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'Vigilante Hackers' Strike Routers In Russia and Iran, Reports Motherboard (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard:
On Friday, a group of hackers targeted computer infrastructure in Russia and Iran, impacting internet service providers, data centres, and in turn some websites. "We were tired of attacks from government-backed hackers on the United States and other countries," someone in control of an email address left in the note told Motherboard Saturday... "We simply wanted to send a message...." In addition to disabling the equipment, the hackers left a note on affected machines, according to screenshots and photographs shared on social media: "Don't mess with our elections," along with an image of an American flag...
In a blog post Friday, cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said the attack was exploiting a vulnerability in a piece of software called Cisco Smart Install Client. Using computer search engine Shodan, Talos (which is part of Cisco) said in its own blog post on Thursday it found 168,000 systems potentially exposed by the software. Talos also wrote it observed hackers exploiting the vulnerability to target critical infrastructure, and that some of the attacks are believed to be from nation-state actors...
Reuters reported that Iran's IT Minister Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi said the attack mainly impacted Europe, India, and the U.S.... The hackers said they did scan many countries for the vulnerable systems, including the U.K., U.S., and Canada, but only "attacked" Russia and Iran, perhaps referring to the post of an American flag and their message. They claimed to have fixed the Cisco issue on exposed devices in the US and UK "to prevent further attacks... As a result of our efforts, there are almost no vulnerable devices left in many major countries," they claimed in an email.
Their image of the American flag was a black-and-white drawing done with ASCII art.
In a blog post Friday, cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said the attack was exploiting a vulnerability in a piece of software called Cisco Smart Install Client. Using computer search engine Shodan, Talos (which is part of Cisco) said in its own blog post on Thursday it found 168,000 systems potentially exposed by the software. Talos also wrote it observed hackers exploiting the vulnerability to target critical infrastructure, and that some of the attacks are believed to be from nation-state actors...
Reuters reported that Iran's IT Minister Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi said the attack mainly impacted Europe, India, and the U.S.... The hackers said they did scan many countries for the vulnerable systems, including the U.K., U.S., and Canada, but only "attacked" Russia and Iran, perhaps referring to the post of an American flag and their message. They claimed to have fixed the Cisco issue on exposed devices in the US and UK "to prevent further attacks... As a result of our efforts, there are almost no vulnerable devices left in many major countries," they claimed in an email.
Their image of the American flag was a black-and-white drawing done with ASCII art.
This little circle-jerk just closed off viable attack vectors that could have been used in a real defense situation.
Retaliation in 3...2....1.....
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
That's also why this is highly unlikely to be NSA. The folks doing intelligence work for government intelligence agencies don't fuck around like this. They go for the throat, and they go hard.
And it's not like it's limited to US. In fact, one of the biggest complaints of FBI doing investigations of Russian for profit hackers was that almost every one they reported on to Russian authorities ended up being recruited for their intelligence apparatus.
Don't kid yourselves, the baddest motherfuckers in the world of computers are employed by governments.
. . . when "The Pros" hack into a system . . . they don't tell anyone about it.
. . . when "The Schmoes" hack into a system . . .they brag about it on Facebook.
One of the oldest rules in the book is that you never let your enemy know that you have compromised them. That way, they will continue to expose valuable information that you can exploit.
If you leave behind an email stating, "You've been hacked!" . . . that's game over for that exploit.
There used to be an ancient joke that "spooky folks" would pass around, that went something like:
"Did you hear the story of the greatest spy coup of all time . . . ?"
"No . . . you didn't . . . and you never will."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!