The Latest Wave of Cyberattacks On the West Is Coming From the Middle East 56
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "A hacker group from the Middle East known as Molerats attacked a wide range of major public sector organizations over April and May, including the BBC and a smattering of European governments, researchers revealed today. The latest attacks, which sought to establish espionage operations on targets' digital infrastructure, took place between 29 April and 27 May, according to security technology vendor FireEye. The Molerats' actions have added weight to concerns around growing cyber capability stemming from the Middle East. Yet researchers are somewhat perplexed as to the motivation of the perpetrators, whose targets included both Israel and Palestine, as well as Turkey, Slovenia, Macedonia, New Zealand and Latvia. The hackers also went after government bodies in the U.S. and the UK."
Let me be the first to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
The non-American world is happily sitting at keyboards and attempting to hack the evil U.S. to pieces. Is this really a surprise to anyone?
It must be the damn fucking chinks again ! (Score:1, Funny)
" A hacker group from the Middle East known as Molerats attacked a wide range of major public sector organizations over April and May, including the BBC and a smattering of European governments>/tt> "
Yep, it must be them fucking middle eastern chinks again !
I hope the Pentagon will show us the photos of them fucking bearded chinks with fucking beach towers on their heads !!!
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The non-American world
What, Canada is in on this too? What about Iceland?
attempting to hack the evil U.S. to pieces
It sounds like most of the targets in this case are European. Persecution complex?
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You do understand that "American" is not a race, but a nationality, right?
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Is this really a surprise to anyone?
A surprising number of Americans believe their own propaganda.
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US hacking attempts get reported when they're discovered, likewise goes for everyone else too; or is there some reason they shouldn't be?
Whatever (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me be the first one to congratulate them. So long as those idiots stick to keyboard attacks instead of suicide bombings I think we are moving in the right direction.
If anyone is dumb enough to connect nuclear power plants to the internet ... well, let's just say we'll learn that lesson and never make that mistake again.
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You still needed two people to physically turn a key on site. The password was just something they added to fulfill some political mandate that wanted the weapon release control in the hands of politicians rather than the military.
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Yeah, because having another check to launching a weapon is a bad thing?
Put all the control in the hands of the military and LIE about the password, what could go wrong?
I'm still upset about the whole "standing armies" thing, so I don't think I can handle a debate of why we want civilian control of the military.
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If anyone is dumb enough to connect nuclear power plants to the internet ... well, let's just say we'll learn that lesson and never make that mistake again.
You're talking about Stuxnet [wikipedia.org], right? You must be from Iran?
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Stuxnet is kind of proving the wisdom in not connecting vital systems to a network with open access to the internet.
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Let me be the first one to congratulate them. So long as those idiots stick to keyboard attacks instead of suicide bombings I think we are moving in the right direction.
If anyone is dumb enough to connect nuclear power plants to the internet ... well, let's just say we'll learn that lesson and never make that mistake again.
I think any agency dumb enough to connect a nuclear power plant control to the internet is dumb enough NOT to learn from their mistakes.
i.e., We are likely already doomed, DOOMED I say!
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If your nation, firm, cult or organization can find some skilled locals you have an interesting network to hop along in a distant country with a physical endpoint in a city.
Nations can list all the 'other' nations all they like. The selection of nations may just be depe
and it comes to this (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:and it comes to this (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, c'mon man. Hackers... cyberattacks! Isn't that relevant?
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What's propagandist about this story?
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If you are concerned by this at all... (Score:5, Interesting)
...why?
Your outermost gateway should be a simple NAT/port-forwarder/load balancer and a honeypot server. Web traffic goes to the front-end servers, all else goes to the honeypot server. There should be no live DNS. Computers don't need readable names, strings are often where mistakes are made and replying to an IP doesn't require name resolution. The NAT/load balancing would be per-inbound-packet at this level, not per-session or per-time-interval. That means attacks on server resources (if they get through at all) are divided across your cluster evenly. Buys the machines time to detect and counter the problem.
Your front-end servers should be not much more than static content delivery systems, proxying the rest through your outer defences. OpenBSD is ideal for this - fast, simple, bullet-proof. Middle level defences should be a very basic firewall (maximum stability and maximum throughput) and an Active NIDS running in parallel (so as not to slow down traffic).
Inside that, you have at least two load-balancers, one on hot standby, farming dynamic requests to mainline servers. Mainline servers have no static content, only dynamic content. If dynamic content changes slowly (eg: BBC), have a cache server sitting in front of the actual content server. No point regenerating unchanged content.
Content servers send through another firewall (it can also be simple) to your database servers. Unrelated data should be on distinct servers for security and seek time. Since the content servers are read-only, they need hit only database cache servers with actual databases behind those. If you absolutely have to have FQDNs, zone transfer the critical stuff. Bounce all other DNS requests via the internal network to the regular DNS source. That way, your at-risk gateway doesn't contain stupid holes in the wall.
The internal corporate network would have a firewall and switch linking up to the content servers and cache servers, then a different firewall to the database servers. These would be heavier-duty firewalls as the traffic is more complex. Logins of any kind should be permitted only over an IPSec tunnel. All unused ports should be closed.
For the outermost systems, logins should be by IPSec only from a cache server. (Content servers have three Ethernet connections, none going to the firewall.)
This arrangement will take punishment. The arrangements where everything (database included) is in the DMZ with no shielding against coding errors, THOSE are the ones that fall over when people sneeze.
Ok, so my topology would cost a few thousand more. To Amazon, the BBC, any of the online banks, any of the online nuclear power stations - a few thousand might be spent on an executive lunch, but considerably more than a few thousand would certainly be spent and/or lost in a disaster. My layout gives security and performance, though the better corporate giants might be able to do better in both departments.
Doesn't matter if they can. What matters is that nobody at that level should be less secure than this. This is your minimal standard.
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Think of the people with contracts selling security in place. Do they really want a robust, healing, balancing, working solution with the min of support calls?
If the bad people are in the network, you have to clean the new extra code out, reset and then the magic can start.
You have the contract to look after the brand and have just seen all your tech been fully understood by diverse people from around the world.
Clean, patch and wait will not work. Th
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Only if someone gives this person security clearance as a "like-minded" individual.
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I wish more companies followed your advice here -- it would mean an end to all the DNS configurations and headaches for the machines in the network to just have a direct connection. You can track the ethernet sig of the machine if you want to catch bad behavior or configurations internally.
Of course, as I become more concerned about the status quo, I'm also heartened that most security at companies is done wrong -- damn wage cutters! ;-)
The solution to the Middle East Issue (Score:1, Funny)
1) Bomb it (a few gigatons worth of nuclear munitions should do it).
2) Wait for the glass to cool
3) Polish the surface
4) Park our tanks on the self-illuminating trinitite surface.
5) Bring in companies to drill for what's left of the oil
6) Once the oil's gone, there's no real reason for ANYONE to be there anymore.
7) If anyone so much as MENTIONS God/Allah/etc again, point them to the large glass patch and tell them to shut the fuck up or they can go camping there for the rest of their lives.
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So, by this ridiculous logic, if anybody in the US (or the entire world) ever mentions god again, that location should be nuked? You sure that's what you want?
Or are you just saying that your version of god is OK but all others need to be eradicated? Do you even know it's the same god but a different manual?
Maybe this is why th
An ad for some crappy company called FireEye (Score:2, Troll)
Oh look, a completely retarded "article" on a vendor site which just happens to sell 'solutions' to fight these "Middle Eastern attacks".
Get fucked Slashdot "editors", how could you even allow a piece of shit like that gets posted?
Sigh.
Election Time (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm guessing it's election time and people need to justify their budgets and keep other things out of the lime light.
"See, them lousy middle east terrorist types are hacking our computers, you need me to run for office and give the NSA power to do anything." - Any Politician in the USA/UK today.
The Latest Wave of Cyberattacks ... (Score:1)
Yeah, whatever.
I totally believe you.
Admirable restraint (Score:2)
Danger! Technological Danger! (Score:4, Insightful)
According to security technology vendor FireEye.
According to security technology vendor FireEye.
According to security technology vendor FireEye.
According to security technology vendor FireEye.
Brainwashing through repetition really works.
"Yet researchers are somewhat perplexed as to the motivation of the perpetrators": So the entire team is composed of sociopaths?
Sadly, the US is pretty much fair game. (Score:3, Insightful)
The US has more or less made themselves fair game for this. And quite frankly, so have all of the "5 eyes".
You can't say "it is our sovereign right to hack into anything we want because we say so", and then turn around and expect that others won't more or less do the same to you.
If you start global surveillance and spying, you can't suddenly act like it's not fair for someone else to do it.
So all you people who keep saying "well, we don't care if the NSA is doing that, that's what they're supposed to do". Well, bad-guy hackers are doing what they're supposed to do in their eyes.
At the end of the day, the 'legitimacy' of it is one group saying they're entitled to do something, and another disagreeing. If your NSA has decided it is their right to hack into anything they see fit because that's their mandate, you have zero right to assume it won't happen to you. In fact, you should expect it.
And, expanding that logic a little ... if you decide it's your right to bomb civilians in order to get to who you want, then you have no right to assume that someone else won't decide that your civilians are also fair targets. Because once you decide civilians are expendable in pursuing your goals, that's the standard you've set. Just because you believe your civilians are more valuable doesn't make it so.
As much as Americans like to think "of course we can, because we're the US of Fucking A", it's no more legitimate than anybody else saying "well, we can too".
By their own logic, the US pretty much deserves what they get. If you act like the wishes of other countries and people is totally irrelevant, well, you more or less deserve for them to decide that what you want is equally irrelevant.
And then it just devolves into a vicious cycle of nobody remembering who shot first.
So if you want to take some form of moral high ground, make sure you're actually staying there. Otherwise, you're just being hypocritical assholes. And, that seems to be a strong suit of Americans.
As long as Americans have the attitude that whatever they do is OK simply because they're Americans, they're always going to have to understand that anybody else can decide the same damned thing.
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just to chime in, not necessarily about the "middle eastern" espionage, but in regards to chinese. There is something fundamentally different between state sanctioned espionage for national defense. and state sanctioned industrial espionage. I'm Ok with the chinese or any other nation really, spying on me to make sure I don't bomb them to hell. That's pretty much how the game is played, but hacking for the industrial edge is another matter altogether.
There is no "West." (Score:1)
Let's see, who created stuxnet? (Score:2)
Gosh, the West went and hacked industrial infrastructure, where? The Middle East? Omigawsh.
Turnabout is fair play, guys. You started the fight, now don't weep that it's come home.
lulz? (Score:2)
"Yet researchers are somewhat perplexed as to the motivation of the perpetrators, whose targets included both Israel and Palestine, as well as Turkey, Slovenia, Macedonia, New Zealand and Latvia. The hackers also went after government bodies in the U.S. and the UK.""
Have they considered it was for "lulz"?