Essays in the Category "Computer and Information Security"
Page 4 of 33
Russia’s Hacking Success Shows How Vulnerable the Cloud Is
The cloud is everywhere. It’s critical to computing. And it’s under attack.
Russia’s Sunburst cyberespionage campaign, discovered late last year, impacted more than 100 large companies and U.S. federal agencies, including the Treasury, Energy, Justice, and Homeland Security departments. A crucial part of the Russians’ success was their ability to move through these organizations by compromising cloud and local network identity systems to then access cloud accounts and pilfer emails and files.
Hackers said by the U.S. government to have been working for the Kremlin targeted a widely used Microsoft cloud service that synchronizes user identities. The hackers …
What Will It Take?
View or Download in PDF Format
What will it take for policy makers to take cybersecurity seriously? Not minimal-change seriously. Not here-and-there seriously. But really seriously. What will it take for policy makers to take cybersecurity seriously enough to enact substantive legislative changes that would address the problems? It’s not enough for the average person to be afraid of cyberattacks. They need to know that there are engineering fixes—and that’s something we can provide.
For decades, I have been waiting for the “big enough” incident that would finally do it. In 2015, Chinese military hackers hacked the Office of Personal Management and made off with the highly personal information of about 22 million Americans who had security clearances. In 2016, the Mirai botnet leveraged millions of Internet-of-Things devices with default admin passwords to launch a denial-of-service attack that disabled major Internet platforms and services in both North America and Europe. In 2017, hackers—years later we learned that it was the Chinese military—hacked the credit bureau Equifax and stole the personal information of 147 million Americans. In recent years, ransomware attacks have knocked hospitals offline, and many articles have been written about Russia inside the U.S. power grid. And last year, the Russian SVR hacked thousands of sensitive networks inside civilian critical infrastructure worldwide in what we’re now calling Sunburst (and used to call SolarWinds)…
Bitcoin’s Greatest Feature Is Also Its Existential Threat
The cryptocurrency depends on the integrity of the blockchain. But China’s censors, the FBI, or powerful corporations could fragment it into oblivion.
Security researchers have recently discovered a botnet with a novel defense against takedowns. Normally, authorities can disable a botnet by taking over its command-and-control server. With nowhere to go for instructions, the botnet is rendered useless. But over the years, botnet designers have come up with ways to make this counterattack harder. Now the content-delivery network Akamai has reported on a new method: a botnet that uses the Bitcoin blockchain ledger. Since the blockchain is globally accessible and hard to take down, the botnet’s operators appear to be safe…
Illuminating SolarStorm: Implications for National Strategy and Policy
This essay appeared as part of a round table on how to respond to the SolarWinds attack.
This operation was a tremendous intelligence success for the Russian government, and recovering from it is going to be much harder than people think. It might not even be possible. It requires much more than simply patching the Sunburst vulnerability. It means burning the infected networks to the ground and rebuilding them from scratch, just as you might reinstall your computer’s operating system after a bad virus. But even that won’t be enough.
The Russians were slow and deliberate, using the backdoor in the SolarWinds update to obtain initial footholds in only a few of the 18,000 vulnerable networks, and then working over months to establish persistence by creating alternative means of access that would survive discovery of the initial vulnerability…
Perspectives on the SolarWinds Incident
View or Download in PDF Format
Excerpt
A serious cybersecurity event was recently revealed: malicious actors had gained access to the source code for the SolarWinds Orion monitoring and management software. They inserted malware into that source code so that, when the software was distributed to and deployed by SolarWinds customers as part of an update, the malicious software could be used to surveil customers who unknowingly installed the malware and gain potentially arbitrary control over the systems managed by Orion. Of course, such a level of control has given attackers opportunities for further exploitation as well…
The Government Will Guard Biden’s Peloton from Hackers. What About the Rest of Us?
The Security Threat to Worry About Is the One Facing the Public, Not the President
President Biden wants his Peloton in the White House. For those who have missed the hype, it’s an Internet-connected stationary bicycle. It has a screen, a camera and a microphone. You can take live classes online, work out with your friends or join the exercise social network. And all of that is a security risk, especially if you are the president of the United States.
Any computer brings with it the risk of hacking. This is true of our computers and phones, and it’s also true about all of the Internet-of-Things devices that are increasingly part of our lives. These large and small appliances, cars, medical devices, toys and—yes—exercise machines are all computers at their core, and they’re all just as vulnerable. Presidents face special risks when it comes to the IoT, but Biden has the National Security Agency to help him handle them…
The Solarwinds Hack Is Stunning. Here’s What Should Be Done
The information that is emerging about Russia’s extensive cyberintelligence operation against the United States and other countries should be increasingly alarming to the public. The magnitude of the hacking, now believed to have affected more than 250 federal agencies and businesses—primarily through a malicious update of the SolarWinds network management software—may have slipped under most people’s radar during the holiday season, but its implications are stunning.
According to a Washington Post report, this is a massive intelligence coup by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). And a massive security failure on the part of the United States is also to blame. Our insecure internet infrastructure has become a critical national security risk—one that we need to take seriously and spend money to reduce…
The US Has Suffered a Massive Cyberbreach. It’s Hard to Overstate How Bad It Is
This is a security failure of enormous proportions – and a wake-up call. The US must rethink its cybersecurity protocols
Recent news articles have all been talking about the massive Russian cyber-attack against the United States, but that’s wrong on two accounts. It wasn’t a cyber-attack in international relations terms, it was espionage. And the victim wasn’t just the US, it was the entire world. But it was massive, and it is dangerous.
Espionage is internationally allowed in peacetime. The problem is that both espionage and cyber-attacks require the same computer and network intrusions, and the difference is only a few keystrokes. And since this Russian operation isn’t at all targeted, the entire world is at risk—and not just from Russia. Many countries carry out these sorts of operations, none more extensively than the US. The solution is to prioritize security and defense over espionage and attack…
The Twitter Hacks Have to Stop
Czech translation
Spanish translation
Twitter was hacked this week. Not a few people’s Twitter accounts, but all of Twitter. Someone compromised the entire Twitter network, probably by stealing the log-in credentials of one of Twitter’s system administrators. Those are the people trusted to ensure that Twitter functions smoothly.
The hacker used that access to send tweets from a variety of popular and trusted accounts, including those of Joe Biden, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, as part of a mundane scam—stealing bitcoin—but it’s easy to envision more nefarious scenarios. Imagine a government using this sort of attack against another government, coordinating a series of fake tweets from hundreds of politicians and other public figures the day before a major election, to affect the outcome. Or to escalate an …
Attacking Machine Learning Systems
The field of machine learning security is progressing rapidly, and new risks have been detected. Machine learning technologies and solutions are expected to become prominent features in the information security landscape.
View or Download in PDF Format
The field of machine learning (ML) security—and corresponding adversarial ML—is rapidly advancing as researchers develop sophisticated techniques to perturb, disrupt, or steal the ML model or data. It’s a heady time; because we know so little about the security of these systems, there are many opportunities for new researchers to publish in this field. In many ways, this circumstance reminds me of the cryptanalysis field in the 1990. And there is a lesson in that similarity: the complex mathematical attacks make for good academic papers, but we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that insecure software will be the likely attack vector for most ML systems…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.