Slashdot Mirror
France Will Hack Its Enemies Back, Its Defense Secretary Says (theregister.co.uk)
France's defence secretary Florence Parly had a declaration to make this week: "Cyber war has begun." And she said the Euro nation's military will use its "cyber arms as all other traditional weapons... to respond and attack," as well as setting up a military bug bounty program. From a report: Parly made her pledges during a speech to the Forum International de Cybersecurite (FIC) in the northern French town of Lille. Her speech was on a topic that most Western countries shy away from addressing directly in public. "The cyber weapon is not only for our enemies," said France's defence secretary this afternoon, speaking through a translator. "No. It's also, in France, a tool to defend ourselves. To respond and attack." Her remarks will be seen as moving the debate about offensive cyber capabilities -- not just so-called "active defence" but using infosec techniques as another weapon in the arsenal of state-on-state warfare -- to a new level.
Please dont declare war. We have enough wars already.
Full contact public warfare.. get it right the first time
A new offensive cyberwarfare department, staffed with white hat hackers and run by a flag officer, and elevated to it's own branch. The French will call it the white flag ministry.
Who are France's ennemies? Yellow jackets? The state already hacks its citizen computers and eletrical networks (using Linky), and owns, controls or regulates most of the local internet infrastructure.
Hacking one's own citizenry is going to become commonplace in our new century.
Long life the yellow jackets, and à bas la Dictature Macron !
And likely nobody else.
One has to wonder whether stupidity is a job requirement for these positions. Even after minimal consultations with actual experts, this person would know that this approach does _not_work.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The problem here is that you have to at least demonstrate that you have the capability to destroy your enemies or it's kind of pointless and very dangerous to try this tactic. You are just asking for trouble if you cannot back it up. I'm thinking this is misguided.
Has France invented something more effective hacking tools than their Maginot line was during WWII? (Asking for a friend...)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
With how trivial it is to hide an attack in another country and blame it on another group, I hope France at least gets some surety of whom they are hacking back, because it seems like this can harm innocent parties, or parties which already have been breached.
Also, what is the end goal of "hacking back"? "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" on the bad guys' machines may sound cool, but the bad guys likely have better backups than 95% of the companies out there and would be back in business in no time. Finding out whom the attacker is? At best, you may net a zombie "client", and maybe find a C&C IP address range.
State on state warfare as in going after another nation's power grid. Oftentimes hacking are asymmetric attacks. There may not be a power grid to speak of in some countries. Others would take that as an act of war, and respond with nukes or other weaponry.
Instead, maybe France needs to take a page from China and other countries, and that would be to see about better firewalling at their physical border routers, so attacks from foreign sources are stopped there, rather than at the hosts themselves. It might be wise to just block entire countries' IP space completely, if it is confirmed without a reasonable doubt that that country has state actors trying to do stuff.
Or, create an organization like UL and have component makers pass basic security testing before it is allowed to be sold, especially IoT stuff. It may not even hurt to make top brass of companies (you know, the guys who say "security has no ROI", then short the company stock before a security breach announcement is made) personally and criminally liable for breaches.
There is a lot countries can do to make themselves less of a target. "Hack them back" just doesn't sound feasible. Way too easy to launch attacks from someone else's territory. One thing countries can do is just not play ball. If Lower Elbonia is always a source of attacks via their state government, block their IP ranges at the routers, and call it done. If a corporation in another country is causing issues due to lack of security, block their range, or put the range in a blackhole list and let the ISPs do the blocking.
Step 1: Spoof target you dislike/pivot off of them.
Step 2: Make an obvious attack against France.
Step 3: Watch a Nation State do your dirty work.
Money for nothin' and chicks for free.
Seriously, this is just another gravy train leaving the station.
All aboard!!!
Capta: congress
the Cyber War has.
#DeleteChrome
God damn you are simple and know nothing about WWII history.
I remember listening to a talk from the Chaos Communications Conference called "We Lost The War". In it, the presenters posed the question of why there's so much talk of cyberwar, which they answered by saying that your standard warmongers are relevant only in war, so they want to shift as much discussion as possible toward war. Importantly, this means that the only reason cyberwar is being mentioned is to give relevance to warmongers. The fact is, computer security is inherently asymmetric. That means that retaliation is ineffective. Buying into the framing that's given by people such as Florence Parly makes absolutely no sense. Cyberwar doesn't have to exist at all; it only exists if we want it to. If not, traditional defensive computer security, as has always been done, is extremely effective.
Florence Parly est une vieille salope qui a dû bien se faire troncher par Macron pour avoir son poste, d'ailleurs il aime ça les ménopausées.
Heureusement qu'il aime les vieilles grosses chattes le petit merdeux, sinon tu ne pourrais pas t'asseoir au premier rang tellement il t'aurait défoncé ton trou du cul pendant des heures.
Et puis qu'est-ce que tu y connais vieille peau, peut-être peux-tu nous éclairer sur qui a mis tes conneries dans ton discours.
Et surtout ton IVe Reich tu peux te le foutre au cul! Va voir ton sac à merde de Le Drian et répète lui-ça.
Florence Parly, ministre de la guerre, mais on t'en veut pas t'es qu'une marionnette de plus qui a ravalé sa conscience depuis des années, tout ça pour 10000 euros par mois. Vous nous faites pitié.
Somewhere, right now, within Frances borders, is a graphic designer tasked by the French government to make the new digital image of a white flag. Vive la Photoshop.
Stories like this usually get the obese armchair Warriors strategising with their little helmet in their hands.
But all that aside France is still using a teletext system which is so old it will take them at least 20 minutes longer to surrender. Every nation of the world riots the French are the only nation to put on a yellow shirt to begin with.
"Never fear, we are constantly vigilant against the menacing threat of jerk hackers. If a jerk hacker is found, we reverse hack-jerk, and they are actually the ones who well be gone to the americans!"
Cyber war FUD aside, I find it an interesting change to reward people who find holes in military systems instead of imprisoning them for "putting brave soldiers life in danger".
See subject: For everyone via APK Hosts File Engine 2.0++ 64-bit for Linux/BSD h t t p : / / a p k . i t - m a t e . c o . u k / A P K H o s t s F i l e E n g i n e F o r L i n u x . z i p
Yields more security/speed/reliability/anonymity vs. any 1 solution (99% of threats use hostnames vs. IP address most firewalls use) more efficiently/FASTER + NATIVELY 4 less!
Vs. "Bolt on 'MoAr' illogic-logic" slowing u hosts speed u up 2 ways: Adblocks + Hardcode fav. sites u spend most time @ vs. competition w/ security bugs (DNS/AntiVir) + overheads slowing u (messagepass 'souled-out' to advertisers easily detected & blocked addons + firewall filtering drivers) & their complexity leads to exploit!
* ONLY 1 of its kind in GUI 4 Linux/BSD (soon 4 MacOS)!
APK
P.S.=> Protects vs. scripts/trackers (kernelmode faster vs. usermode slower NoScript vs. 3rd party script)/ads/DNS request tracking + redirect poisoned or downed DNS/botnets/malware download/malcript/email malicious payload
When cyber attacks are perpetrated, it can be extremely hard if not impossible to confirm who actually initiated the attack. Worse, the attackers may plant evidence pointing to an innocent party, causing the French to attack that target, which it turn can cause that target to retaliate, initiating a full out cyber war back and forth...
But will they acknowledge that the US ordered interference on their elections?
Will they recognize that the US is hacking them?
https://wikileaks.org/cia-france-elections-2012/#Press%20Release%20%28english%29
https://wikileaks.org/nsa-france/spyorder/
Or do "allies" get a free pass?
It has to be a modem at the end of the ISP on that one IP.
One IP, one ISP, one powerful politically active desktop computer.
Its always only one desktop computer.
That has the computer power needed to do the layers needed to make funny political meme art.
Stop the meme computers and French politics can sell the extra big tax rates.
A very East German way of preventing any comment on what a government is doing.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Sacré bleu!
It's here! APK Hosts File Engine 1.0++ 64-bit for MacOS h t t p : / / a p k . i t - m a t e . c o . u k / A P K H o s t s F i l e E n g i n e F o r M a c O S . z i p
Yields more security/speed/reliability/anonymity vs. any 1 solution (99% of threats use hostnames vs. IP address most firewalls use) more efficiently/FASTER + NATIVELY 4 less!
Vs. "Bolt on 'MoAr' illogic-logic" slowing you hosts speed u up 2 ways: Adblocks + Hardcode fav. sites u spend most time @ vs. competition loaded w/ security bugs (DNS/AntiVir) + overheads slowing u (messagepass 'souled-out' to advertisers easily detected & blocked addons + firewall filtering drivers) & their complexity leads to exploitation!
* ONLY 1 of its kind in GUI 4 MacOS!
(Better vs. Windows model in speed/efficiency)
APK
P.S.=> Protects against ALL known & unknown vulnerabilities. Now supports port filters in hosts. My work is world-class & China copied it because they can't do better. I am God's gift to Slashdot... apk
>> How will France confirm who the attacker really is
Easy. Throw dice.
If you get a 1,2,5, the attacker is China
If you get a 3 or 4, the Attacker is Russia
If you get a 6, it's China and Russia acting together.
aaaaaaa
But I am le tired
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
in case someone hasn't been reading the NSA/CIA leaks: CIA has for many years been actively targetting French corporations with the intent to sabotage all trade deals and contracts of $200 million or more, if the contract for some reason cannot first be won by American corporations.
Obviously, France is not the only country on this list of targets. The world needs to wake up and realise who is the real enemy.
And yet it was France that won the American War of Independence for you.
Du pain , Du vin and le cheese all delivered straight to my computer now, since I hate the French nutters. Crazy bunch of wilderbeasts.
MacOS model's NOT done yet so you can STOP now as you IMPERSONATE me here on /. nigh constantly, ok? Good!
* Port Filters are not supported in my work on hosts (in fact, my program STOPS that error) & here's proof of it https://news.slashdot.org/comm...
APK
P.S.=> Hopefully, this 'sinks in' to your DULL BRAIN @ last, finally (for the 100th time now)... apk
The phrase makes no sense - "The cyber weapon is not only for our enemies," said France's defence secretary this afternoon, speaking through a translator. "No. It's also, in France, a tool to defend ourselves. To respond and attack." " Anyway, isn't declaring yourself to be up for some internet fisticuffs a recipe for disaster? A million script kiddies just realised how much fun it would be to deface French websites and turn off their power!