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The Latest Wave of Cyberattacks On the West Is Coming From the Middle East
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "A hacker group from the Middle East known as Molerats attacked a wide range of major public sector organizations over April and May, including the BBC and a smattering of European governments, researchers revealed today. The latest attacks, which sought to establish espionage operations on targets' digital infrastructure, took place between 29 April and 27 May, according to security technology vendor FireEye. The Molerats' actions have added weight to concerns around growing cyber capability stemming from the Middle East. Yet researchers are somewhat perplexed as to the motivation of the perpetrators, whose targets included both Israel and Palestine, as well as Turkey, Slovenia, Macedonia, New Zealand and Latvia. The hackers also went after government bodies in the U.S. and the UK."
...Duh?
The non-American world is happily sitting at keyboards and attempting to hack the evil U.S. to pieces. Is this really a surprise to anyone?
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Let me be the first one to congratulate them. So long as those idiots stick to keyboard attacks instead of suicide bombings I think we are moving in the right direction.
If anyone is dumb enough to connect nuclear power plants to the internet ... well, let's just say we'll learn that lesson and never make that mistake again.
Hey, c'mon man. Hackers... cyberattacks! Isn't that relevant?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
...why?
Your outermost gateway should be a simple NAT/port-forwarder/load balancer and a honeypot server. Web traffic goes to the front-end servers, all else goes to the honeypot server. There should be no live DNS. Computers don't need readable names, strings are often where mistakes are made and replying to an IP doesn't require name resolution. The NAT/load balancing would be per-inbound-packet at this level, not per-session or per-time-interval. That means attacks on server resources (if they get through at all) are divided across your cluster evenly. Buys the machines time to detect and counter the problem.
Your front-end servers should be not much more than static content delivery systems, proxying the rest through your outer defences. OpenBSD is ideal for this - fast, simple, bullet-proof. Middle level defences should be a very basic firewall (maximum stability and maximum throughput) and an Active NIDS running in parallel (so as not to slow down traffic).
Inside that, you have at least two load-balancers, one on hot standby, farming dynamic requests to mainline servers. Mainline servers have no static content, only dynamic content. If dynamic content changes slowly (eg: BBC), have a cache server sitting in front of the actual content server. No point regenerating unchanged content.
Content servers send through another firewall (it can also be simple) to your database servers. Unrelated data should be on distinct servers for security and seek time. Since the content servers are read-only, they need hit only database cache servers with actual databases behind those. If you absolutely have to have FQDNs, zone transfer the critical stuff. Bounce all other DNS requests via the internal network to the regular DNS source. That way, your at-risk gateway doesn't contain stupid holes in the wall.
The internal corporate network would have a firewall and switch linking up to the content servers and cache servers, then a different firewall to the database servers. These would be heavier-duty firewalls as the traffic is more complex. Logins of any kind should be permitted only over an IPSec tunnel. All unused ports should be closed.
For the outermost systems, logins should be by IPSec only from a cache server. (Content servers have three Ethernet connections, none going to the firewall.)
This arrangement will take punishment. The arrangements where everything (database included) is in the DMZ with no shielding against coding errors, THOSE are the ones that fall over when people sneeze.
Ok, so my topology would cost a few thousand more. To Amazon, the BBC, any of the online banks, any of the online nuclear power stations - a few thousand might be spent on an executive lunch, but considerably more than a few thousand would certainly be spent and/or lost in a disaster. My layout gives security and performance, though the better corporate giants might be able to do better in both departments.
Doesn't matter if they can. What matters is that nobody at that level should be less secure than this. This is your minimal standard.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm guessing it's election time and people need to justify their budgets and keep other things out of the lime light.
"See, them lousy middle east terrorist types are hacking our computers, you need me to run for office and give the NSA power to do anything." - Any Politician in the USA/UK today.
Be seeing you...
I was considering not answer, but then some idiot moded down my answers because he does not agree with it. What is propagandistic? For starters, it is a company in interesting in spreading FUD for their own benefit - take it with a pinch of salt on both hands if you may. Than it is the political fearing-mongering of the partner that is always licking the arse of USA. We are already very fed up with that shit - oh my chinese and middle-easterners are so bad, bad guys, they manufactured Windows and Cisco routers, and they have backdoors on it, and sold printers with damaged firmware to Iraq, and wrote stuxnet, and are always invading countries...oh wait... That is utter bullshit. Most cyber attacks come either from USA or Chinese domestic machines that have not properly secured their machines. Add to that a mentality of the Chinese if it works, dont fix it, and you have a lot of old XP machines laying around without any kind of maintenance and full of virus. Oddly enough, the UK also has the same mentality, however they are much smaller in numbers. Id worry more about Russian bots or Nigeria 419 scammers...
According to security technology vendor FireEye.
According to security technology vendor FireEye.
According to security technology vendor FireEye.
According to security technology vendor FireEye.
Brainwashing through repetition really works.
"Yet researchers are somewhat perplexed as to the motivation of the perpetrators": So the entire team is composed of sociopaths?
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
The US has more or less made themselves fair game for this. And quite frankly, so have all of the "5 eyes".
You can't say "it is our sovereign right to hack into anything we want because we say so", and then turn around and expect that others won't more or less do the same to you.
If you start global surveillance and spying, you can't suddenly act like it's not fair for someone else to do it.
So all you people who keep saying "well, we don't care if the NSA is doing that, that's what they're supposed to do". Well, bad-guy hackers are doing what they're supposed to do in their eyes.
At the end of the day, the 'legitimacy' of it is one group saying they're entitled to do something, and another disagreeing. If your NSA has decided it is their right to hack into anything they see fit because that's their mandate, you have zero right to assume it won't happen to you. In fact, you should expect it.
And, expanding that logic a little ... if you decide it's your right to bomb civilians in order to get to who you want, then you have no right to assume that someone else won't decide that your civilians are also fair targets. Because once you decide civilians are expendable in pursuing your goals, that's the standard you've set. Just because you believe your civilians are more valuable doesn't make it so.
As much as Americans like to think "of course we can, because we're the US of Fucking A", it's no more legitimate than anybody else saying "well, we can too".
By their own logic, the US pretty much deserves what they get. If you act like the wishes of other countries and people is totally irrelevant, well, you more or less deserve for them to decide that what you want is equally irrelevant.
And then it just devolves into a vicious cycle of nobody remembering who shot first.
So if you want to take some form of moral high ground, make sure you're actually staying there. Otherwise, you're just being hypocritical assholes. And, that seems to be a strong suit of Americans.
As long as Americans have the attitude that whatever they do is OK simply because they're Americans, they're always going to have to understand that anybody else can decide the same damned thing.