Haroon Meer: Lessons from Anonymous on cyberwar -- A cyberwar is brewing, and Anonymous reprisal attacks on HBGary Federal shows how deep the war goes

Lessons from Anonymous on cyberwar: A cyberwar is brewing, and Anonymous reprisal attacks on HBGary Federal shows how deep the war goes.
Haroon Meer
Al Jazeera

"Cyberwar" is a heavily loaded term, which conjures up Hollywood inspired images of hackers causing oil refineries to explode.

Some security celebrities came out very strongly against the thought of it, claiming that cyberwar was less science, and more science fiction.

Last year on May 21, the United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) reported reaching initial operational capability, and news stories abound of US soldiers undergoing basic cyber training, which all point to the idea that traditional super powers are starting to explore this arena.

Recent activities with one government contractor and Anonymous, however, show clearly that cyber operations have been going on for a long while, and that the private sector has been only too ready to fill the cyber mercenary role for piles of cash.

Anonymous vs. HBGary

Early in 2011, Aaron Barr submitted a talk to a security conference in which he planned to "focus on outing the major players of the anonymous group".

Barr, the CEO of Washington-based HBGary Federal, had spent time "infiltrating the group" using multiple identities on social networks and Anonymous IRC channels.

He was confident enough of his analysis to publish parts of it through the Financial Times. Barr (and indeed the rest of the company) planned to milk the exposure, lining up a string of meetings to profit from the research, from an interview with 60 Minutes to multiple potential deals with federal agencies.

The CEO of HBGary prepared a post explaining how they had flexed their "muscle today by revealing the identities of all the top management within the group Anonymous."

Anonymous were quick to respond.

Even while Barr was proclaiming victory and threatening to "take the gloves off", Anonymous were burrowing deeper into his network.

By the end of the attack, Barr's iPad was reputedly erased, his LinkedIn and Twitter accounts were hijacked, the HBGary Federal website was defaced, proprietary HBGary source code was stolen and with over 71,000 private emails now published to the internet, HBGary was laid bare.

In this, was our first lesson: The asymmetry of cyber warfare.

HBGary, a well-funded, pedigreed security company with strong offensive cyber capabilities was given a beating by a non-funded, loosely organised hacker collective.

The incident holds a string of lessons for those wishing to secure their networks from attack, but what's far more interesting is the leaked emails that give us insight into the murky world of "cyber contractors" and what’s being called "the military digital complex".

HBGary: cyberwar arms dealer

HBGary was formed by security research veteran Greg Hoglund, who has made a name for himself over the years doing research on rootkit technology.

A rootkit is a piece of software installed to ensure that an attacker is able to maintain control of a compromised computer. Rootkits are designed to avoid detection once installed.

Hoglund’s emails claim that his current products were built with "about 2 million in Uncle Sam's money", but this alone is no shocker. Governments fund technology research all the time, and HBGary were also building a commercial product.

What is shocking though, are some of the other details that came out in the wash.

The emails make it clear that HBGary sold rootkits and keyloggers (tools to record and exfiltrate keystrokes surreptitiously) to government contractors for prices between $60,000 and $200,000 each.

These pieces of "malware" would be tailored specifically to the clients needs, which undoubtedly reflected the state of the ultimate targets e.g.: "..test the tool against McAfee and Norton".

Some rootkits were fairly routine, while others clearly betrayed specific needs: "Runs on MS Windows XP sp2 and Office 2003, finds MS Office files using the XRK technique to exfiltrate files".

Even next generation rootkits were explored - to remain active despite the removal of a hard drive or to persist on a machine through the video card.

Make no mistake, these were offensive cyber tools, made to order.

To Read the Rest of this Article

Best of the Left: #440 Governments vs Journalism (Wikileaks); #442 They are legion, etc (Anonymous)

(Good summaries and retrospective look)

#440 Governments vs Journalism (Wikileaks)

Act 1: The campaign to ruin Julian Assange – The Progressive
Song 1: And So It Goes – The Essential Billy Joel

Act 2: Assange released from jail – The Bugle
Song 2: Jailhouse Rock – The Essential Elvis Presley (Remastered)

Act 3: Full Exclusive Assange interview – MSNBC
Song 3: Hurt – American IV: Man Comes Around

Act 4: Thomas Friedman’s approval of wikileaks – Counterspin
Song 4: Morning Sun – Shayna Zaid & the Catch

Act 5: US reaps what it sows – Majority Report
Song 5: What You Get – Bastards of the Beat

Act 6: Open letter signatory on wikileaks – On the Media
Song 6: What we’ve got – Anthony da Costa and Emilyn Brodsky

Act 7: Media should stand up for Assange – Young Turks
Song 7: Time to Ride – Sammy Davis, Jr.: Greatest Hits (Live)

Act 8: Nothing bad about wikileaks – David Feldman Podcast
Song 8: One Day – Light (Bonus Track Version)

Act 9: Losing liberties over wikileaks – The Progressive
Song 9: Flamencos En El Aire – Gipsy Kings

Act 10: Inhumane treatment of PFC. Manning – Young Turks
Song 9: Drift Away – Brothers In Blues & Sisters In Soul – 18 Classic Tracks (Re-Recorded Version)

Act 10: Michael Moore on wikileaks – Rachel Maddow

To Listen to the Episode

#442 They are legion, etc (Anonymous)

Act 1: News on Anonymous Operation: Payback – Countdown
Song 1: I Want You – Savage Garden

Act 2: Anonymous back up wikileaks – On the Media
Song 2: Little Lion Man – Sigh No More

Act 3: WW 3.0 Omar Wason on cyber war – Colbert Report
Song 3: Gone – On and On

Act 4: Are the Anonymous attacks civil disobedience? – On the Media
Song 4: Natural Blues – Play & Play: B Sides

Act 5: Intro to interview with Anonymous – Citizen Radio
Song 5: Legion – Empires

Act 6: Operation: Payback message – Anonymous
Song 6: Eclipse – Welcome to Earth

Act 7: Interview with Anonymous spokesman – Citizen Radio

To Listen to the Episode

Adi Kuntsman: Online Memories, Digital Conflicts and the Cybertouch of War

Online Memories, Digital Conflicts and the Cybertouch of War
by Adi Kuntsman
Digital Icons

Wars, conflicts and commemoration occupy the minds of today’s users of new media across the globe; and those in Russia, Eurasia and Central Europe are no exception. Digital reporting of military actions and virtual museums of past wars and genocides; hacker attacks against websites and databases and computer war games; online antiwar organising and digital performances of postwar trauma; flashmobs of political protest or racist incitement and digitalised personal memories and family histories – these are only some of the examples of the ways in which war, conflict and commemoration are narrated, experienced and performed in contemporary digital media. Thus, the aim of the special issue entitled ’War, Conflict and Commemoration in the Age of Digital Reproduction’ is to explore these and other phenomena, by looking at various forms and segments of digital media: Internet sites, blogs and forums, online news and discussions, social networks, commemoration sites and virtual museums, digital games, video performance and computer crimes.

The issue brings together ten authors, working in a variety of formats – articles, essays, reports, ethnographic film and digital performance – and reflecting on the following questions:

What is the role of new media in understanding, representing, negotiating and remembering (or forgetting) war and genocide?

What is the status of testimony, evidence and reportage in the age of digital reproduction?

What practices of memory do new information and communication technologies entail?

What structures of feeling operate in online reports and debates around military operations and human suffering?

How can digital mediations of conflict bring people and communities together, while tearing others apart?

And lastly, how can the embodied, physical violence intensify in digital interactions, and how can it be diffused, resisted and remembered?

This special issue was born out of a sense of political and intellectual necessity, posed by recent developments in digital media and its use. Digital media is fundamentally changing the terrain of politics, due to its reach and speed, and its function in the lives of civilian populations and states alike. For example, together with ‘citizen journalism’, enabled by blogs, the Internet has given a platform to political extremism, racism and neo-Nazism. (While Web 2.0 technologies allow non-hierarchical participation,
they also, at times, turn the Internet into a digital war zone (Karatzogianni 2006, 2009).

In today’s ‘global matrix of war’ (Kaplan 2009), digital technologies are used by both state and non-state actors, often blurring the line between military and entertainment and between control and resistance. Attacks on the ground and in the air now go hand in hand with information warfare, propaganda and racist attacks in blogs and YouTube vlogs; conflicts between states or stateless groups reverberate in cyberattacks by hackers from each side; and testimonies of atrocities are captured on mobile phones and circulated on Facebook, irrevocably changing our modes of witnessing, feeling and remembering violent and traumatic events (Ibrahim 2009; Kaplan 2009; Reading 2009).

Politically, then, the topic of war and conflict and of their relations with digital media is clearly an urgent one. In that respect, Central and Eastern Europe is not unique. The region, however, has its own, very particular, record of past wars and conflicts that scar social and mnemonic fabrics of today’s life: World War II, German occupation and the Holocaust, decades under communism, twenty years of post-communist transformation, and waves of conflicts and bloodshed they brought.

More recently, the region has witnessed a rise in the right wing nationalism and extremist racism, struggles for sovereignty and independence, ‘wars on terror’ and localised armed conflicts. Addressing all these together, through the lens of shared political conditions, while remaining attentive to each country’s unique culture and
circumstances, is what encouraged me to assemble this collection.

The special issue is also motivated by an intellectual need to shed light on the role of digital media in these processes across the region. With the growing integration of digital media into most aspects of our lives, we witness an explosion of scholarly interest in the subject, cutting across many disciplines. Similarly, the topic of war, conflict and memory is widely explored. The two, however, only recently began to intersect, for example in the special issue of Journal of Computer Mediated Communication (2006), ‘War Coverage in Cyberspace’ (2006) or in edited collections such as Digital War Reporting (Matheson and Stuart 2009) or Save As… Digital Memories (Garde-Hansen et.al. 2009).1 But even when the two fields are explored in conjunction, they mostly concentrate on one narrow aspect – such as war coverage and reportage, or memories – rather than a complex examination of how digital media and computer technologies affect the warfare itself, its social perception and the ways of remembrance and commemoration. Such complex approach is precisely what unites the papers in this special issue, when they examine how war and conflicts of past and present are negotiated, performed and remembered on the Internet and in other digital media tools.

To Read the Rest of the Introduction to the Special Issue and to Access the Issue's Essays

Intelligence Squared U.S.: Has The Cyberwar Threat Been Exaggerated?

Has The Cyberwar Threat Been Exaggerated?
Intelligence Squared U.S. (NPR)

As succeeding presidential administrations and leaders in the Pentagon devote increasing resources to defending U.S. computer networks and planning for potential cyber warfare, some observers are questioning whether the cyber threat has been overstated.

While risks do exist, they say, most of them don't truly rise to the level of war. And framing the debate in war terms could provide justification for the U.S. intelligence community to assert greater authority over what people can do on the Internet, they argue.

But those who warn of the country's cyber vulnerabilities argue that criminals, hackers and other nations pose a great threat to disrupt and destroy the data networks the U.S. relies on so heavily — and strong defenses are essential.

Those debating were:

FOR THE MOTION

Marc Rotenberg is executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. He teaches information privacy law at Georgetown University Law Center and has testified before Congress on many issues, including access to information, encryption policy, consumer protection, computer security and communications privacy. He testified before the 9/11 Commission on "Security and Liberty: Protecting Privacy, Preventing Terrorism." He has served on several national and international advisory panels, including the expert panel on cryptography policy and computer security for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, referred to by The Economist as a "security guru." He is the author of nine books — including the best-sellers Beyond Fear, Secrets and Lies and Applied Cryptography — as well as hundreds of articles and essays, and many more academic papers. His influential newsletter Crypto-Gram and his blog Schneier on Security are read by more than 250,000 people. Schneier is the chief security technology officer of BT.

AGAINST THE MOTION

John M. "Mike" McConnell, a retired vice admiral, is executive vice president and leader of the national security business for Booz Allen Hamilton and is a member of the firm's leadership team. McConnell previously served from 2007-09 as U.S. director of national intelligence, a position of Cabinet rank under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. As DNI, he served as the principal intelligence adviser to the president and as a member of the U.S. National Security Council. McConnell's career has spanned more than 40 years, focusing on international developments and foreign intelligence issues, including 29 years as a career intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy.

Jonathan Zittrain is professor of law at Harvard Law School, where he co-founded its Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. Previously, he was professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University. He performed the first large-scale tests of Internet filtering in China and Saudi Arabia in 2002, and now as part of the OpenNet Initiative, he has co-edited a study of Internet filtering by national governments, "Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering."

To Listen to the Debate