by admin on February 12, 2010
One of core principles of hacking in my personal philosophy is to identify and control communication networks. When you control the phones or data networks individual systems in a given country or corporation become meaningless as you can move between everything seamlessly. The ante has been upped with cell phones being an added bonus. Now with access to cell phone company internals for a given country you can not only see call records, text messages and mms messages, but actually track cell phone owners location and depending on the system – monitor phone calls live.
Take a look at this lengthy well researched article at CNET by Declan McCullagh
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10451518-38.html
!
by admin on February 4, 2010
Amex Gift Card
In certain types of information warfare campaigns a powerful component is the false website. It’s versatile tool that can be used to establish credibility for an operation, or as a way to disseminate memes into the zeitgeist or even as a sophisticated honey-pot to lure a targeted group in. However setting up such websites can leave quite a paper trail for investigators to follow which can lead to detection of the origin of the campaign and it’s perpetrators.
A lot of false websites are really just small organized crime with phishing scams. These websites are setup from other countries with stolen credit cards. The cards can usually be tracked down and help become a fingerprint that identifies the culprit – but most law enforcement agencies don’t have the resources to take the fight that far except for the largest cases.
Enter the Gift Credit Card – offered by the 3 giants of the credit card industry – Visa, Amex and Mastercard. You can walk into a Duane Reade with no ID and purchase a $5000 gift credit card that is registered to no address or name.
Using these cards, one could acquire the resources for websites, hosting and email and other online services ( phone, fax, voice mail, etc )that require credit cards relatively anonymously of course being careful where one originates one’s data calls to the network from.
They are small and can be used to move cash to other countries rapidly, where as being caught travelling internationally with 10k plus in cash could be tricky – 5 or 10 gift credit cards purchased at 5k a piece will not be noticed for the moment by customs – so that one could purchase services from a remote location exterior to the states with US dollars via a credit card instrument that these services require.
These cards represent a cash cow [ estimates are it is approaching a $100 Billion dollar business and growing ] and the banking/credit card industry is a powerful lobby so they aren’t going away any time soon. Much to the chagrin of the one or two Senators raising the alarm – there is no political will currently to modify the system.
While the secret is out about these cards [ Multi-agency report on fiscal instruments including gift cards ] , accountability for their usage is quite far off and for the present time remain a powerful tool for initiating clean information warfare campaigns that include fictitious websites as a component of the strategy and they also make great gifts!
by admin on February 3, 2010
Yes Men Poster
I watched a film called “The Yes Men Fix The World” and to my pleasant surprise it was a textbook example of some forms of Information Warfare.
Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno may not know it, but their stylish escapades taking on corporations acting badly help illustrated some techniques and outcomes of Information Warfare. One of their prime pranks they setup a false website for a division of Dow Chemical that would handle humanitarian outreach. The clever pair were contacted by the BBC to do an interview on the anniversary of the horrible Bhopal Chemical Disaster caused by one of their acquired subsidiaries Union Carbide - they went on air internationally as a representative of the company and took full responsibility for the tragedy and claimed they would give full renumeration for victims of the accident.
After the news hit the wire services, Dow Chemical temporarily lost $2BN (US) off it’s stock value. While there attack wasn’t permanent on Dow’s stock price as it was widely reported as a hoax afterward – this case illustrates that there are a lot of attacks that could take place in this vector on both corporations and countries on their economic assets that could have long reaching consequences. There are some variations that could also play havoc with military assets – especially for countries without developed satellite recon or intelligence services that can corroborate disinformation.
Here in the information age, markets react very quickly to news – even unjustified rumors are enough for a company to take a bath in share price that it may never recover from. Possible attack sources could originate from activists, terrorists, governments and even disgruntled employees.
Kudos to these fellows for this teaching aide in information warfare.
by admin on January 31, 2010
The Financial Times reports that the USA is currently placing it’s defense of cyberspace completely under military command.
Of course, there is the old adage that the best defense is a good offense. This is a highly abused term is appropriate here in the sense that having situational awareness and parity while engaging in information warfare means having an advanced offense already in play.
Already controlling the battleground ahead of time is key and there are some tactical advantages in that the USA has in exporting various technologies and encryption and having access to several global companies’ network traffic availible for their sigint operations. Sitting on the data streams is the most powerful tool in finding, tracking and stopping attacks.
However for the most part there is a lack of offensive capability on the USA’s part for several reasons that the militarization of these capabilities will compromise in the short term as the program tries to align itself with the policy emanating from the administration’s cabinet posts that oversee cyberwar strategy. Bob Gourley, the former chief technology officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency let’s it slip in this quote – “We have U.S. warriors in cyberspace that are deployed overseas and live in adversary networks.” Unfortunately this doesn’t extend to some key countries that are listed as major adversaries who have free reign over our networks.
Based on the challenges for assembling an effective force for offense and training pipeline, while China currently enjoys several advantages over the USA in information warfare and cyber intelligence – the likely outcome will be an eventually outsourcing of offensive projects for the military to private trusted contractors , some of which have agency investments.
It’ll be interesting to see what companies and various military wings (NAVY, MARINES, AIR FORCE) evolve to take up this emerging space and what will be stored on their computers.
