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In an Age of Cyber War, Where Are the Cyber Weapons?
chicksdaddy writes "MIT Tech Review has an interesting piece that asks an obvious, but intriguing question: if we're living in an age of cyber warfare, where are all the cyber weapons? Like the dawn of the nuclear age that started with the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the use of the Stuxnet worm reportedly launched a global cyber arms race involving everyone from Syria to Iran and North Korea. But almost four years after it was first publicly identified, Stuxnet is an anomaly: the first and only cyber weapon known to have been deployed. Experts in securing critical infrastructure including industrial control systems are wondering why. If Stuxnet was the world's cyber 'Little Boy,' where is the 'Fat Man'? Speaking at the recent S4 Conference, Ralph Langner, perhaps the world's top authority on the Stuxnet worm, argues that the mere hacking of critical systems is just a kind of 'hooliganism' that doesn't count as cyber warfare. True cyber weapons capable of inflicting cyber-physical damage require extraordinary expertise. Stuxnet, he notes, made headlines for using four exploits for "zero day" (or previously undiscovered) holes in the Windows operating system. Far more impressive was the metallurgic expertise needed to understand the construction of Iran's centrifuges. Those who created and programmed Stuxnet needed to know the exact amount of pressure or torque needed to damage aluminum rotors within them, sabotaging the country's uranium enrichment operation."
Haven't you been watching the news for the last six months?
REALLY stupid question. It is not like they are going to wave them about for everyone to see. They most likely exist.
We have E-cannons already, skript kiddies have been using them for years now.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Is there a doubt in anyone's mind?
Perception is reality
The weapons are on chips, firmware or in the OS! Did you not read that catalog that the Snowden fella kindly leaked for us?
Ask Intel about iAMT and vPro. Ask China about Manchurian Microchips. Ask Microsoft about NSAKEY again, because if we didn't believe their lame excuses 10 years ago, we REALLY don't buy them today.
Sure, the NSA probably has a large virus arsenal too, but when you can issue a National Security Letter to MS or Apple or Google or Mozilla, or simply activate one of our many programmer agents in place (such as in the IETF or at MS or Google) and just put the exploits wherever you like, viruses start seeming pretty silly. Heck, even our geopolitical adversaries are using US-made cyber-weapons - ahem, I mean operating systems and applications.
Where are the cyber weapons? Already deployed and awaiting activation. Undocumented errata in major CPUs which allow bypassing memory protection. Preset keys in network cards allowing remote administration. Undocumented admin passwords in network firmware. Code signing certs in the hands of intelligence agencies. That's where.
Wow, parent god modded to -1 ...
http://cryptome.org/2014/01/nsa-codenames.htm
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-nsa-has-back-doors-for-numerous-devices-a-940994.html
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/nsa-hacking-catalogue/
Wouldn't the Morris Worm qualify as the first "cyber weapon"? Granted it was crude and uncontrollable, but I'd bet that the same could have been made for the Mark 1 Mod 0 Blunderbuss 500 years ago.
And I think that the power of a cyber-weapon would lie primarily in secrecy, like land mines; you don't know you're under attack until you've already taken considerable damage.
All of those were used by governments. One was used for industrial sabotage; the other two to spy on people who were then assassinated. Are these not "cyber-weapons"? What makes them different from Stuxnet but the degree of press they received?
In the hands of the Cybermen, of course.
If we started building bunkers out of blocks of TNT, someone would rapidly figure out it was a bad idea.... but not so when it's abstracted several layers deep.
In conventional munitions, it's necessary to deliver an explosive to a target. Thanks to the Unix security model, with its lack of any notion of multi-level security, we've created an entire infrastructure that's ready to self-destruct at a moment's notice. The military went on to actually procure and use multi-level security in a number of cases, while the idea is perceived as impossible, or unnecessary in the civilian space.
All of our Linux, Mac OS, and Windows machines share the same brain dead security model. When you run code, you have to trust it not to be a virtual grenade, each and every time.
The existence of billions of computers which blindly run code without actual security protecting the operating system (as a multi-level secure system does) is astoundingly stupid, and yet 99.9% of the "tech" community is just fine with this state of affairs.
The infrastructure IS the weapon, its your job to change that over the next 20 years.... get crackin'
I found the weapon!
Table-ized A.I.
I'd guesstimate on average, we log about 50-100 attack attempts from Chinese IPs per server per day. Our sample size is only several thousand customer servers, but that's enough to get a rough idea of what's happening on the internet generally.
There IS cyber war going on, much like the Cold War. It's not on the news every day, but it's happening just as much as Reagan was trying to defeat the USSR. The weapons aren't that advanced most of the time simply because they don't need to be - the targets very cooperatively run PHP scripts written by kids with NO security training whatsoever. When your admin interface is open to brute force and SQL injection attacks, advanced weapons aren't needed. The secretary of state and chairman of the senate defense committee have the same unpatched Linksys router at home as any random person. How many high level bureaucrats have VoIP at home? VoIP "protected" by Netgear's firewall?
Sitting in some cyber arsenal, awaiting use. The problem with cyber attacks is that once discovered, they can be defended against. So from a tactical point of view, they are best kept in reserve until the case for their use is overwhelming.
As a part of Operation Orchard, it is theorized that Israel may have disabled Syrian air defense via back doors in their IT systems. If so, the existance of such back doors was revealed by a post mortem analysis and the holes in the systems plugged. So that would be a case of a one time use. It had better be worthwhile (and arguably, it was).
The cyber weapons in the hands of criminal organizations are best used in a very low key manner, so as not to attract attention and patches. Criminals are probably continuing to bleed some credit cards for $9.85 here and there, hoping to stay under the radar for as long as possible.
Have gnu, will travel.
All available evidence suggests that the vast majority originate in China. That makes sense - it would be silly to go through the great firewall, twice, and slow yourself down by going around the world and back, when you could just as easily use a US zombie.