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The Art of (Cyber) War Part III - The War with Iran has begun..
In the past few days Iran http://www.farsinet.com/tehran has shown it’s hand Saudi Arabia has reponded via the Gulf Cooperative Council http://www.gcc-sg.org/eng/ to help the government of Bahrain and full blown battles have broken out in Syria with President Assad turning to Iran to stay in power against protesters. Egypt has let Iranian warship sail through the Suez Canal, no longer restrict the movements of Hezzbolah (The Party of God in Arabic) along with Hamas, This is the most dangerous time in the world since World War II, and the period from 1945- to the fall of the Berlin wall....... The next blog will cover cyber warfare on the desktop level and an analysis of the current events in the middle east and the horn of Africa......1. NASDAQ attack – a few months ago there were media reports on a cyber attack on the NASDAQ http://www.nasdaq.com/, this is critical infrastructure for the U.S. and world financial markets as NASDAQ is where some key hi-tech companies such as Microsoft are listed on the stock market.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2011/02/did-nasdaq-hackers-grab-holy-grail-of-insider-information/1
2. Stuxnext Iran Attack – Last year a computer worm/virus named Stuxnext attacked a nuclear plant in Iran, the political leadership admitted the attack had slowed down progress at the facility. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/8262853/Stuxnet-virus-attack-Russia-warns-of-Iranian-Chernobyl.html. Iran is a major supplier of oil to China and this has implications in regard to the UN Security Council as China is a permanent member.
3. Google China network attack – The Wide Area Network of Google http://www.google.com/ in mainland China was hacked and Google reported the incident to the U.S. government after checking with other U.S. companies based in China and finding they had been attacked also. This was a key moment in cyber warfare as President Obama formulated a more sophisticated cyber warfare doctrine for the U.S. Armed Forces as a result of this attack, and Google actually relocated to Hong Kong, China from mainland China as a result of the attack. This has lead to a greater coordination between the U.S. armed forces and private companies in protecting key critical infrastructure of the U.S. civillian economy. The Google attack and move from mainland China led to Baidu http://www.baidu.com/ the Chinese version of Google becoming the top search engine in mainland China instead of Google. http://voices.allthingsd.com/20100222/hacking-inquiry-puts-china%e2%80%99s-elite-in-new-light/?mod=ATD_rss. China has long had a very sophisticated IT approach, which led to them building the Great Firewall of China to defend against an asymmetric network attack in China, to prevent attacks such as the attack against Google. A good way to shore up your your defenses are to follow some of the tips in the article http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/IT-Management/Ensuring-ITs-Survival-301220 in Baseline http://www.baselinemag.com/ an online and print technology magazine for CIOs based in New York, New York.
4. Baidu Iranian Cyber Army Attack – The Chinese search engine Baidu has been attacked by a group called the Iranian Cyber Army. I am still researching this story for more details but allegedly a group called the Iranian Cyber Army attacked Baidu, China’s most popular search engine, China is still conducting a computer forensics investigation to see if this group is actually affiliated with the government of Iran. http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/13/baidu-cyber-attack-markets-technology-china.html. This leads to what makes cyber attacks so effective, because attacks can be routed through the computers of businesses, governments, and individuals who may be unaware that the attacks are being launched from their PC networks, governments who are attacked have to do computer forensics analysis before their response or they may strike the wrong target, which may the true attacker’s intent. At this point with the hand of Iran being shown in Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon, it is pretty good guess that Iran is the culprit.
5. Estonia Denial of Service Attack – This attack is crucial in the understanding of cyber warfare. Estonia was former part of the USSR/Soviet Union, now Russia http://moscow.usembassy.gov/ that got into a dispute over the price they would pay Russia over natural gas shipped to Europe, and the pipelines that Russia paid for were on Estonia’s soil. To make a long story short, while the payment dispute over natrual gas shipped over the pipelines was in progress, Estonia suffered Denial of Service attacks that shut down vital government services and dropped Estonia to it’s knees http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9721429-1.html. This was a key cyber battle because it made Europe aware of it’s vulnerability when states like Estonia go rogue from Russia, and make Europe's natrual gas supplies vulnerable; this led to an establishment of a CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) center being set up in Estonia. I will describe in detail what a CERT center is in more detail in my next blog.
Egyptian Cyber War Tactics
The cyber weapons/tactics that were used in Egypt (http://www.sis.gov.eg/En/Default.aspx or http://egypt.usembassy.gov/) are social network sites; for example Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ (Egypt has one of the largest groups of Facebook users in the world), Google, software applications (The Egyptian armed Forces arrested a Google http://www.google.com/ executive who was later released, it is not know if he was just acting on his own) and apparently as I stated in my last blog there appears to have been some coordination with Hamas and Iran with the events in Egypt, and now Bahrain. The unrest in Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Libya, Bahrain and most recently Syria was the first phase of war with Iran, the cyber war is now a shooting war in Syria, and covert in Egypt with sabotage of the natural gas line from Egypt to Isra-el. The conflict in Libya seems to be a trial run by NATO http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/index.htm vs. Iran if there is not a settlement on Iran's pursuit of atomic power, and there has recently been an attempt to view the the Lybia conflict as an attempt to rally Africa to view this battle as an attempt to re-colonize Africa. For those who doubt this tactic will work, think again it will. I will describe why in my next blog.........I hope this blog has helped to educate LAN/WAN administrators on cyber warfare and the importance of securing their computer networks, along with alerting individual users to the importance of securing their own personal computers with software such as the Norton Security Suite http://antivirus.norton.com/norton especially if they have broadband so their computers are not used as botnets. Please feel free to give me feedback on this article and how it can be improved or important cyber incidents you would like to know more about. Take care and until next time…….
To check out the Chrysler video with Emminen http://www.youtube.com/user/chrysler? bid=5079147&adid=233347236&pid=57249858&KWNM=chrysler+super+bowl+commercial&KWID=150748058&channel=PS and to Check out the latest GM products, news, and technology go to http://www.gm.com/, and for info on Ford & Microsoft's smart phone technology for cars if you want to develop car or smart phones applications for Ford go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sync/default.
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