with the Laughing Man and what he had done. If you have not seen the series there is a box set of just the episodes that concern the Laughing Man you can watch.
The story line though sparked with me because it showed the great asymmetric power of this kind of warfare that could be carried out by one person. One person with the skill sets to do it, could affect the bottom line of a company at a distance as well as anonymously. This is a powerful thought and one that in today’s society is much more of a reality than ever before and it is precisely because of technology. This idea I personally now call “The Laughing Man Effect” and in tandem with meme’s could spell real trouble for the world today. We have seen this already taking place with Anonymous and their various wars against injustice or just for the lulz as we saw in LulzSec. In fact, I would claim that HB Gary would have been the first instance of the Laughing Man Effect and it just took the Sony incident for it to solidify in my head.
Memetics
Now consider the meme. Meme’s are ideas or images that catch fire with people and are passed on rather like cognitive malware. Anonymous was a meme as well as means of creating and delivering meme’s on the internet. Born of the 4chan boards where meme’s are born every second, some dying on the vine while others catching fire, Anonymous caught on once they went after Scientology. The reality is that Anonymous lit this fire and now GOP has taken up the notion ostensibly and acted upon their personal desires of retribution much like Anon’s did on Scientology.
If the GOP is in fact a real group or person with an agenda to destroy Sony then I believe that their idea has come from Anonymous(s) successes. I also think that if they do really exist as a group then they have learned from Anonymous successes and failures. So far GOP has been pretty cagey with their use of dead drop email accounts and the use of various servers around the globe to send email to reporters. Which, if they are not caught right away, will give them more power of the meme as the David who slew Goliath.
In the end, I believe this to be just the meme taking root in the collective unconscious spurred on by the likes of Anonymous, Snowden, Wikileaks, and the Occupy movements. We live in a time where the small can in fact easily take down the big with technologies that we all use and often times do not secure properly. In the case of Sony it seems that they neglected a lot and got burned badly by doing so. If that is the case then who’s to say when the next big corporation is taken down by another person or persons with an axe to grind or a valid grievance?
The meme is catching and the Laughing Man Effect may be a real concern for the governments and corporations of the world. The more flashy and catchy or perhaps just downright motivational the more chance that others will follow. This is the nature of the meme and it’s ability to propagate so quickly and effectively in our hyper connected world. If you just look at all the media coverage of the Sony incident and then look at all the armchair detection going on around it you can see how this one too has sparked the collective imagination and curiosity.
Future State Electronic Warfare
So here it is. What some have been fearing and perhaps not getting across well enough is coming to pass. In our connected world it is easy to take things down and burn them. I the case of Sony they will come back sure. If you look at their stock the last few days as revelations surfaced, their prices took a dive but then went back up. Perhaps the real world just doesn’t understand the ramifications of what has happened here. However, the fact remains that Sony was completely decimated on a technical level to start. This is an important point that should be thought about.
That Sony was likely hit by an insider is highly probable. Was that insider sent in or actively recruited? Are they someone who just did this because they felt abused? I guess time will tell on these questions but insider attacks have always been a problem and they won’t go away. How do you really protect against that without making life harder for end users? Much more, how do you protect against insider attacks without alienating workers as they are watched every second of the day as they work to insure they aren’t setting off an attack? It’s a vicious cycle really.
Alternatively, how can any company expect to defeat a determined attacker anyway? The dreaded APT’s have had it easy and still do to a large extent but even after we all have learned our lessons, it will still always be a surety that a determined attacker will get you in the end. With that knowledge then what do you do? Do you just accept that fact like something akin to the AA credo of “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change” or do you fight harder? It is a never ending battle.
What Sony can teach us though now is that the idea of this kind of warfare is out there. Ordinary people are feeling empowered to take on corporations and governments with the aid of the very technologies they use to carry on daily business. Technologies that are now commonplace and we cannot do without. This is a scary thing to many in power and it’s been made all the scarier when things like the Sony hack happens so utterly and completely well.
Welcome to the future of online/electronic asymmetric warfare kids.
K.
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Written by Krypt3ia
2014/12/06 at 22:49
Posted in Commentary, Covert Ops, Cyber, CYBER CYBER CYBER, CyberPocalypse, CyberSec, CyberSociology, CyberWar