Does Pakistan Have Cyber Warfare Capability?

[Riaz Haq]

Recent reports of Russian hacks of the American Democratic Party's election campaign staff to influence the outcome of US elections have brought international cyber espionage in sharp focus once again. How many nations have such capabilities? What are their names? Are India and Pakistan among them?

Pakistan is believed to be among a couple of dozen nations with serious cyber espionage capabilities. This belief has been strengthened among the cyber security community since Operation Arachnophobia is suspected to have originated in Pakistan.

Bloodmoney: A Novel of Espionage:

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius frequently writes about the activities of intelligence agencies and often cites "anonymous" intelligence sources to buttress his opinions. He is also a novelist who draws upon his knowledge to write spy thrillers.

Ignatius's 2011 fiction "Bloodmoney: A Novel of Espionage" features a computer science professor Dr. Omar who teaches at a Pakistani university as the main character. Omar, born in  Pakistan's tribal region of South Waziristan, is a cyber security expert. One of Omar's specialties is his deep knowledge of SWIFT, a network operated by Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication that tracks all international financial transactions, including credit card charges.

Omar's parents and his entire family are killed in a misdirected US drone strike. Soon after the tragedy,  several undercover CIA agents are killed within days after their arrival in Pakistan.  American and Pakistani investigations seek the professor's help to solve these murders. Ignatius's novel ends with the identification of the professor as the main culprit in the assassinations of CIA agents.

Operation Arachnophobia:

In 2014, researchers from FireEye, a Silicon Valley cyber security company founded by a Pakistani-American,  and ThreatConnect teamed up in their investigation of "Operation Arachnophobia" targeting Indian computers. It features a custom malware family dubbed Bitterbug that serves as the backdoor for stealing information. Though the researchers say they have not identified the specific victim organizations, they have spotted malware bundled with decoy documents related to Indian issues, according to DarkReading.com.

The reason it was dubbed "Operation Arachnophobia" has to do with the fact that variants of the Bitterburg malware detected by the researchers included build paths containing the strings “Tranchulas” and “umairaziz27”, where Tranchulas is the name of an Islamabad-based Pakistani security firm and Umair Aziz is one of its employees.

Operation Hangover:

Operation Arachnophobia targeted Indian officials. It appears to have been Pakistan's response to India's Operation Hangover that targeted Pakistan. Investigations by  Norway-based security firm Norman have shown that the Operation Hangover attack infrastructure primarily was used as a means to extract security-related information from Pakistan and, to a lesser extent, China.

"Targeted attacks are all too common these days, but this one is certainly noteworthy for its failure to employ advanced tools to conduct its campaigns," said Jean Ian-Boutin, malware researcher at ESET security company. "Publicly available tools to gather information on infected systems shows that the attackers did not go to great lengths to cover their tracks. On the other hand, maybe they see no need to implement stealthier techniques because the simple ways still work."

Attack Easier Than Defense:

The fact that cyber attacks so often succeed suggests that it's easier to attack a system than to defend it.  By the time such attacks are detected, it's already too late. A lot of valuable information has already been lost to attackers.

However, it's still very important to possess the cyberattack capability as a deterrent to attacks. Those who lack the capacity to retaliate invite even more brazen cyberattacks.

Need for International Treaties:

Cyberattacks on infrastructure can have disastrous consequences with significant loss of human life. Disabling power grids and communication networks can hurt a lot of people and prevent delivery of aid to victims of disaster. It's important that nations work together to agree on some norms for what is permissible and what is not before there is a catastrophe.

Summary:

About 30 nations, including US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, China, India, Iran, Israel and Pakistan, possess cyber espionage and attack capabilities.  Growth and proliferation of such technologies present a serious threat to world peace.  There is an urgent need for nations of the world to come together to agree on reasonable restrictions to prevent disasters.

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[Riaz Haq]

MALWARE ATTACKS USED BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT RETAIN POTENCY FOR MANY YEARS, NEW EVIDENCE INDICATES

https://theintercept.com/2017/03/10/government-zero-days-7-years/

A NEW REPORT from Rand Corp. may help shed light on the government’s arsenal of malicious software, including the size of its stockpile of so-called “zero days” — hacks that hit undisclosed vulnerabilities in computers, smartphones, and other digital devices.

The report also provides evidence that such vulnerabilities are long lasting. The findings are of particular interest because not much is known about the U.S. government’s controversial use of zero days. Officials have long refused to say how many such attacks are in the government’s arsenal or how long it uses them before disclosing information about the vulnerabilities they exploit so software vendors can patch the holes.

Rand’s report is based on unprecedented access to a database of zero days from a company that sells them to governments and other customers on the “gray market.” The collection contains about 200 entries — about the same number of zero days some experts believe the government to have. Rand found that the exploits had an average lifespan of 6.9 years before the vulnerability each targeted was disclosed to the software maker to be fixed, or before the vendor made upgrades to the code that unwittingly eliminated the security hole.

Some of the exploits survived even longer than this. About 25 percent had a lifespan of a decade or longer. But another 25 percent survived less than 18 months before they were patched or rendered obsolete through software upgrades.

Chart: RAND

 

Rand’s researchers found that there was no pattern around which exploits lived a long or short life — severe vulnerabilities were not more likely to be fixed quickly than minor ones, nor were vulnerabilities in programs that were more widely available.

“The relatively long life expectancy of 6.9 years means that zero-day vulnerabilities — in particular the ones that exploits are created for [in the gray market] — are likely old,” write lead researchers Lillian Ablon and Andy Bogart in their paper “Zero Days, Thousands of Nights.”

Rand, a nonprofit research group, is the first to study in this manner a database of exploits that are in the wild and being actively used in hacking operations. Previous studies of zero days have used manufactured data or the vulnerabilities and exploits that get submitted to vendor bug bounty programs — programs in which software makers or website owners pay researchers for security holes found in their software or websites.

The database used in the study belongs to an anonymous company referred to in the report as “Busby,” which amassed the exploits over 14 years, going back to 2002. Busby’s full database actually has around 230 exploits in it, about 100 of which are still considered active, meaning they are unknown to the software vendors and therefore no patches are available to fix them. The Rand researchers only had access to information on 207 zero days — the rest are recently discovered exploits the company withheld from Rand’s set “due to operational sensitivity.”

While it’s not known how many of these exploits are in the U.S. government’s arsenal, Jason Healey, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs, believes the U.S. government’s zero-day stockpile is comparable in size to Busby’s.

For many years, critics of the government’s use of zero days suspected the arsenal numbered in the thousands. But a report Healey published with his students last year, based in part on statistical analysis of the number of zero days that get discovered and disclosed each year to bug bounty programs, estimated that the government’s trove likely contained between two dozen and 225 zero-day exploits.

This would seem to jibe with statements made by government officials. Michael Daniel, former special adviser to President Obama on cybersecurity issues and a member of Obama’s National Security Council, has said in the past that “there’s often this image that the government has spent a lot of time and effort to discover vulnerabilities that we’ve stockpiled in huge numbers and similarly that we would be purchasing very, very large numbers of vulnerabilities on the open market, the gray market, the black market, whatever you want to call it. [But] the numbers are just not anywhere near what people believe they are.”

Shining a Light on the Government’s Zero-Day Policy

The government has long insisted that it discloses more than 90 percent of the vulnerabilities it finds o..., and that those it doesn’t disclose initially get reviewed on a regular basis to re-evaluate if they should be disclosed.

The problem with this is that the public doesn’t know how long the government is exploiting these security holes before they’re shared publicly — and therefore how long ordinary citizens are left exposed to Russian or Chinese nation-state hackers or cybercriminals who may discover the same vulnerabilities and exploit them.

One factor that can affect how quickly the government discloses vulnerabilities is their collision rate or rediscovery rate. This refers to how often the same vulnerabilities get discovered independently by two or more parties.

It’s a metric that is particularly important in the policy debate around the government’s use of zero-day exploits; if the U.S. knows about a vulnerability, there’s a good chance others do too and are quietly exploiting it. If the data shows there is high probability that criminal hackers or nation-state hackers from Russia or China could discover a vulnerability and create an exploit for it, this can be an argument for disclosing the vulnerability sooner rather than later to get it patched. But if that probability is low, the government can use it to justify nondisclosure and keeping people at risk longer.

The Rand researchers found that the collision rate for the exploits in the Busby database was indeed low. In a typical one-year period, only about 6 percent of the vulnerabilities got discovered by others. That figure jumped to 40 percent, however, when viewed across the entire 14 years of the database.

But there’s a slight problem with this analysis, says Columbia University’s Healey. The Rand researchers determined the collision rate based on publicly disclosed vulnerabilities — those discovered and reported by researchers as part of a vendor bug bounty program or made public in some other way, such as at conferences or in news articles. But this isn’t the collision that concerns critics of zero-day arsenals. They’re concerned about collisions with zero days that remain secret, such as those developed by other nation-state actors and criminal hackers and aren’t publicly disclosed.

“The collision rate is absolutely fascinating, but this is the wrong way to talk about it,” says Healey.

Healey says Rand should be looking for collisions with the zero days found in other gray market databases held by other exploit sellers. He says the kinds of researchers who participate in bug bounty programs tend to be looking for different kinds of vulnerabilities than researchers who are looking for vulnerabilities for offensive hacking. The latter will have different needs and also better resources to look for vulnerabilities.

It’s worth noting that another study released this week by cryptographer Bruce Schneier and Trey Herr of the Harvard Kennedy School found a higher collision rate when looking at vulnerabilities found in browser software and mobile phones.

“Between 15 percent and 20 percent of all vulnerabilities in browsers have at least one duplicate,” they wrote “For data available on Android between 2015 and 2016, 22 percent of vulnerabilities are rediscovered at least once an average of 2 months after their original disclosure. There are reasons to believe that the actual rate is even higher for certain types of software.”

But this study also involved vulnerabilities disclosed to bug bounty programs. Dan Guido, CEO of Trail of Bits, whose company does extensive consulting on iOS security, says, “I don’t think studying bug bounty collisions is representative of exploit use in the wild.”

Regardless of this limitation, Guido says the collision test conducted by Rand is still illuminating for the very fact that it involved at least one set of data consisting of live, in-the-wild exploits.

“Even with the caveats around the collision rate, using the best available data we have now [with those live exploits], is significantly lower than we expected,” he said.

Which begs the question — is it low enough that the government would be justified in holding on to exploits for years and not disclosing the vulnerabilities they attack?

Ari Schwartz, former senior director of cybersecurity in Obama’s White House who participated in the so-called Vulnerabilities Equities process where the government makes these assessments, says even a low collision rate is a problem.

“Let’s say it’s just 10 percent; is it worth doing disclosure for 10 percent? I think it is,” he says. “That’s still pretty high if you think about it — 1 in 10.”

Healey says the RAND study is an incredible asset to other researchers because of its use of live exploits that are in the wild. It makes the data and analysis more realistic than studies that only simulate scenarios and guess at conclusions, like what the consequences of not disclosing a vulnerability might be.

“We can theorize all we want about what’s good and what’s bad [in terms of disclosure], but this is going to shake things up, because now we can roll up our sleeves and actually come up with some real answers.”

They hope it may also encourage the owners of other exploit databases to share their collections with researchers.

[Riaz Haq]

The global war in Cyberia has begun — and will never end 

by NIALL FERGUSON

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/the-global-war...


To each American administration, its war. For Truman and Eisenhower, Korea. For Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, Vietnam. For Carter and Reagan, the culmination of the Cold War. For both Bushes, Iraq. For Clinton, ex-Yugoslavia. For Obama, Afghanistan.

Which will be Donald Trump’s war? There is good reason to fear it could the Second Korean War. Or it could be yet another quagmire in the Middle East. His most excitable critics warn that the Third World War will happen on his watch. But I am more worried about the First Cyber War — because that war has already begun.

Last week’s cyber-attack was just the latest directed against the US by WikiLeaks: the release of a vast cache of documents stolen from the CIA.

In a tweet, WikiLeaks claimed these revealed “CIA hacker malware a threat to journalists: infests iPhone, Android bypassing Signal, Confide encryption”.

Actually, none of the documents mentions Signal, but that’s not the point. In the strange land of Cyberia — the twilight zone inhabited by Russian intelligence operatives — cyber-warfare is mainly about the spread of disinformation under the guise of leaking classified or confidential information.


To visit the WikiLeaks website is to enter the trophy room of Cyberia. Here is the “Hillary Clinton Email Archive”, over there are “The Podesta Emails”. Not all the leaked documents are American, but you will look in vain for leaks calculated to embarrass Russia. Julian Assange may still skulk in the Ecuadorean embassy in London but he lives in Cyberia, Vladimir Putin’s honoured guest.


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Computer scientists have understood the disruptive potential of cyber-warfare since the earliest days of the internet. At first it was adolescent hackers who caused mayhem: geeks such as Robert Tappan Morris, who almost crashed the internet in 1988 by releasing a highly infectious software worm.

It is still the case that a lot of cyber-attacks are carried out by non-state actors: teenage vandals, criminals, “hacktivists” or terrorist organisations. However, the most striking development of the past year has been the advent of Cyberia.

As the country that built the internet, the US was bound to lead in cyber-warfare. During the 2003 Iraq invasion, US spies penetrated Iraqi networks and sent messages urging generals to surrender. Seven years later the US and Israel unleashed the Stuxnet virus on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The problem is not just that two can play at that game. It is that no one knows how many people can play at any number of cyber-games.

In recent years, the US has found itself under cyber-attack from Iran, North Korea and China. However, these attacks were directed against companies (notably Sony Pictures). The Russians are the first to wage war directly against the US government. They learnt the ropes in attacks on Estonia, Georgia and Ukraine. Last year, using WikiLeaks and the blogger Guccifer 2.0 as proxies, they launched a sustained assault on the US political system, using the Clinton emails and those of her campaign manager John Podesta to undermine the credibility of the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.

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Like the financial network, our social, commercial and infrastructural networks are under constant attack from fools and knaves. There is nothing we can do to stop them. The most we can do is to design networks so that the ravages of Cyberia can’t cause a total outage.

Trump’s war has begun: it is the First Cyber War. Like all wars, its first casualty was truth. Unlike other wars, it will have no last casualty, as it is a war without end. Get used to it. Or get rid of your computer.

[Riaz Haq]

Let’s leave aside the question of whether that interference decided the election in favour of Trump. The critical point is that Moscow was undeterred. For specialists in national security, this is only one of many perplexing features of cyber-war. Accustomed to the elegant theories of “mutually assured destruction” that evolved during the Cold War, they are struggling to develop a doctrine for a different form of conflict, with countless potential attackers and numerous gradations of destructiveness.

For Joseph Nye of Harvard’s Kennedy School, deterrence may be salvageable, but that can only be true now if America is prepared to make an example of an aggressor. The three other options Nye proposes are to ramp up cyber-security, to try to “entangle” potential aggressors in trade and other relationships (so as to raise the cost of cyber-attacks to them), or to establish global taboos against cyber, like those against biological and chemical weapons.

Nye’s analysis is not very comforting. Given the sheer number of cyber-aggressors, defence seems doomed to lag behind offence. And the Russians have proved themselves to be indifferent to both entanglement and taboos, even if China seems more amenable to Nye’s approach.

How scared should we be of Cyberia? For Princeton’s Anne-Marie Slaughter, our hyper-networked world is, on balance, a benign place and America “will gradually find the golden mean of network power”. At the other extreme is Joshua Cooper Ramo, whose book T he Seventh Sense argues for the erection of real and virtual “gates” to shut out the Russians and other malefactors. But Ramo himself quotes the three rules of computer security devised by the NSA cryptographer Robert Morris Sr: 1. Do not own a computer; 2. Do not power it on; 3. Do not use it. If we all ignore those rules, how will any gates keep out the Cyberians?

An intellectual arms race is on to devise a viable doctrine of cyber-security. My 10 cents’ worth is that those steeped in the traditional thinking of national security will not come up with it. A realistic goal is not to deter attacks or retaliate against them but to regulate all the various networks on which our society depends so that they are resilient — or, better still, “anti-fragile”, a term coined by Nassim Taleb to describe a system that grows stronger under attack.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/the-global-war...

[Riaz Haq]

Can Cyber Warfare Be Deterred? by Joseph Nye

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/cyber-warfare-deterren...

Fear of a “cyber Pearl Harbor” first appeared in the 1990s, and for the past two decades, policymakers have worried that hackers could blow up oil pipelines, contaminate the water supply, open floodgates and send airplanes on collision courses by hacking air traffic control systems. In 2012, then-US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned that hackers could “shut down the power grid across large parts of the country.”
None of these catastrophic scenarios has occurred, but they certainly cannot be ruled out. At a more modest level, hackers were able to destroy a blast furnace at a German steel mill last year. So the security question is straightforward: Can such destructive actions be deterred?
The Year Ahead 2017 Cover Image
It is sometimes said that deterrence is not an effective strategy in cyberspace, because of the difficulties in attributing the source of an attack and because of the large and diverse number of state and non-state actors involved. We are often not sure whose assets we can hold at risk and for how long.
Attribution is, indeed, a serious problem. How can you retaliate when there is no return address? Nuclear attribution is not perfect, but there are only nine states with nuclear weapons; the isotopic identifiers of their nuclear materials are relatively well known; and non-state actors face high entry barriers.
None of this is true in cyberspace where a weapon can consist of a few lines of code that can be invented (or purchased on the so-called dark web) by any number of state or non-state actors. A sophisticated attacker can hide the point of origin behind the false flags of several remote servers.
While forensics can handle many “hops” among servers, it often takes time. For example, an attack in 2014 in which 76 million client addresses were stolen from JPMorgan Chase was widely attributed to Russia. By 2015, however, the US Department of Justice identified the perpetrators as a sophisticated criminal gang led by two Israelis and an American citizen who lives in Moscow and Tel Aviv.
Attribution, however, is a matter of degree. Despite the dangers of false flags and the difficulty of obtaining prompt, high-quality attribution that would stand up in a court of law, there is often enough attribution to enable deterrence.
For example, in the 2014 attack on SONY Pictures, the United States initially tried to avoid full disclosure of the means by which it attributed the attack to North Korea, and encountered widespread skepticism as a result. Within weeks, a press leak revealed that the US had access to North Korean networks. Skepticism diminished, but at the cost of revealing a sensitive source of intelligence.
Prompt, high-quality attribution is often difficult and costly, but not impossible. Not only are governments improving their capabilities, but many private-sector companies are entering the game, and their participation reduces the costs to governments of having to disclose sensitive sources. Many situations are matters of degree, and as technology improves the forensics of attribution, the strength of deterrence may increase.
Moreover, analysts should not limit themselves to the classic instruments of punishment and denial as they assess cyber deterrence. Attention should also be paid to deterrence by economic entanglement and by norms.
Economic entanglement can alter the cost-benefit calculation of a major state like China, where the blowback effects of an attack on, say, the US power grid could hurt the Chinese economy. Entanglement probably has little effect on a state like North Korea, which is weakly linked to the global economy. It is not clear how much entanglement affects non-state actors. Some may be like parasites that suffer if they kill their host, but others may be indifferent to such effects.

[Riaz Haq]

As for norms, major states have agreed that cyber war will be limited by the law of armed conflict, which requires discrimination between military and civilian targets and proportionality in terms of consequences. Last July, the United Nations Group of Government Experts recommended excluding civilian targets from cyberattacks, and that norm was endorsed at last month’s G-20 summit.
It has been suggested that one reason why cyber weapons have not been used more in war thus far stems precisely from uncertainty about the effects on civilian targets and unpredictable consequences. Such norms may have deterred the use of cyber weapons in US actions against Iraqi and Libyan air defenses. And the use of cyber instruments in Russia’s “hybrid” wars in Georgia and Ukraine has been relatively limited.
The relationship among the variables in cyber deterrence is a dynamic one that will be affected by technology and learning, with innovation occurring at a faster pace than was true of nuclear weapons. For example, better attribution forensics may enhance the role of punishment; and better defenses through encryption may increase deterrence by denial. As a result, the current advantage of offense over defense may change over time.

Cyber learning is also important. As states and organizations come to understand better the importance of the Internet to their economic wellbeing, cost-benefit calculations of the utility of cyber warfare may change, just as learning over time altered the understanding of the costs of nuclear warfare.
Unlike the nuclear age, when it comes to deterrence in the cyber era, one size does not fit all. Or are we prisoners of an overly simple image of the past? After all, when nuclear punishment seemed too draconian to be credible, the US adopted a conventional flexible response to add an element of denial in its effort to deter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. And while the US never agreed to a formal norm of “no first use of nuclear weapons,” eventually such a taboo evolved, at least among the major states. Deterrence in the cyber era may not be what it used to be, but maybe it never was

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/cyber-warfare-deterren...

[Riaz Haq]

US scientists at U of Michigan hack' #India electronic #vote17 machines - BBC News. #UPElection2017

http://www.bbc.com/news/10123478

Scientists at a US university say they have developed a technique to hack into Indian electronic voting machines.
After connecting a home-made device to a machine, University of Michigan researchers were able to change results by sending text messages from a mobile.
Indian election officials say their machines are foolproof, and that it would be very difficult even to get hold of a machine to tamper with it.
India uses about 1.4m electronic voting machines in each general election.
'Dishonest totals'
A video posted on the internet by the researchers at the University of Michigan purportedly shows them connecting a home-made electronic device to one of the voting machines used in India.
Professor J Alex Halderman, who led the project, said the device allowed them to change the results on the machine by sending it messages from a mobile phone.

"We made an imitation display board that looks almost exactly like the real display in the machines," he told the BBC. "But underneath some of the components of the board, we hide a microprocessor and a Bluetooth radio."
"Our lookalike display board intercepts the vote totals that the machine is trying to display and replaces them with dishonest totals - basically whatever the bad guy wants to show up at the end of the election."
In addition, they added a small microprocessor which they say can change the votes stored in the machine between the election and the vote-counting session.
India's electronic voting machines are considered to be among the most tamperproof in the world.
There is no software to manipulate - records of candidates and votes cast are stored on purpose-built computer chips.
Paper and wax seals
India's Deputy Election Commissioner, Alok Shukla, said even getting hold of machines to tamper with would be very difficult.
"It is not just the machine, but the overall administrative safeguards which we use that make it absolutely impossible for anybody to open the machine," he told the BBC.
"Before the elections take place, the machine is set in the presence of the candidates and their representatives. These people are allowed to put their seal on the machine, and nobody can open the machine without breaking the seals."
The researchers said the paper and wax seals could be easily faked.
However, for their system to have any impact they would need to install their microchips on many voting machines, no easy task when 1,368,430 were used in the last general election in 2009.

[Riaz Haq]

India, Pakistan cyber war intensifies

https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/176619-India-Pakistan-cyber-war-in...

NEW DELHI: Indian hackers claimed to have hacked Islamabad, Peshawar, Multan International and Karachi airport

The hack comes just days after Pakistani hackers, identifying themselves as 'Alone Injector', posted offensive content on NSG's official homepage. As most were preparing to celebrate New Year, hackers from India and Pakistan were busy firing shots across the online border in the ongoing cyber war between the two countries.

Indian hackers allegedly infected three Pakistan airport websites with ransomware claiming that this was to avenge hacking of the official website of the elite National Security Guard (NSG) by their counterpart in Pakistan.

Indian hackers on Monday night claimed to have hacked Islamabad, Peshawar, Multan International and Karachi airport website. Not only they have hacked and brought the website down, but have also injected it with ransomware malware which restricts the owners use of their website. Indian hackers locked the access to the websites and are demanding bitcoins (virtual money) in exchange for unlocking it. However, an Indian hacker told Mail Today that last time the money they got from Pakistan to unlock their computer was donated to needy kids but this time, they will not share the key to unlock the sites.

The move came just a day after Pakistani hackers, identifying themselves as 'Alone Injector', posted the offensive content on NSG's official homepage. The website belonging to the 'black cat' commandos is maintained from the NSG headquarters and gives out basic information about the force, its origin and operations.

The matter has been brought to the notice of the National Informatics Centre, and remedial action is in process. Retaliating immediately, Indian hackers have launched a massive attack on crucial Pakistan establishment and warned both Pakistan hackers and the government against attacking India further.

This hacking group in past had infected the Pakistan government systems, taken control over hundreds of computers and locked its complete data, making it inaccessible - using a malicious programme. The hacking group also leaked details of Pakistan army officers and banking details.

However, there was no confirmation by any security agency about it as the hackers from both the countries are not officially. This fighting started last week after Pakistan cyber attackers hacked

Thiruvananthapuram airport's website, a group of cyber experts from Kerala - the 'Mallu Cyber Soldiers' - decided to respond in kind: by hacking the website of a Pakistani airport. The hacker obtained the login information for the website of the Sialkot International Airport in Pakistan's Punjab province. They changed the password and shared the new login details with the public. Experts believe the hacking of airport websites can be used to get out crucial information about flights, which can have serious consequences.

Moreover, leaking of details about the individual airports - from logistics to facilities - is also dangerous. Experts believe that intelligence-gathering process has increased as hackers are not only defacing the sites but are silently spying on critical networks. 'Indian hackers have only replied after observing malicious intention of Pakistani hackers.

'Techies across the border targeted Indian sites result of which NSG's website was hacked. Such fights are common but now the intensity of attacks have increased many fold as hackers from both the countries are targeting crucial websites,' said Kislay Choudhary, a cyber crime expert.

[Riaz Haq]

America must defend itself against the real national security menace

by Fareed Zakaria

1. Punishment 
2. Defense
3. Taboo

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-united-states-must-defe...


Since the North Korean government’s 2014 attacks on Sony Pictures Entertainment, many in the intelligence community, including Adm. Michael S. Rogers, have warned that “we’re at a tipping point.” Rogers, head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, testified to Congress in 2015 that the country had no adequate deterrent against cyberattacks. He and many others have argued for an offensive capacity forceful enough to dissuade future threats.

But the digital realm is a complex one, and old rules will not easily translate. The analogy that many make is to nuclear weapons. In the early Cold War, that new category of weaponry led to the doctrine of deterrence, which in turn led to arms-control negotiations and other mechanisms to foster stable, predictable relations among the world’s nuclear powers.

But this won’t work in the cyber realm, Joseph Nye says in an important new essay in the journal International Security. First, the goal of nuclear deterrence has been “total prevention” — to avert a single use of nuclear weapons. Cyberattacks happen all the time, everywhere. The Defense Department reports getting 10 million attacks a day. Second, there is the problem of attribution. Nye quotes defense official William Lynn, who observed in 2010, “Whereas a missile comes with a return address, a computer virus generally does not.” That’s why it is so easy for the Russian government to deny any involvement with the hacking against the Democratic National Committee. It is hard to establish ironclad proof of the source of any cyberattack — which is a large part of its attractiveness as an asymmetrical weapon.


Nye argues that there are four ways to deal with cyberattacks: punishment, entanglement, defense and taboos. Punishment involves retaliation, and although it is worth pursuing, both sides can play that game, and it could easily spiral out of control.

Entanglement means that if other countries were to harm the United States, their own economies would suffer. It strikes me as of limited value because there are ways to attack the United States discreetly without shooting oneself in the foot (as Russia has shown recently, and as Chinese cybertheft of intellectual property shows as well). And it certainly wouldn’t deter groups such as the Islamic State, al-Qaeda or even WikiLeaks.

The other two strategies merit more consideration. Nye contends that the United States should develop a serious set of defenses, beyond simply governmental networks, that are modeled on public health. Regulations and information would encourage the private sector to follow some simple rules of “cyber hygiene” that could go a long way toward creating a secure national network. This new system of defenses should become standard in the digital world.

The final strategy Nye suggests is to develop taboos against certain forms of cyberwarfare. He points out that after the use of chemical weapons in World War I, a taboo grew around their use, was enacted into international law and has largely held for a century. Similarly, in the 1950s, many strategists saw no distinction between tactical nuclear weapons and “normal” weapons. Gradually, countries came to shun any use of nuclear weaponry, a mutual understanding that has also survived for decades. Nye recognizes that no one is going to stop using cyber-tools but believes that perhaps certain targets could be deemed off-limits, such as purely civilian equipment.

Of course, the development of such norms would involve multilateral negotiations, international forums, rules and institutions, all of which the Trump administration views as globaloney. But at least it is working hard to prevent Yemeni tourists from entering the country.

[Riaz Haq]

Wikileaks reveal #American #Spy Agency #NSA #Cyber Weapons Used to Hack #Pakistan mobile system http://bit.ly/2nQ1VHn via @techjuicepk

New information about the involvement of US in hacking Pakistan mobile system has been found in a release by Wikileaks. This leak points to NSA’s cyber weapons which include code related to hacking of Pakistan mobile system.

NSA’s interest in Pakistan
NSA, National Security Agency responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes in the USA, has allegedly spied on Pakistani civilian and military leadership in the past. Edward Snowden, a former NSA employee, has also suggested in the past that NSA used wiretapping and cyber weapons to spy on many international leaders.

Scope of new information
On Saturday, Wikileaks revealed hundreds of cyber weapons variants which include code pointing towards NSA hacking Pakistan mobile system.

The link shared in the tweet by Wikileaks’ official account points to a Github repository containing the decrypted files pertaining to NSA cyber weapons. A complete analysis of these files by a cyber security expert is needed to further highlight the severity of the situation. Initial impressions, however, seem to indicate that these leaks will certainly provide more substance to previous allegations against NSA.

[Riaz Haq]

#Cyberattack Hits #Ukraine Then Spreads Internationally. #NSA #hackingtool #WannaCry #Petya #Russia

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/technology/ransomware-hackers.html

Computer systems from Ukraine to the United States were struck on Tuesday in an international cyberattack that was similar to a recent assault that crippled tens of thousands of machines worldwide.

In Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, A.T.M.s stopped working. About 80 miles away, workers were forced to manually monitor radiation at the old Chernobyl nuclear plant when their computers failed. And tech managers at companies around the world — from Maersk, the Danish shipping conglomerate, to Merck, the drug giant in the United States — were scrambling to respond. Even an Australian factory for the chocolate giant Cadbury was affected.

It was unclear who was behind this cyberattack, and the extent of its impact was still hard to gauge Tuesday. It started as an attack on Ukrainian government and business computer systems — an assault that appeared to have been intended to hit the day before a holiday marking the adoption in 1996 of Ukraine’s first Constitution after its break from the Soviet Union. The attack spread from there, causing collateral damage around the world.

The outbreak was the latest and perhaps the most sophisticated in a series of attacks making use of dozens of hacking tools that were stolen from the National Security Agency and leaked online in April by a group called the Shadow Brokers.

Like the WannaCry attacks in May, the latest global hacking took control of computers and demanded digital ransom from their owners to regain access. The new attack used the same National Security Agency hacking tool, Eternal Blue, that was used in the WannaCry episode, as well as two other methods to promote its spread, according to researchers at the computer security company Symantec.

The National Security Agency has not acknowledged its tools were used in WannaCry or other attacks. But computer security specialists are demanding that the agency help the rest of the world defend against the weapons it created.

“The N.S.A. needs to take a leadership role in working closely with security and operating system platform vendors such as Apple and Microsoft to address the plague that they’ve unleashed,” said Golan Ben-Oni, the global chief information officer at IDT, a Newark-based conglomerate hit by a separate attack in April that used the agency’s hacking tools. Mr. Ben-Oni warned federal officials that more serious attacks were probably on the horizon.

The vulnerability in Windows software used by Eternal Blue was patched by Microsoft in March, but as the WannaCry attacks demonstrated, hundreds of thousands of groups around the world failed to properly install the fix.

“Just because you roll out a patch doesn’t mean it’ll be put in place quickly,” said Carl Herberger, vice president for security at Radware. “The more bureaucratic an organization is, the higher chance it won’t have updated its software.”

Because the ransomware used at least two other ways to spread on Tuesday — including stealing victims’ credentials — even those who used the Microsoft patch could be vulnerable and potential targets for later attacks, according to researchers at F-Secure, a Finnish cybersecurity firm, and others.

A Microsoft spokesman said the company’s latest antivirus software should protect against the attack.

The Ukrainian government said several of its ministries, local banks and metro systems had been affected. A number of other European companies, including Rosneft, the Russian energy giant; Saint-Gobain, the French construction materials company; and WPP, the British advertising agency, also said they had been targeted.