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Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Letter Of Marque: ASF 2011–Gen. Michael Hayden Talks About LoM And ‘Digital Blackwater’

Filed under: Cyber Security,Letter Of Marque — Tags: article 1 section 8, Aspen Security Forum, Cyber Security, cyberwar, General Michael Hayden, Letter Of Marque, piracy — Matt @ 1:02 AM

Now this was a pleasant surprise. I am always on the lookout for any serious or interesting conversations about the Letter of Marque and Reprisal, and low and behold I stumbled on a good one at the Aspen Security Forum. General Michael Hayden, with his extensive intelligence background and experience, actually brought up the concept of the LoM (@ min. 30:04) when talking about private security in the cyber space realm. The ‘Digital Blackwater’ comment came up before the mention of the LoM. Pretty cool stuff, and it is great to see such important and highly influential folks have a conversation about the concept.

The other topic that came up that really grabbed my attention is the patent legislation that is coming up that is referred to as the ‘first to file’ law or the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. Meaning, companies that ‘first’ file the patent, win the rights to it, as opposed to companies or individuals who actually thought it up and file for that patent. A law like this would make it very lucrative for digital pirates to steal valuable information and file it first–legally. Scary stuff, and this could ramp up the cyber piracy game big time. The Google Cloud security solution is what you can rely on to get help with securing your data.

The other statistic I was floored by was that the US businesses loses about a trillion dollars a year to cyber piracy and all of the money that companies have to spend on security. That is a stunning figure, and it kind of puts into perspective what is really being lost, and especially during such tough economic times. Something must be done to stop that, and you can see why concepts like digital PSC’s and LoM come up. It’s like these criminals and attackers are just walking into Fort Knox and taking whatever gold they want. The vulnerable OT networks is what one should make sure to protect from cyber attacks.

Finally they ended the conversation with cloud computing, which will probably be pretty popular for companies to get into. Reduced cost and increased security do to economy of scale (everyone is sharing everyone’s stuff, to include security measures) Although I tend to think that cloud computing will be attacked and exploited, just like anything else. Interesting stuff, and this is a great LoM resource for future discussions. –Matt

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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

China: The Cyberwar Between Google and China

Filed under: China,Technology — Tags: China, cyberwar, Google, private military companies, security, Thomas Ricks — Matt @ 5:59 AM

Interesting deal between Google and China. Although the real winner here will be China’s search engine called Baidu. You can bet that any telecom stuff that Google was planning on doing in China, will probably suffer as well.

The real story though, is the whole concept of a mega corporation like Google, taking on a super power like China? Thomas Ricks was pretty intrigued by the concept as well. Time to break out the pre-Westphalia rule book, and start implementing cyber privateer hacking to go after these state sponsored hackers. –Matt

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Security specialist ‘has evidence of Chinese attack on Google’

A US computer expert says he has found the ‘digital fingerprints’ of Chinese authors on the tools used to launch recent attacks against Google

By Claudine Beaumont, Technology Editor20 Jan 2010

Joe Stewart, a security specialist with SecureWorks in the US, told the New York Times that he had analysed the software used to attack Google, and found that the main program used by the hackers contained a module based on an algorithm that appeared in a Chinese technical document that has been published exclusively on Chinese-language websites.

Google last week announced that the accounts of human rights activists and political dissidents had been hacked, and that it believed the attacks had originated from China. However, details about the precise nature of the attacks were not revealed, although security experts broadly agreed that Google was probably correct in its suspicions.

It is thought that a Trojan virus, known as Hydraq, was responsible for opening a “back door” in to compromised computers, which could then be used by hackers to access and take control of a machine without the owner’s permission or knowledge.

Stewart uses a method known as a “reverse engineering” to unravel malicious software, viruses and Trojans to identify how and where they originated. He looks for patterns in the code, and for unusual algorithms used by hackers to error-check transmitted data.

However, Stewart said that he could not rule out the possibility that the programmers behind the Google hack had laid a false trail that pointed to Chinese involvement in order to disguise the fact they originated from another country or government.

“But Occam’s Razor suggests that the simplest explanation is probably the best one,” he told the New York Times.

Story here.

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Hackers create opportunity for military firms

Attacks on Google boost the market for cyber-security just as government weapons spending is expected to slow. Military firms are retooling for rising demand by corporations as well as government.

By W.J. Hennigan

January 19, 2010

For U.S. military firms, the latest revelations of highly sophisticated hacker attacks on Google Inc. are highlighting a new reality, and a potentially lucrative business: The battlefield is shifting to cyberspace.

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