Cyberwar: War in the Fifth Domain

G

groveChuck

U-matic Member
Fascinating article that reads like a screenplay for a cyber thriller:

"AT THE height of the cold war, in June 1982, an American early-warning satellite detected a large blast in Siberia. A missile being fired? A nuclear test?
It was, it seems, an explosion on a Soviet gas pipeline. The cause was a malfunction in the computer-control system that Soviet spies had stolen from a firm in Canada.

They did not know that the CIA had tampered with the software so that it would “go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds,” according to the memoirs of Thomas Reed, a former air force secretary.
The result, he said, “was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space.”

This was one of the earliest demonstrations of the power of a “logic bomb”.
Three decades later, with more and more vital computer systems linked up to the internet, could enemies use logic bombs to, say, turn off the electricity from the other side of the world? Could terrorists or hackers cause financial chaos by tampering with Wall Street’s computerised trading systems?

And given that computer chips and software are produced globally, could a foreign power infect high-tech military equipment with computer bugs?
“It scares me to death,” says one senior military source. “The destructive potential is so great.”

After land, sea, air and space, warfare has entered the fifth domain: cyberspace."

more:
http://www.economist.com/node/16478792
One lesson (for nations, industry and perhaps even production people)? If you find a thumb drive, DON'T PLUG IT INTO YOUR COMPUTER!!!
1511082.GIF
 
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I AGREE
 
It appears to be mostly the NSA, but also:

"In May the Pentagon set up its new Cyber Command (Cybercom) headed by General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency (NSA). His mandate is to conduct “full-spectrum” operations—to defend American military networks and attack other countries’ systems. Precisely how, and by what rules, is secret."

" Cybercommand will protect only the military “.mil” domain. The government domain, “.gov”, and the corporate infrastructure, “.com” will be the responsibility respectively of the Department of Homeland Security and private companies, with support from Cybercom."

"... By breaking up data and sending it over multiple routes, the internet can survive the loss of large parts of the network. Yet some of the global digital infrastructure is more fragile. More than nine-tenths of internet traffic travels through undersea fibre-optic cables, and these are dangerously bunched up in a few choke-points, for instance around New York, the Red Sea or the Luzon Strait in the Philippines (see map). Internet traffic is directed by just 13 clusters of potentially vulnerable domain-name servers."

"... China, in particular, is accused of wholesale espionage, attacking the computers of major Western defence contractors and reputedly taking classified details of the F-35 fighter, the mainstay of future American air power. At the end of 2009 it appears to have targeted Google and more than a score of other IT companies. Experts at a cyber-test-range built in Maryland by Lockheed Martin, a defence contractor (which denies losing the F-35 data), say “advanced persistent threats” are hard to fend off amid the countless minor probing of its networks. Sometimes attackers try to slip information out slowly, hidden in ordinary internet traffic.

At other times they have tried to break in by leaving infected memory-sticks in the car park, hoping somebody would plug them into the network.
Even unclassified e-mails can contain a wealth of useful information about projects under development.
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“Cyber-espionage is the biggest intelligence disaster since the loss of the nuclear secrets [in the late 1940s],” says Jim Lewis of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, DC. Spying probably presents the most immediate danger to the West: the loss of high-tech know-how that could erode its economic lead or, if it ever came to a shooting war, blunt its military edge.


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About nine-tenths of the 140 billion e-mails sent daily are spam;

The amount of information now available online about individuals makes it ever easier to attack a computer by crafting a personalised e-mail that is more likely to be trusted and opened. This is known as “spear-phishing”.
The ostentatious hackers and virus-writers who once wrecked computers for fun are all but gone, replaced by criminal gangs seeking to harvest data. “Hacking used to be about making noise. Now it’s about staying silent,” says Greg Day of McAfee, a vendor of IT security products. Hackers have become wholesale providers of malware—viruses, worms and Trojans that infect computers—for others to use. Websites are now the favoured means of spreading malware, partly because the unwary are directed to them through spam or links posted on social-networking sites. And poorly designed websites often provide a window into valuable databases.

Malware is exploding . It is typically used to steal passwords and other data, or to open a “back door” to a computer so that it can be taken over by outsiders. Such “zombie” machines can be linked up to thousands, if not millions, of others around the world to create a “botnet”. Estimates for the number of infected machines range up to 100m (see map for global distribution of infections). Botnets are used to send spam, spread malware or launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which seek to bring down a targeted computer by overloading it with countless bogus requests.
 
It is a curious number, but I get little "adult" spam other than Facebook come ons (and I'm not on FB) and the occasional Viagra or Grow 10" ad, and they go to my junk mail (oh wait, I just checked. I got Wives Waiting to Hook up, too. Maybe they really mean it???).

OTOH, just think how much faster things would move if 125 billion spam emails weren't sent everyday!
 
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