CounterMeasures - A Security Blog � Hacking

Polish Government under DDoS, Anonymous ACTA up again.

Rik Ferguson — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 22:54:55 +0000

Anonymous are again making headlines, as the majority of Polish government related web sites are taken offline in DDoS attacks over the weekend as a protest about an international agreement perceived as being cooked up in years of secret talks between governments and industry.

As the dust settles and the mutual back-slapping begins over the withdrawal of the SOPA bill in the US, an older and potentially uglier beast has once again reared its head in Europe. This particular beast is called ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) and you can certainly be forgiven if you haven’t heard of it before, even though it predates both SOPA and PIPA.

ACTA is what is known as a “plurilateral agreement” aimed at establishing international (not just US) standards on intellectual property rights enforcement. SOPA would have negligible effects outise of the US, but ACTA is a global agreement. It aims to create its own governing body outside of the existing World Trade Organisation, the World Intellectual Property Organisation and the United Nations. Preliminary talks began as far back as 2006 including Canada, the United States, Japan, the EU and Switzerland. Official negotiations began in 2008 with the addition of Australia, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, South Korea and Singapore. Alongside these national government representatives, an advisory body of large US-based corporations was involved, including the RIAA, the MPAA, International Intellectual Property Alliance and Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America.

The negotiations were classified as “Secret” in the US on the grounds that there was a risk of damage to national security. The process by which negotiations took place, without public scrutiny or judicial oversight and the way in which the details of ACTA only emerged as a series of leaks until a draft was eventually published in 201O, after the 8th round of negotiations, has attracted widespread criticism from academics and groups such as the EFF.

The major concerns regarding the actual content of the draft centre around a couple of important issues. Perceived infringement on communications privacy for Internet users, as ISPs are obliged to filter content in more depth as a result of their liability for the actions of their subscribers and an increase in liability for websites that link to copyrighted material (sound familiar?) . There has also been concern that the section dealing with border controls would authorise invasive searches of personal laptops or MP3 players in the search for copyright infringing material. It should be noted that EU legislation prohibits travellers from checks if the offending goods are not a part of “large-scale” traffic and US legislation amply demonstrates that unilateral implementation of invasive border searches is entirely to be expected.

So why Poland, and why today? Well, the government of the Donald Tusk made a surprise announcement ( two PDFs in Polish) on the 19th January that they would be signing ACTA one week later on the 26th, taking them down the road to ratification. Many Poles feel that this has been done without inclusion or open debate and without a mandate from the people. The strength of feeling is immediately visible in Twitter, with thousands of Poles making tweets of thanks to Anonymous for this initial and ongoing action. Even those not actively participating in the DDoS have contributed to the failures of multiple websites by attempting to access them in their browser to see if the site had been taken offline.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the proposed agreement, it is certainly true to say that democracy is never served in secret, where the interests of only one side of the debate are represented. The Polish Minister for Administration and Digitalisation, Michal Boni has asked Prime Minister Donald Tusk to reconsider the decision before signing and a further meeting has been scheduled for the 24th Jan.

The mystery of the “hacked” Facebook accounts

Rik Ferguson — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:30:36 +0000

After a day of investigation it seems that “Team SwaStika” may be attempting to take credit for compromising account details that they really had nothing to do with.

The two lists of hacked accounts (Part 1 and Part 2) have both been circulated online before the Pastebin posts were made by Team SwaStika. The list entitled Part 1 appears to have been doing the rounds on various underground forums for the better part of a year. The second list entitled Part 2 by Team SwaStika is much more recent. The first evidence I can find of the accounts listed in Part 2 is only 19 days old.

A list with content exactly matching this second Pastebin post by Team SwaStika was uploaded to a compromised website by the better known group of hackers Group Hp-Hack. Group Hp-Hack is a Saudi Arabian hacker group that has previously gained notoriety in August of this year for defacing the websites of Joomla Canada and ethicalhackingcourses.com (which remains defaced to this day).

The html list of alleged Facebook logins uploaded to a compromised web server was created in Microsoft Word and has a creation date of 1st October 2011 but was posted with the claim (in Arabic) that the list only represents 10% of the 7 million accounts that were breached by Group Hp-Hack.

Group Hp-Hack defacement

I have informed the owners of the compromised server and advised them to remove the content and once again passed this information to Facebook’s security team

Over 10,000 Facebook account details hacked and published

Rik Ferguson — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:02:51 +0000

An update to this investigation is available here.
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A hacking group calling themselves “Team Swastika” have published what they claim to be the usernames and passwords for over ten thousand Facebook accounts on Pastebin, an online service for sharing large quantities of text data online. It should be noted that the PR agency for Facebook in the UK gave me the following statement, “This does not represent a hack of Facebook or anyone’s Facebook profiles. Our security experts have reviewed this data and found it to be a set of e-mail and password combinations that are not associated with any live Facebook accounts“.

Team Swastika are a new arrival on the hacking scene, having announced their “launch” only six days ago. although they have only one tweet to their name they have already caused concern by publishing database tables and user credentials stolen from the websites of the Indian Embassy in Nepal and the Government of Bhutan, apparently by SQL injection attack.

This latest publication of what they claim to be more than ten thousand Facebook user credentials is without context and with no indication of the means by which they were stolen. The posts themselves have already been removed by Pastebin but I managed to get a look at them before this happened…

Stolen credentials for Facebook accounts

The compromised user accounts come from all over the globe, and a quick glance through the list of associated passwords shows that the majority of affected users are not using complex passwords, with many being simply a derivation of the user name, a favourite football club or a short numerical password.

The ongoing effect of such a large scale compromise can be disastrous for affected users, particularly if the password is shared for multiple accounts. It can lead to compromise of the victim’s email account which can act as the skeleton key for many other online services, as any password reset procedure will normally pass through the account owner’s email inbox for verification. regaining control of a compromised account can be a costly and time consuming process, as this recent victim explains.

It is never a good idea to use the same password across multiple web sites, so try to have a unique one for every site you use. While this may sound complex and impossible to remember there is simple way to achieve this. Create a complex password using upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters such as $%&!. Devise a way to differentiate your password for each site you use, for example putting the first and last letters of the web site name at the beginning and end of your initial complex password, making it unique yet easy to remember

As for those security or password reset questions, this is also one of the most common ways to break into an account. If you are asked to provide answers to “Security questions” consider whether the answers are really secure. Secure means that you are the only person who can answer the question. If the possibility exists to create your own questions, use it. If you are obliged to answer more standard questions such as “First school”or “First pet” remember the answer doesn’t have to be the truth, it only has to be something you can remember.

I have not verified if the credentials as posted are legitimate, for reasons of privacy, but have passed the full list of affected accounts on to Facebook security so that they can warn and protect their users.

Sony (not) hacked

Rik Ferguson — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:45:25 +0000

Enter your password

News reports today are characterising an attack against the Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) and Sony Entertainment Online (SOE) as “another hack” or “Sony hacked again“. However, according to a blog post from Sony’s SVP and Chief Information Security Officer, that simply isn’t the case.

The attack against PSN accounts belonging to Sony subscribers went like this… Person or persons unknown, built or obtained a database of username and password pairs which they attempted to use to log into the PSN and SOE. The “overwhelming majority” of access attempts using these pairs of credentials failed, in fact less than 0.1% were successful. For this reason Sony suspect that the credentials used were not stolen from Sony directly, either now or in past intrusions. The database in question was most probably email and password pairs that have been obtained elsewhere but were being used in a brute force attack against Sony, in the knowledge that users have the unfortunate habit of reusing passwords across multiple services.

When Sony detected this irregular activity against its servers it immediately locked out all of the affected accounts and is informing the affected users that they need to change their passwords. Only a small fraction of that 0.1% showed evidence of irregular activity before Sony locked them down, meaning that the damage was successfully contained.

In reality this story should not be characterised as a failure over at Sony, but rather a success. Through their own monitoring systems they detected anomalous behaviour, acted quickly to contain the damage and locked out the accounts affected. They are also obliging the affected users to change their service passwords to better secure themselves in the future. Of course given the past intrusion at Sony, there is every possibility that the data does relate to that stolen from Sony earlier but also indicates that the mass password reset policy it instituted after the event served to render the majority of that data unusable.

After all it is not, as Sony have learned to their cost, whether you get attacked that is important, it’s how you deal with it. The lesson for Sony customers is not that Sony hasn’t learned lessons, it is rather that we as users still have some important lessons to learn.

It is never a good idea to use the same password across multiple web sites, so try to have a unique one for every site you use. While this may sound complex and impossible to remember there is simple way to acheive this. Create a complex password using upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters such as $%&!. Devise a way to differentiate your password for each site you use, for example putting the first and last letters of the web site name at the beginning and end of your initial complex password, making it unique yet easy to remember

As for those security or password reset questions, this is also one of the most common ways to break into an account. If you are asked to provide answers to “Security questions” consider whether the answers are really secure. Secure means that you are the only person who can answer the question. If the possibility exists to create your own questions, use it. If you are obliged to answer more standard questions such as “First school”or “First pet” remember the answer doesn’t have to be the truth, it only has to be something you can remember.

Security through governmental Obscurity

Rik Ferguson — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:08:15 +0000

by permission from dingler1109 Flickr stream

Another object lesson if one is needed that security by obscurity (and fairly transparent obscurity at that) simply doesn’t work.

At the tail end of last week, journalist and historian Bram Talman managed to publish the Dutch National budget for 2012 via Twitter, a document that is not due to go before the Dutch parliament until tomorrow.

While some of the news reports describe the incident as “hacking”, it is nothing complex at all. In Mr. Talman’s own words, he simply made an informed guess at the URL where the document would be hosted, typed it into a browser and there it was in all its glory

“Last year the name of the website was miljoenennota.prinsjesdag2010.nl. I simply replaced 2010 with 2011″

He later tweeted, the following day, that he had uncovered the budget of Utrecht in the same way.

While there are many technologies that can help with securing sensitive data, such as encryption, data leakage prevention, intrusion prevention and web application firewalls just for example; one of the key steps for making sure a confidential document stays that way, would be not_hosting_it_on_a_public_website…

According to the Irish Times, Mr Rutte the Dutch Prime Misister was quoted as saying, “The leak is extremely irritating and unfortunate,” he said. The IT company, Facetbase, said the cause of the embarrassment had been human error, which it very much regretted. Normally, said its head of crisis management, Peter van der Maat, a fake version of the new document would be put online until the real one was ready – but that had not happened.

DigiNotar, Iran, Certificates and YOU

Rik Ferguson — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 11:57:50 +0000

The story that has been slowly breaking over the past few days regarding the compromise at Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar and the subsequent “theft” of many important credentials is one that is of huge importance for internet users, governments and even the trust foundation that underlies the internet in general.

What has happened exactly?

DigiNotar is a trusted authority. That means that they can issue certificates that allow websites offering secure, encrypted communications to prove that they are who they say they are. Think of it as a digital passport. When you browse to your bank, your email provider or any other secure site, in the background these certificates are exchanged before secured communications can begin. Your web browser contains a list of “root authorities” whose certificates can be trusted. If a web site presents a valid certificate then your browser will trust it and begin encrypted communications. When the certificate is valid, this all happens transparently to you, the end user. DigiNotar’s security has been compromised and a large number of fraudulent certificates have been issued. A full list can be found here (CSV file), although it should be stated that this list may yet grow over time.

What is a valid certificate?

A valid certificate is one that matches the name of the site that is using it, that has an expiry date that has not yet been exceeded and critically is signed by a trusted authority. It is this last step that is normally difficult for those with malicious intent to overcome. If I present an faked, expired or otherwise fraufdulent certificate, your browser will alert you and you may well choose not to continue the communication.

So what does this mean?

If I can set up a “man-in-the-middle”, for example a proxy server, between you and your bank it is very simple for me to intercept and read plain old HTTP traffic as it is not encrypted. However HTTPS traffic would be a problem, it is encrypted and I don’t have the keys to decrypt it, the encryption is between you and your bank. If I have a valid certificate that appears to come from your bank I can overcome this problem, my proxy can pretend to be your bank, present the right credentials and I can decrypt and read all your content, before I pass it on to the real final destination.

Who is at risk?

In a normal situation where I am browsing the internet I can connect directly from my computer to my bank I am on a network I trust and I am not at risk. If however all my traffic must pass through a proxy, either at my Internet Service Provider or at state level, which is the case in some more restrictive nations, then I am at risk. The owner of the proxy can make use of fraudulent certificates and act as a man-in-the-middle. There is also a risk on public networks such as wi-fi hotspots, again the hot-spot provider will often make use of a proxy. Under normal circumstances encrypted traffic will simply be passed through untouched, but if I have a shady certificate and malicious intent I can intercept your traffic.

Alternatively I could infect your system with malware that configures your computer to pass all your traffic through a proxy of my choice, wherever you are located. For this to be effective I would need to be able to install code on your system to make these changes. At least one of the fraudulent certificates allows “code signing” meaning it can be used to certify that a program is from a valid publisher so this possibility certainly exists in theory.

Trend Micro’s Feike Hacquebord has uncovered concrete evidence that the fraudulent certificates issued as a result of the DigiNotar compromise have disproportionately and suspiciously affected users based in Iran (link to TrendLabs blog to follow). In Iran, all web traffic must pass through state approved proxies, the perfect man in the middle. In this scenario, the “benefits” of owning fraudulent certificates are clear. All encrypted traffic for affected destinations can now be decrypted at will and the end-user will be entirely unaware. It has been reported that the fraudulent certificates obtained include certs for *.com and *.org, meaning that all traffic for any web site with one of these suffixes can be intercepted.

Is the internet broken?

Does this event undermine the foundations of trusted communication online? Not entirely, although it certainly highlights a weak link in the chain. Authorities that are trusted to certify the identity and validity of web servers have a responsibility to ensure that the security of their systems and networks is second to none; they represent the top of the food chain. Having said that, security should always be designed on the assumption that a breach will occur. The key to successfully responding to such an event lies in the honesty and transparency of an authority that has been the victim of such an attack. Details of any such breach should be made public immediately so that the bad certificates can be revoked and will no longer be accepted by browsers around the world, thus mitigating the effect of such an attack. Unfortunately in the case of DigiNotar the extent of the breach was reported as minimal at the outset and the full details are only now becoming clear, several days later. We now know that 531 bad certificates have been issued, including those for *.*.com and *.*.org, making the certificates for WindowsUpdate look tame by comparison. The compromise at DigiNotar happened in July of this year, at the time of the initial investigation the fraudulent cert for google.com was not discovered, meaning that that one at least was in the wild for over a month.

Trust in all certificates issued by DigiNotar has already been revoked by many browser and operating system manufacturers and the consequences for DigiNotar as a company are likely to be severe, possibly fatal.

Anonymous vows to attack Facebook?

Rik Ferguson — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:25:50 +0000

In a new video, Anonymous or at least an element of the “loose online collective” (how much am I growing to despise that term?) has announced plans for a coordinated attack on Facebook to be launched on the auspicious date (at least here in the UK) of the 5th of November. The video calls for volunteers to join the assault but does not give any details on planned activity. The video should for now be treated with suspicion. It was posted almost a month ago and yet has not been widely publicised, or publicised at all, on the usual Anonymous channels. The Twitter profiles that appear to be associated are inactive, and in a masterstroke of irony, there’s even a Facebook page for it

According to the video, Facebook deserves to be “killed” for a number of reasons

1 – They store personal information and do not delete it – “even if you “delete” your account, all your personal info stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time. Changing the privacy settings to make your Facebook account more “private” is also a delusion. Facebook knows more about you than your family“.

2 – They sell rights of access to your data to external agencies - “Facebook has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world. Some of these so-called whitehat infosec firms are working for authoritarian governments, such as those of Egypt and Syria”

Having set out their reasons, they sign off with the message “We exist without nationality, without religious bias. We have the right to not be surveilled, not be stalked, and not be used for profit. We have the right to not live as slaves.”

Let’s examine these accusations. Firstly data retention; according to Facebook’s own Privacy Policy “When you delete an account, it is permanently deleted from Facebook.” which seems pretty clear cut. There is a later caveat in a section dealing with backup copies of data that states, “Removed and deleted information may persist in backup copies for up to 90 days, but will not be available to others.” Of course if you have chosen to share information on Facebook and that information has been further shared by your friends or contacts, then you must consider it has passed beyond your control. This is the primary reason why caution should always be uppermost in your mind when posting anything online. On the face of it, point 1 of the Anonymous gripe seems invalid.

Secondly, Facebook sells information to third parties? Again a squint at the Privacy Policy tells us Facebook’s approach to this matter; “We may disclose information pursuant to subpoenas, court orders, or other requests (including criminal and civil matters) if we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law. This may include respecting requests from jurisdictions outside of the United States where we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law under the local laws in that jurisdiction, apply to users from that jurisdiction, and are consistent with generally accepted international standards. We may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, to prevent imminent bodily harm, or to protect ourselves and you from people violating our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, courts or other government entities.”

So, without getting into a debate about the rights and wrongs of specific governments around the globe, Facebook is certainly open that they will share information in response to requests from both US and “foreign” jurisdictions under the laws applicable in that jurisdiction. What is the lesson to take from this? If you are a Facebook user and you consider that your local government or law enforcement may take unwanted interest in your social networking activities then pay very close attention to the information that you disclose, both on your personal profile and in your activities on the website. If you are engaging in activity which your government would rather you didn’t, be aware that a legal or civil request to this social networking provider may well be honoured.

The biggest and most important point though is this. Facebook is voluntary. You join Facebook because you want to. You provide information of your own volition and essentially at your own risk. If Facebook does know more about you than your own family, it is only because you told them. Conversely, while the social networking provider does provide relatively granular controls over how and who you share your data with, it is certainly my opinion that the default settings on an account are still too open, and the mechanisms for controlling sharing too complex.

Posting information anywhere online is similar to pasting up a notice in a global meeting hall and should be treated in that way. Even if you restrict access to your information to only your friends, you cannot control how that information is further shared by people within your circle of trust. If you aren’t happy to stand in a crowded shopping centre and repeatedly shout out your telephone number, you shouldn’t be making it available online, anywhere.

However, the thing that bothers me most in the Anonymous announcement is the phrase “One day you will look back on this and realise what we have done here is right, you will thank the rulers of the internet, we are not harming you but saving you“. Joseph Goebbels once said something very similar, “It is the absolute right of the State [the rulers of the internet?] to supervise the formation of public opinion.“.

“For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.” – Janet Frame.

Anti-Sec is not a cause, it’s an excuse

Rik Ferguson — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 00:37:53 +0000

In a move clearly inspired by LulzSec, an Italian hacker recently uploaded a torrent containing personal information of thousands of Italian university students. This information was stolen from a slew of Italian university websites. According to the press release posted by Lulzstorm this was done “to tell every Italian student how little secure their personal data are”. I can think of better ways.

The spate of recent data thefts and subsequent publication, in the name of Anonymous, Lulz Sec, LulzStorm or the umbrella movement Anti-Sec has had a tangible impact on the safety and security of thousands of innocent internet users.

While there may be sympathy in some quarters for attacks on security contractors such as HB Gary and Infraguard or government websites in oppressive states; that sympathy rapidly evaporates when the result of publishing stolen material endangers the lives of serving police officers. Or when it compromises the privacy and safety of hundreds of thousands of innocent customers of online portals or gaming services.

The call to arms to the disparate hacker community that is represented by Operation AntiSec might read like something from a cyberpunk novel but in reality it is being used by far too many to lay a thin veneer of altruism over something entirely selfish. At least LulzSec had the decency to be honest in their manifesto, they were simply courting chaos.

The truth is that the majority of people now assembling under the Anti-Sec banner are doing this simply because they can. The convenience of having a “cause” somehow making it laudable. It is true that there are far too many poorly secured and configured web-sites out there. It is also true that the customers of those websites deserve a higher degree of care than they currently receive. It is manifestly not true to say that the interests of those people are best served by pasting their personal data all over the internet.

In the ultimate irony, the original AntiSec manifesto from back in 2001 was all about the irresponsibility of full disclosure. That same manifesto was reposted when Imageshack was compromised 8 years later. The manifesto criticised the “security industry” for using full-disclosure to develop “scare tactics” to convince people into by security. Are you listening Operation AntiSec?

This is a call for responsible disclosure in the Anti-Sec community, find the flaws, publish your successes if you must, but have the decency to spare the innocent victims of your crimes. Obscure personal data before you publish; otherwise you are considerably worse than those you are attempting to shame.

All your citizens are (not) belong to us

Rik Ferguson — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:39:48 +0000

UPDATE III: I just received the following statement from the Office for National Statisitcs in the UK

“Census data secure

The Office for National Statistics reaffirmed today (Wednesday) that personal census information is secure and an allegation made yesterday that it has been hacked is without foundation.

Census Director, Glen Watson, said:

“I can reassure the public that their census records are secure. We have strict measures in place protecting the nation’s census information. The claim that hackers got in looks like a hoax and our investigation concluded that there is no sign of any suspicious activity. The alleged hackers have also denied any involvement.

“However, we are not complacent and will remain vigilant. The security and confidentiality of census data remain our top priority.”"

UPDATE II: Recent tweets on the LulzSec Twitter account deny any truth to the UK Census data rumours.

UPDATE: The Metropolitan Police Cental e-crime Unit PCeU have confirmed that a 19 year-old man has been arrested in connection with LulzSec activity. If LulzSec preparation was in anyway similar to that of Wikileaks, should expect to start seeing mass release of previously witheld information?
_________________________________________________

In a surprising and worrying development, an unconfirmed post on Pastebin, purportedly from Lulz Sec, claims that they are in possession of the entire UK census data for 2011.

So far this claim has not been backed up on the LulzSec Twitter account, which is their usual habit, although a couple of prior post do lend some credence to it

Yesterday they tweeted

“Government hacking is taking place right now behind the scenes“

and a few hours ago, they posted a couple of statements that are similar in tone to the PasteBin document:

“Thank you to the supporters who have assisted in leaks. Like @WikiLeaks, our sources remain anonymous. Leak payloads are being decided now.”

and

“Our next step is to categorize and format leaked items we acquire and release them in #AntiSec “payloads” on our website and The Pirate Bay.“

No details are included in the PasteBin post regarding how the information was obtained, but the messages posted so far seem to indicate a leak rather than an intrusion or hack.

If this claim turns out to be true it means the personal details of every UK citizen, names, addresses, religion, family details, income levels, professional details are in the hands of a group who have already shown they have no objection to releasing illegally obtained material publicly.

This could undermine the confidence of the nation and possibly others to hand over sensitive information to a civil service that has already once demonstrated its inability to encrypt or safeguard it from loss.

Currently refusal to fill in a census is a criminal offence in the UK, will we be looking at mass criminality when the next census rolls around?

Lockheed Martin are currently responsible for the UK census. I have approached them to confirm or deny this claim and am awaiting a statement.

What the Hack is going on?

Rik Ferguson — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:51:28 +0000

Used under creative commons from brittgow Flickr

With all the recent news stories of successful hacking attacks of some very prominent organisations, this seems like an entirely reasonable question. The litany of victims is impressive including such luminaries as Google, RSA, Visa, MasterCard, Citibank, Epsilon, the US Senate, the UK National Health Service, Fox, Sony (of course) and just last night the CIA website was targeted with what a Distributed Denial of Service Attack. The amount of prime time coverage these various activities are getting is prompting several questions. Is this hacking group stuff something new? Is this cyber-espionage or even cyber warfare? What impact will this have on me and the future of the internet?

The idea of a hacking group is certainly not a new phenomenon, in fact they began to flourish in the early eighties, the early days of home computing, acting as a forum for members to share information, learn and compare skills. Early groups bore names such as Legion of Doom, Cult of the Dead Cow or Masters of Deception and specialised not only in the nascent internet hacking scene and are responsible for the birth of hacktivism, but also in the perhaps dying are of phreaking (abuse of public telecommunications networks). The nineties saw the rise of a different kind of hacking group, L0pht Heavy Industries who operated more as a research organisation, providing software tools for penetration and security testing and issuing advisories. This group also famously testified to the US Congress that they could take down the entire internet in under 30 minutes back in 1998. L0pht later merged with @stake, who were eventually acquired by Symantec.

Now in the noughties we have witnessed the rise of Anonymous, and more recently LulzSec. Anonymous as a collective is something that began on message boards like the infamous 4chan, for the purposes of attacking the Church of Scientology, and has with generous media coverage evolved into a bigger deal. Instead of being a relatively closed group, Anonymous instead actively sought the participation of the general public when they began their actions in support of Wikileaks. Tens of thousands of volunteers are downloading tools which enable them to participate in the global assault on businesses with whom they feel personally aggrieved. The latest versions of this tool includes functionality which means the user can hand of control of their weaponised computer to a central authority (Anonymous) to better direct and control the attacks. Lulz Sec on the other had maintain the tradition of the closed group, and according to their own web site have no motivation but anarchy,

“We’re LulzSec, a small team of lulzy individuals who feel the drabness of the cyber community is a burden on what matters: fun. Considering fun is now restricted to Friday, where we look forward to the weekend, weekend, we have now taken it upon ourselves to spread fun, fun, fun, throughout the entire calendar year“.

Of course similar groups have emerged around the world in places as far flung as Pakistan and India, where there is fierce competition between the groups. In Romania groups such as HackersBlog have hit various companies. In China and Russia, many hackers are believed to act as proxies for their governments.

It’s not all about the hacking for fun and kudos gangs, organised criminal groups have been with us for many years now, and the last 12 months or so has seen a marked increase in the frequency of attacks on online aggregations of information, such as Sony, Epsilon or Citibank for the purposes of theft of information for financial reward. One single attack, if successful can yield such a vast amount of saleable or otherwise abusable personal data, that I’m only surprised the attacks took so long to gather pace.

Another phenomenon that has risen to prominence recently is purported nation-state activity. Again, despite recent press coverage this is also nothing new, the Titan Rain attacks for example date back to 2003 where the finger was firmly pointed at China for the theft of large amounts of information from military and governmental targets, gh0stnet in 2007 was similarly blamed on China, as were the Aurora attacks the following year. This year has already seen similarly motivated attacks on RSA, the European Council, the French Finance Ministry, the Canadian government, Lockheed Martin and of course Stuxnet.

So many technological and cryptographically advances have their roots in the centuries old art of espionage, we should really not be surprised to see national foreign intelligence services making use of cutting edge tools and techniques to further their national or economic interests.

None of this represents a global online meltdown, or the end of the internet economy or national security as we know it. Like everything else in this world we can trace a simple process of evolution at work here. Security companies, individuals and enterprises must evolve to keep pace and just maybe learn some of the lessons that some of these guys have been teaching us for years now. Encrypt your data, develop securely, configure correctly, test your defences effectively, use complex passwords, shield your vulnerabilities and build your systems under the assumption that a breach *will* happen.