Russian Intelligence Gets Source Code to Windows 7
I don’t think this is a good idea.
Entries Tagged "Russia"
Page 11 of 13
The Threat of Cyberwar Has Been Grossly Exaggerated
There’s a power struggle going on in the U.S. government right now.
It’s about who is in charge of cyber security, and how much control the government will exert over civilian networks. And by beating the drums of war, the military is coming out on top.
“The United States is fighting a cyberwar today, and we are losing,” said former NSA director—and current cyberwar contractor—Mike McConnell. “Cyber 9/11 has happened over the last ten years, but it happened slowly so we don’t see it,” said former National Cyber Security Division director Amit Yoran. Richard Clarke, whom Yoran replaced, wrote an entire book hyping the threat of cyberwar.
General Keith Alexander, the current commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, hypes it every chance he gets. This isn’t just rhetoric of a few over-eager government officials and headline writers; the entire national debate on cyberwar is plagued with exaggerations and hyperbole.
Googling those names and terms—as well as “cyber Pearl Harbor,” “cyber Katrina,” and even “cyber Armageddon“—gives some idea how pervasive these memes are. Prefix “cyber” to something scary, and you end up with something really scary.
Cyberspace has all sorts of threats, day in and day out. Cybercrime is by far the largest: fraud, through identity theft and other means, extortion, and so on. Cyber-espionage is another, both government- and corporate-sponsored. Traditional hacking, without a profit motive, is still a threat. So is cyber-activism: people, most often kids, playing politics by attacking government and corporate websites and networks.
These threats cover a wide variety of perpetrators, motivations, tactics, and goals. You can see this variety in what the media has mislabeled as “cyberwar.” The attacks against Estonian websites in 2007 were simple hacking attacks by ethnic Russians angry at anti-Russian policies; these were denial-of-service attacks, a normal risk in cyberspace and hardly unprecedented.
A real-world comparison might be if an army invaded a country, then all got in line in front of people at the DMV so they couldn’t renew their licenses. If that’s what war looks like in the 21st century, we have little to fear.
Similar attacks against Georgia, which accompanied an actual Russian invasion, were also probably the responsibility of citizen activists or organized crime. A series of power blackouts in Brazil was caused by criminal extortionists—or was it sooty insulators? China is engaging in espionage, not war, in cyberspace. And so on.
One problem is that there’s no clear definition of “cyberwar.” What does it look like? How does it start? When is it over? Even cybersecurity experts don’t know the answers to these questions, and it’s dangerous to broadly apply the term “war” unless we know a war is going on.
Yet recent news articles have claimed that China declared cyberwar on Google, that Germany attacked China, and that a group of young hackers declared cyberwar on Australia. (Yes, cyberwar is so easy that even kids can do it.) Clearly we’re not talking about real war here, but a rhetorical war: like the war on terror.
We have a variety of institutions that can defend us when attacked: the police, the military, the Department of Homeland Security, various commercial products and services, and our own personal or corporate lawyers. The legal framework for any particular attack depends on two things: the attacker and the motive. Those are precisely the two things you don’t know when you’re being attacked on the Internet. We saw this on July 4 last year, when U.S. and South Korean websites were attacked by unknown perpetrators from North Korea—or perhaps England. Or was it Florida?
We surely need to improve our cybersecurity. But words have meaning, and metaphors matter. There’s a power struggle going on for control of our nation’s cybersecurity strategy, and the NSA and DoD are winning. If we frame the debate in terms of war, if we accept the military’s expansive cyberspace definition of “war,” we feed our fears.
We reinforce the notion that we’re helpless—what person or organization can defend itself in a war?—and others need to protect us. We invite the military to take over security, and to ignore the limits on power that often get jettisoned during wartime.
If, on the other hand, we use the more measured language of cybercrime, we change the debate. Crime fighting requires both resolve and resources, but it’s done within the context of normal life. We willingly give our police extraordinary powers of investigation and arrest, but we temper these powers with a judicial system and legal protections for citizens.
We need to be prepared for war, and a Cyber Command is just as vital as an Army or a Strategic Air Command. And because kid hackers and cyber-warriors use the same tactics, the defenses we build against crime and espionage will also protect us from more concerted attacks. But we’re not fighting a cyberwar now, and the risks of a cyberwar are no greater than the risks of a ground invasion. We need peacetime cyber-security, administered within the myriad structure of public and private security institutions we already have.
This essay previously appeared on CNN.com.
EDITED TO ADD (7/7): Earlier this month, I participated in a debate: “The Cyberwar Threat has been Grossly Exaggerated.” (Transcript here, video here.) Marc Rotenberg of EPIC and I were for the motion; Mike McConnell and Jonathan Zittrain were against. We lost.
We lost fair and square, for a bunch of reasons—we didn’t present our case very well, Jonathan Zittrain is a way better debater than we were—but basically the vote came down to the definition of “cyberwar.” If you believed in an expansive definition of cyberwar, one that encompassed a lot more types of attacks than traditional war, then you voted against the motion. If you believed in a limited definition of cyberwar, one that is a subset of traditional war, then you voted for it.
This continues to be an important debate.
EDITED TO ADD (7/7): Last month the Senate Homeland Security Committee held hearings on “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset: Comprehensive Legislation for the 21st Century.” Unfortunately, the DHS is getting hammered at these hearings, and the NSA is consolidating its power.
EDITED TO ADD (7/7): North Korea was probably not responsible for last year’s cyberattacks. Good thing we didn’t retaliate.
Cryptography Failure Story
By Russian spies:
Ricci said the steganographic program was activated by pressing control-alt-E and then typing in a 27-character password, which the FBI found written down on a piece of paper during one of its searches.
EDITED TO ADD (7/2): More information.
Fake CCTV Cameras
CCTV cameras in Moscow have been accused of streaming prerecorded video instead of live images.
What I can’t figure out is why? To me, it seems easier for the cameras to stream live video than prerecorded images.
New York and the Moscow Subway Bombing
People intent on preventing a Moscow-style terrorist attack against the New York subway system are proposing a range of expensive new underground security measures, some temporary and some permanent.
They should save their money – and instead invest every penny they’re considering pouring into new technologies into intelligence and old-fashioned policing.
Intensifying security at specific stations only works against terrorists who aren’t smart enough to move to another station. Cameras are useful only if all the stars align: The terrorists happen to walk into the frame, the video feeds are being watched in real time and the police can respond quickly enough to be effective. They’re much more useful after an attack, to figure out who pulled it off.
Installing biological and chemical detectors requires similarly implausible luck – plus a terrorist plot that includes the specific biological or chemical agent that is being detected.
What all these misguided reactions have in common is that they’re based on “movie-plot threats”: overly specific attack scenarios. They fill our imagination vividly, in full color with rich detail. Before long, we’re envisioning an entire story line, with or without Bruce Willis saving the day. And we’re scared.
It’s not that movie-plot threats are not worth worrying about. It’s that each one – Moscow’s subway attack, the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, etc. – is too specific. These threats are infinite, and the bad guys can easily switch among them.
New York has thousands of possible targets, and there are dozens of possible tactics. Implementing security against movie-plot threats is only effective if we correctly guess which specific threat to protect against. That’s unlikely.
A far better strategy is to spend our limited counterterrorism resources on investigation and intelligence – and on emergency response. These measures don’t hinge on any specific threat; they don’t require us to guess the tactic or target correctly. They’re effective in a variety of circumstances, even nonterrorist ones.
The result may not be flashy or outwardly reassuring – as are pricey new scanners in airports. But the strategy will save more lives.
The 2006 arrest of the liquid bombers – who wanted to detonate liquid explosives to be brought onboard airliners traveling from England to North America – serves as an excellent example. The plotters were arrested in their London apartments, and their attack was foiled before they ever got to the airport.
It didn’t matter if they were using liquids or solids or gases. It didn’t even matter if they were targeting airports or shopping malls or theaters. It was a straightforward, although hardly simple, matter of following leads.
Gimmicky security measures are tempting – but they’re distractions we can’t afford. The Christmas Day bomber chose his tactic because it would circumvent last year’s security measures, and the next attacker will choose his tactic – and target – according to similar criteria. Spend money on cameras and guards in the subways, and the terrorists will simply modify their plot to render those countermeasures ineffective.
Humans are a species of storytellers, and the Moscow story has obvious parallels in New York. When we read the word “subway,” we can’t help but think about the system we use every day. This is a natural response, but it doesn’t make for good public policy. We’d all be safer if we rose above the simple parallels and the need to calm our fears with expensive and seductive new technologies – and countered the threat the smart way.
This essay originally appeared in the New York Daily News.
Eavesdropping in the Former Soviet Union
Interesting story:
The phone’s ringer is a pretty simple thing: there’s a coil, a magnet and a hammer controlled by the magnet that hits the gongs when there is AC current in the coil. The ringer system is connected directly to the phone line when the phone is on hook. (Actually through a capacitor that protects the ringer system from DC current normally present in the line.)
If you haven’t figured yet, the coil with the hammer is a speaker, not a perfect one, but a speaker anyway, and that also means that the system can be used as an electrodynamic microphone. Any ordinary speaker is an electrodynamic microphone at the same time, if you hook it up to an audio amplifier using normal microphone input.
So this was how actually they, the KGB, did their eavesdropping, I thought. They didn’t need to freeze outside or put bugs in our homes, because they had a nice wiretapping device in every single home in the country. The shocking part of it was that they didn’t just eavesdrop phone conversations – that one was kind of obvious. They were able to hear everything. The PSTN switching stations were considered strategic objects, they were under KGB’s control and surely it was no problem for them to get a few powerful amplifiers hooked up to certain lines leading to homes they needed to eavesdrop. Simple!
U.S. Power Grid Hacked, Everyone Panic!
Yesterday I talked to at least a dozen reporters about this breathless Wall Street Journal story:
Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.
The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven’t sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.
“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” said a senior intelligence official. “So have the Russians.”
[…]
Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, “If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on.”
Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk.
“Over the past several years, we have seen cyberattacks against critical infrastructures abroad, and many of our own infrastructures are as vulnerable as their foreign counterparts,” Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair recently told lawmakers. “A number of nations, including Russia and China, can disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure.”
Read the whole story; there aren’t really any facts in it. I don’t know what’s going on; maybe it’s just budget season and someone is jockeying for a bigger slice.
Honestly, I am much more worried about random errors and undirected worms in the computers running our infrastructure than I am about the Chinese military. I am much more worried about criminal hackers than I am about government hackers. I wrote about the risks to our infrastructure here, and about Chinese hacking here.
And I wrote about last year’s reports of international hacking of our SCADA control systems here.
James Bamford Interview on the NSA
Worth reading. One excerpt:
The problem is that NSA was never designed for what it’s doing. It was designed after World War II to prevent another surprise attack from another nation-state, particularly the Soviet Union. And from 1945 or ’46 until 1990 or ’91, that’s what its mission was. That’s what every piece of equipment, that’s what every person recruited to the agency, was supposed to do, practically—find out when and where and if the Russians were about to launch a nuclear attack. That’s what it spent 50 years being built for. And then all of a sudden the Soviet Union is not around anymore, and NSA’s got a new mission, and part of that is going after terrorists. And it’s just not a good fit. They missed the first World Trade Center bombing, they missed the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, they missed the attack on the U.S. embassies in Africa, they missed 9/11. There’s this string of failures because this agency was not really designed to do this. In the movies, they’d be catching terrorists all the time. But this isn’t the movies, this is reality.
The big difference here is that when they were focused on the Soviet Union, the Soviets communicated over dedicated lines. The army communicated over army channels, the navy communicated over navy channels, the diplomats communicated over foreign-office channels. These were all particular channels, particular frequencies, you knew where they were; the main problem was breaking encrypted communications. [The NSA] had listening posts ringing the Soviet Union, they had Russian linguists that were being pumped out from all these schools around the U.S.
Then the Cold War ends and everything changes. Now instead of a huge country that communicated all the time, you have individuals who hop from Kuala Lampur to Nairobi or whatever, from continent to continent, from day to day. They don’t communicate [electronically] all the time—they communicate by meetings. [The NSA was] tapping Bin Laden’s phone for three years and never picked up on any of these terrorist incidents. And the [electronic] communications you do have are not on dedicated channels, they’re mixed in with the world communication network. First you’ve got to find out how to extract that from it, then you’ve got to find people who can understand the language, and then you’ve got to figure out the word code. You can’t use a Cray supercomputer to figure out if somebody’s saying they’re going to have a wedding next week whether it’s really going to be a wedding or a bombing.
So that’s the challenge facing the people there. So even though I’m critical about them for missing these things, I also try in the book to give an explanation as to why this is. It’s certainly not because the people are incompetent. It’s because the world has changed.
I think the problem is more serious than people realize. I talked to the people at Fort Gordon [in Georgia], which is the main listening post for the Middle East and North Africa. What was shocking to me was the people who were there were saying they didn’t have anybody [at the time] who spoke Pashtun. We’re at war in Afghanistan and the main language of the Taliban is Pashtun.
The answer here is to change our foreign policy so that we don’t have to depend on agencies like NSA to try to protect the country. You try to protect the country by having reasonable policies so that we won’t have to worry about terrorism so much. It’s just getting harder and harder to find them.
Also worth reading is his new book.
Cyberattack Against Georgia Preceded Real Attack
This is interesting:
Exactly who was behind the cyberattack is not known. The Georgian government blamed Russia for the attacks, but the Russian government said it was not involved. In the end, Georgia, with a population of just 4.6 million and a relative latecomer to the Internet, saw little effect beyond inaccessibility to many of its government Web sites, which limited the government’s ability to spread its message online and to connect with sympathizers around the world during the fighting with Russia.
[…]
In Georgia, media, communications and transportation companies were also attacked, according to security researchers. Shadowserver saw the attack against Georgia spread to computers throughout the government after Russian troops entered the Georgian province of South Ossetia. The National Bank of Georgia’s Web site was defaced at one point. Images of 20th-century dictators as well as an image of Georgia’s president, Mr. Saakashvili, were placed on the site. “Could this somehow be indirect Russian action? Yes, but considering Russia is past playing nice and uses real bombs, they could have attacked more strategic targets or eliminated the infrastructure kinetically,” said Gadi Evron, an Israeli network security expert. “The nature of what’s going on isn’t clear,” he said.
[…]
In addition to D.D.O.S. attacks that crippled Georgia’s limited Internet infrastructure, researchers said there was evidence of redirection of Internet traffic through Russian telecommunications firms beginning last weekend. The attacks continued on Tuesday, controlled by software programs that were located in hosting centers controlled by a Russian telecommunications firms. A Russian-language Web site, stopgeorgia.ru, also continued to operate and offer software for download used for D.D.O.S. attacks.
Welcome to 21st century warfare.
“It costs about 4 cents per machine,” Mr. Woodcock said. “You could fund an entire cyberwarfare campaign for the cost of replacing a tank tread, so you would be foolish not to.”
Dual-Use Technologies and the Equities Issue
On April 27, 2007, Estonia was attacked in cyberspace. Following a diplomatic incident with Russia about the relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial, the networks of many Estonian organizations, including the Estonian parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters, were attacked and—in many cases—shut down. Estonia was quick to blame Russia, which was equally quick to deny any involvement.
It was hyped as the first cyberwar: Russia attacking Estonia in cyberspace. But nearly a year later, evidence that the Russian government was involved in the denial-of-service attacks still hasn’t emerged. Though Russian hackers were indisputably the major instigators of the attack, the only individuals positively identified have been young ethnic Russians living inside Estonia, who were pissed off over the statue incident.
You know you’ve got a problem when you can’t tell a hostile attack by another nation from bored kids with an axe to grind.
Separating cyberwar, cyberterrorism and cybercrime isn’t easy; these days you need a scorecard to tell the difference. It’s not just that it’s hard to trace people in cyberspace, it’s that military and civilian attacks—and defenses—look the same.
The traditional term for technology the military shares with civilians is “dual use.” Unlike hand grenades and tanks and missile targeting systems, dual-use technologies have both military and civilian applications. Dual-use technologies used to be exceptions; even things you’d expect to be dual use, like radar systems and toilets, were designed differently for the military. But today, almost all information technology is dual use. We both use the same operating systems, the same networking protocols, the same applications, and even the same security software.
And attack technologies are the same. The recent spurt of targeted hacks against U.S. military networks, commonly attributed to China, exploit the same vulnerabilities and use the same techniques as criminal attacks against corporate networks. Internet worms make the jump to classified military networks in less than 24 hours, even if those networks are physically separate. The Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command uses the same tools against the same threats as any large corporation.
Because attackers and defenders use the same IT technology, there is a fundamental tension between cyberattack and cyberdefense. The National Security Agency has referred to this as the “equities issue,” and it can be summarized as follows: When a military discovers a vulnerability in a dual-use technology, they can do one of two things. They can alert the manufacturer and fix the vulnerability, thereby protecting both the good guys and the bad guys. Or they can keep quiet about the vulnerability and not tell anyone, thereby leaving the good guys insecure but also leaving the bad guys insecure.
The equities issue has long been hotly debated inside the NSA. Basically, the NSA has two roles: eavesdrop on their stuff, and protect our stuff. When both sides use the same stuff, the agency has to decide whether to exploit vulnerabilities to eavesdrop on their stuff or close the same vulnerabilities to protect our stuff.
In the 1980s and before, the tendency of the NSA was to keep vulnerabilities to themselves. In the 1990s, the tide shifted, and the NSA was starting to open up and help us all improve our security defense. But after the attacks of 9/11, the NSA shifted back to the attack: vulnerabilities were to be hoarded in secret. Slowly, things in the U.S. are shifting back again.
So now we’re seeing the NSA help secure Windows Vista and releasing their own version of Linux. The DHS, meanwhile, is funding a project to secure popular open source software packages, and across the Atlantic the UK’s GCHQ is finding bugs in PGPDisk and reporting them back to the company. (NSA is rumored to be doing the same thing with BitLocker.)
I’m in favor of this trend, because my security improves for free. Whenever the NSA finds a security problem and gets the vendor to fix it, our security gets better. It’s a side-benefit of dual-use technologies.
But I want governments to do more. I want them to use their buying power to improve my security. I want them to offer countrywide contracts for software, both security and non-security, that have explicit security requirements. If these contracts are big enough, companies will work to modify their products to meet those requirements. And again, we all benefit from the security improvements.
The only example of this model I know about is a U.S. government-wide procurement competition for full-disk encryption, but this can certainly be done with firewalls, intrusion detection systems, databases, networking hardware, even operating systems.
When it comes to IT technologies, the equities issue should be a no-brainer. The good uses of our common hardware, software, operating systems, network protocols, and everything else vastly outweigh the bad uses. It’s time that the government used its immense knowledge and experience, as well as its buying power, to improve cybersecurity for all of us.
This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.