The NSA is storing all global communications as they add a $2 Billion Total Awareness Utah Center to the cloud, and promise that one day the Yottabytes of Big Data will be deciphered.
Confessions of John Perkins Tells The Story
About His Activities As An Economic Hit Man
“The concept of corporatocracy is that corporations, to a significant extent, have massive power over governments, including those governments nominally elected by the people. They exercise their power via corporate monopolies and mergers, and through their subsequent capacity to leverage broad economic interests, which allows them the luxury of being declared “too big to fail”; this is accomplished by legal mechanisms (i.e., lobbyists, campaign contributions to office holders and candidates, threats to leave the state or country for another with less oversight and/or more personally beneficial subsidies, etc.), which renders them immune to vague accusations and prosecution. It may also refer to an unrealized form of government or theoretical corporate governance in national or international affairs.”
“Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly-paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.” [Via: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man]
Interview – Confessions of an Economic Hit Man – Part I
Interview – John Perkins – Confessions of an Economic Hit Man – Part II
The book argues that computer security has evolved from a technical discipline to a strategic concept. The world’s growing dependence on a powerful but vulnerable Internet – combined with the disruptive capabilities of cyber attackers – now threatens national and international security.
Strategic challenges require strategic solutions. The author examines four nation-state approaches to cyber attack mitigation:
• Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)
• Sun Tzu’s Art of War
• Cyber attack deterrence
• Cyber arms control
The four threat mitigation strategies fall into several categories. IPv6 is a technical solution. Art of War is military. The third and fourth strategies are hybrid: deterrence is a mix of military and political considerations; arms control is a political/technical approach.
The Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) is used to place the key research concepts into an influence matrix. DEMATEL analysis demonstrates that IPv6 is currently the most likely of the four examined strategies to improve a nation’s cyber defense posture.
There are two primary reasons why IPv6 scores well in this research. First, as a technology, IPv6 is more resistant to outside influence than the other proposed strategies, particularly deterrence and arms control, which should make it a more reliable investment. Second, IPv6 addresses the most significant advantage of cyber attackers today – anonymity.
NB! The author will give a keynote at HITB2011KUL in October 2011.
About the Author Kenneth Geers, PhD, CISSP, is the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) Cyber Subject Matter Expert. He was the first U.S. Representative to the NATO CCD COE in Tallinn, Estonia.
Unveillance, a data leak intelligence firm, has been studying this botnet for several months and reports that there are affected individuals and corporations in at least 172 countries, including the United States, Russia, Brazil, China, Great Britain, India and Iran. The malicious software (malware) at the heart of this investigation is the Butterfly Bot Kit, also known as Palevo, Pilleuz or Rimecud. This is the same software that was used to infect the millions of computers in the Mariposa botnet. Based on intelligence gathered from its network of global sensors, Unveillance estimates that this botnet is larger than Mariposa.
What Makes It “Indestructible?”
Golovanov and Soumenkov summarize this nicely: “The malware writers extended the program functionality, changed the algorithm used to encrypt the communication protocol between bots and the botnet command and control servers, and attempted to ensure they had access to infected computers even in cases where the botnet control centers are shut down. The owners of TDL are essentially trying to create an ‘indestructible’ botnet that is protected against attacks, competitors, and antivirus companies.”
First things first: location, location, location. Once inside, TDL-4 takes up residence in the master boot record (MBR), which means it can run before the computer is actually booted up. The MBR is also rarely combed over by a standard anti-virus scanner, giving TDL added invisibility.
Then, TDL-4 does something else quite clever: it runs its own anti-virus program. The software contains code to remove around 20 of the most common malicious programs, wiping an infected machine clean of everyday malware that might draw a user’s attention or cause an administrator to take a closer look. It can then download whatever malicious software it wants to in the place of the deleted programs. This version of TDL-4 also has added modules, like one that “fraudulently manipulates advertising systems and search engines” and another that establishes proxy servers on infected machines, which can be used to facilitate and hide other malicious cyber actions.
But critical to TDL-4’s indestructibility is the way it communicates between bots. There are a few things at play here. First, and perhaps most central, is a clever algorithm that encrypts the communication protocol between bots and the botnet command. This makes it virtually pointless to monitor traffic between the command server and infected machines.
Hacktivism
The term hacktivism (a portmanteau of hack and activism) was first used by designer/author Jason Sack in a 1995 InfoNation article about the media artist Shu Lea Cheang. Much as hacking can mean both constructive and destructive activitites, activism similarly includes both explicitly non-violent action (from the models of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi) and violent revolutionary activities (Che Guevara).
BBC Documentary on Hactivism
What WikiLeaks does and the possibility of a cyber war in the future.
DDoS attacks are growing in numbers. Discover Peakflow SP, a DDoS protection, threat management, and network visibility solution from Arbor Networks.
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