2 February 2015 – We have written numerous posts about cyber warfare: the actions by a nation-state or international organization to attack and attempt to damage another nation’s computers or information networks. Tools-of-the trade include computer viruses or denial-of-service attacks. Last week at NATO headquarters in Belgium, RAND provided a workshop on the methods of defending against the damaging effects of cyber warfare on a nation’s digital infrastructure.
So a story in today’s New York Times was spot on: how Syria’s hackers … using the guise of a “harmless” romantic Skype chat … were able to bury a code in a photo sent to a rebel fighter with malware that copied files from the rebel’s computer, including tactical battle plans and troves of information about him, his friends and fellow fighters.
The story of the romantic Skype chat is drawn from a new study by the intelligence-gathering division of FireEye, a computer security firm, which has delved into the hidden corners of the Syrian conflict — one in which even a low-tech fighting force has figured out a way to use cyberespionage to its advantage. Like the hackers who the U.S. says were working for North Korea when they attacked Sony Pictures in November, the assailants aiding Assad’s forces in this case took steps to hide their true identities.
As many have commented, the militarization of the Web has meant a spiraling proliferation of increasingly sophisticated hacking and disruption techniques as nation-state and other political actors have employed full-time professional teams to gather and improve what has been generated by amateur, non-political hackers and, inevitably, disseminated those techniques back into the broader “black hat” community from which they were derived. The result has been a rapidly rising threat level to every computer, device and server, and a concomitant rise in the cost of doing business on the web.
For the New York Times piece click here.
