Cyber Warfare

@Kurt You raise many valid points. Touching on some of the highlights

_Regarding the nuclear ambitions of Iran may I point out the historical, bilateral, cultural and international relations shared by Iran and Pakistan. You mentioned this fact in your post. I firmly believe that those two Islamic states will draw closer together in the future. They share much history. What would be the shape of a future alliance between those two states is anybodies guess. But an alliance would create an Islamic nuclear armed bloc that would have to be reckoned with. Iran and Pakistan were once a part of what was considered Greater Iran. Them linking up again should not be discounted. There are signs that a strengthening of ties are already underway

Greater Iran - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Iran

_Regarding the Iranian missile threat to Europe, I still stand by my historical thinking on Iran regarding Europe (NATO) as a new version of the Crusades. The wild card is what influence western thinking will have on the Iranian young people, If they adopt a more liberal view of Islam then things might cool down a bit. However if Iran for whatever reason takes a hard turn towards Islamic fundamentalism then all bets are off on where things will land. This chart below shows the current missile protection setup as established to protect Europe from a current and future missile threat

BBC News - Nato's missile defence shield 'up and running'

Originally Posted by delft

How do you think such an, as yet impossible, Iranian attack on Europe would serve any Iranian purpose?
All this nonsense you cite is mostly internal US politics, within the beltway, or politics between Netanyahu and Obama, and preparing for the possibility, now receding, of neutralizing the Russian strategic weapons.

Answer: Any attack on Europe would have to be viewed through the prism of Islam. And I cannot understand Islam and its goals of converting non-believers to Islam via the sword. But Islam drives all decisions for Iran and cannot be understood by a non-Islamic person.
Are the Iranians pragmatic? I cannot say.

China Cyber-skills Are Improving But Still Don't Top Russia and Israel

Notions that most Chinese hackers are simplistic and amateurish may be correct for the moment, but it is irrelevant, says a senior U.S. official who has been involved in classified airborne electronic and cyber-warfare since the Vietnam War.

“There are some really good [Chinese hackers] that fall into the category of advanced persistent threats,” says the veteran electronic warrior. “The others in that category are the Israelis and the Russians and I’m not talking just about Russian Mafia which is good in the financial arena.”

The information comes from background conversations with experts gathered for the Air Force Association’s 2nd Annual Cyber Conference in Washington, D.C.

U.S. analysts have based their judgement on the forensic analysis of APT such as skills at getting through firewalls. They contend that in the upper category, the order of sophistication is Russia, Israel and then some of the Chinese. The number of penetrations by the Chinese overwhelm all the others, but the Russians put more focus on sophisticated exploitation schemes.

“If you look at the educational background of the Russian [cyber-]mafia, most of them came out of the Russian Academy of Sciences,” the specialist says. “They’ve had a strong focus for a number of years.”

Russia also flooded Israel with scientists when the Soviet government lifted its restriction on the immigration of Jews. They flocked to Israel and added new engineering and scientific life to Jerusalem’s technology base.

The reason that Russia is rated higher than Israel in its cyber-expertise is the size of Moscow’s resources and its well-educated population.

“Now China is putting a lot of resources into cyber,” the EW specialist says. “A lot of those [Chinese] amateurs that get caught and identified are probably all students that will one day move up into the APT category.”

OT
Kurt wrote in #38:

Now comes Israel, a country that tries to establish rule by another branch of the Abrahamic religions in "their ancient land" at the exclusion of all those "occupiers" who settled in "their land" after the Romans forced them to live in the diaspora.

Just a bit of history. Judaism developed from the earlier Israelite polytheism during the Babylonian exile of the elites of eleven of the twelve Israelite tribes. Jews have been living in the diaspora ever since. The Persians, who probably taught them monotheism allowed the return of some/any (?) to the old Judea and Samaria ( The Samaritans were the tribe that kept its elite, Samaritans have been discriminated against in Israel until a few years ago ). Jump to the Roman period. There where three Jewish insurrections in the first and second century:
AD 66-70, well-known (?).
AD 115-118 ( not in the later Palestine, because of the presence of two Roman legions, but in Cyrenaica, in Alexandria ( at the time a half Jewish city - most of the Jews spoke Greek and the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament was made about a century and a half before the birth of Christ for those Greek speaking Jews ) and on Cyprus where the Jews tried to murder all non-Jews. Also in what is now southern Iraq and was then part of Persia.
AD 132-135, the Bar Kochba war. It was after this war that the Roman authorities expelled the Jews from Jerusalaim, gave the city a new Roman name and renamed the country Palestine. The Jews were not then expelled from Palestine. It were the Crusaders, those heroes of George W. Bush, for whom many Jews fled or who murdered them. See Persecution of Jews in the First Crusade - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Qur'an is opposed to forced conversion and at the time of the first crusade the majority of the people in the Middle East were Christians and there many Jews.

Addition: I first got interested in this matter by reading Volume "History before 1880" from the series Israel Pocket Library published by Keter in Jerusalem in the 1970's. Later reading largely confirmed what I read there.

Originally Posted by NikeX

Answer: Any attack on Europe would have to be viewed through the prism of Islam. And I cannot understand Islam and its goals of converting non-believers to Islam via the sword. But Islam drives all decisions for Iran and cannot be understood by a non-Islamic person.
Are the Iranians pragmatic? I cannot say.

It's quite clear that you don't understand Islam. Neither do I, I'm an atheist.
The Qu'ran is opposed to forced conversion, unlike Christianity ( remember the conversion of the Saxons by Charlemagne, when many who resisted were killed, some after being baptized ) or apparently Buddhism ( most Tibetans were converted by their King at the same time Charlemagne was evangelising among the Saxons ).
Is the fact that you don't understand people enough reason to think they're idiots?
Iran has not attacked any country since 1979, unlike the US and Israel and many other Western countries. They are accused of terrorism, but the only thing that can be proved "against" them is their support for Hezbollah and Hamas. It sees these movement as defending themselves and their people against the aggressor state Israel. You might disagree but this is a defensible point of view.
Iran is enriching uranium it says for peaceful purposes and warlike intent has not been proved against them. But ending enrichment and giving in to blackmail might encourage the blackmailers. At the same time it says developing nuclear weapons is haram and that too is a reasonable point of view. Beside it sees that Iraq was able to remove the occupation forces and it expects Afghanistan also to be successful.
Iran is arming itself to deter aggressors and it keeps to the rules. Both are duties of a state. So where do you see Iran being unreasonable

^^^ We, in the non-islamic world, need to worry more about the Wahibis. These are the true Islamic Nutjobs who want to proliferate islam to the 4 corners of the globe whether you like it or not. Just so happens they are backed by the Saudis ( esp. their Royal family). They use soft power e.g. supplying their form of islamic teaching in text books for kids as well as direct funding of terrorism. Know your enemy...because the US Gov sure doesn't.

Back to the CyberWarfare topic:

It was reported today that upon examining the Flame malware

- At least four programmers developed code for the servers and left their nicknames in the source code.

- One of the servers communicated with more than 5,000 victim machines during just a one-week period last May, suggesting the total victims exceed 10,000.

-The infections didn’t occur at once, but focused on different groups of targets in various countries at different times; one server focused primarily on targets in Iran and Sudan.

-The attackers stole massive amounts of data – at least 5.5 gigabytes of stolen data inadvertently left behind on one of the servers was collected in one week.

-The four pieces of malware used different custom protocols to communicate with the servers.

-The attackers used a number of means to secure their operation as well as the data they stole – although they left behind gigabytes of purloined data, it was encrypted using a public key stored in a database on the servers and an unknown private key, preventing the researchers and anyone else without the private key from reading it.

-The attackers, perhaps suspecting that their operation was about to be uncovered last May, attempted a cleanup operation to wipe the Flame malware from infected machines.

It must be clear to many people working in IT that it is taking an unnecessary risk to use programs and operating systems that are in widespread use. It is much better to use a less well known operating system and by preference one designed for security like OpenBSD instead of Microsoft Windows. You might then introduce your own variations to make exploitation of any mistakes you make more difficult.
A strong defense is more valuable than offensive capabilities that might be denied when you most need them.

Add to that, education for users about security issues. I for one am eager to see consumer operating systems that start to use TPM for security.

As a computer user, HUAWEI and kapersky are two second-rate companys who cannot be remembered in the historic view.

Originally Posted by escobar

China Cyber-skills Are Improving But Still Don't Top Russia and Israel

See the contradiction? They make a general statement about Chinese hackers not being as good as Israeli and Russians yet why is China accused of being the biggest cyber threat? Chinese hackers accused of stealing F-35 data... Are they small potatos? Oh maybe those are the good ones. So does that mean all Israeli and Russians hackers are all great?

Recently Iran has been accused of cyber attacks to which has brought up the idea again cyber attacks are acts of war. Which begs the question what is Stuxnet? And look how Israel is sounding again the alarm bells on Iran's nuclear program. Where's Stuxnet to save the world?

Why are the US not boosting about their own cyber warfare skills? Their espionage establishment is larger than the military of many countries, they spent relatively little on humint and much on the interception of messages of their friends, their enemies and everyone else and that is already close to cyber espionage.
Also they push the use of Microsoft Windows which is notoriously leaky. And what do we think of this item I found on slashdot:
Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

China Telco Replaces Cisco Devices Over Security Concerns
Posted by timothy on Friday October 26, @08:02PM
from the tit-for-tat-for-tit-etc dept.

hackingbear writes
"China Unicom, the country's second largest telecom operator, has replaced Cisco Systems routers in one of the country's most important backbone networks, citing security reasons [due to bugs and vulnerability.) The move came after a congressional report branded Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and ZTE Corp. security threats in the United States, citing bugs and vulnerability (rather than actual evidence of spying.) Surprising to us, up to now, Cisco occupies a large market share in China. It accounts for over a 70 percent share of China Telecom's 163 backbone network and over an 80 percent share of China Unicom's 169 backbone network. Let's wait to see who's the winner in this trade war disguised as national security."

Read the 134 comments

Also from /.:
Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

Iran's High Tech Copycat War Against the West: Drones and Cyberwar
Posted by Soulskill on Friday October 26, @02:25PM
from the sue-them-for-copyright-infringment dept.

An anonymous reader writes
"Iran and its nuclear program seem to be getting all the headlines. Yet, Iran has found a way to respond to western cyber attacks such as Stuxnet, drone surveillance and targeted assassinations; they've decided to respond in kind. Iran has launched its own cyber attacks on U.S. banks via denial-of-service attacks. Iranian drones recently were used to spy on Israeli nuclear facilities. Cyberweapons were also used against Saudi oil facilities. The goal: to make sure the west, specifically the United States, knows that Iran does have the tools to strike back. While Iran does not have a world-class military like the United States, it does have the capabilities to cause damage if it wants to. With Iran taking to cyberspace and drones, it shows such technology is not just under the control of the U.S. Iran has been careful, though, not to escalate the conflict. The risk: what if the plan backfires and goes beyond its intended scope?"

Read the 149 comments

Originally Posted by delft

Why are the US not boosting about their own cyber warfare skills? Their espionage establishment is larger than the military of many countries, they spent relatively little on humint and much on the interception of messages of their friends, their enemies and everyone else and that is already close to cyber espionage.
Also they push the use of Microsoft Windows which is notoriously leaky. And what do we think of this item I found on slashdot:
Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

Why boast? Why would be gained by bragging? Why give potential enemies any information?