Cyber Attacks Increasingly Worrisome to US Business and National Security
The past few weeks have seen a series of cyber attacks against the U.S.
government (including penetrating the CIA and US Senate websites); Gmail
accounts for U.S. officials, Chinese activists and journalists;
multiple defense contractors including Lockheed Martin;international
bodies such as the IMF and the G-20; and financial entities such as
NASDAQ and Citibank. Overall, attacks on U.S. networks have increased
forty percent in the past year.
Alarm bells are beginning to
ring. British Defense Secretary Liam Fox said that these attacks were
regular, in large number and had become a "matter of urgency."
Department of Commerce General Counsel Cameron Kerry said the "recent
wave of cybersecurity attacks and breaches sounds an urgent wake-up
call."
The attacks are impacting US businesses. Google was one of
approximately twenty U.S. companies believed to be targeted by a very
sophisticated attack originated by China. The FBI also has identified
$20 million in attempted wire fraud in the last year alone in which
banking credentials of small-to-medium sized U.S. businesses were
compromised and used to initiate wire transfers to Chinese companies.
Google has gone public with the attack because it believes they were
motivated by a desire to get Gmail account information on human rights
activists.
Google's move has been applauded by some since, as one
expert put it, "those who have been targeted by China have dealt with a
certain level of persistence and seen these attacks take place over
long periods of time, where all signs point back to China and it really
feels like they're not even trying to hide that it's them anymore."
Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates indicated that the U.
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S. is prepared to use force against cyber attacks that could be
considered acts of war. Gates also indicated that it was not one country
involved. For example, Russian hackers have reversed-engineered Skype
and posted the results on the Internet and Russian intelligence is
suspected to be behind a March hack that swiped 24,000 Pentagon files.
Most
recently, an Iranian hacker penetrated DigiNotar, a Dutch SSL
certificate authority, and caused over 500 fraudulent security
certificates to be issued including certificates for Facebook, Skype,
Mozilla, Microsoft, Yahoo, Android, Twitter and domains owned by the
CIA, Israel's Mossad and the UK's MI6 which could be used to spoof such
sites.
The Obama administration has responded to the growing
threat first by establishing a Cyber Command within the Pentagon in 2009
and releasing an International Strategy for Cyberspace earlier this
year. The administration also has proposed cybersecurity legislation
that would impose harsher penalties for cybercriminals and establish a
national standard for data beach disclosures, while requiring the
Department of Homeland Security to work with the private sector, to
identify and address vulnerabilities for critical infrastructure. After
Citibank drew fire for its delay in reporting (and its under-reporting)
its data breach, the Securities and Exchange Commission is considering
issuing guidance on when public companies must disclose material attacks
to investors.
The U.S. is not above playing cyber-offense,
however, as there are reports that the Stuxnet worm that derailed Iran's
nuclear program was a covert U.S. initiative.
At a time when the
phrase "Cyber Pearl Harbor" has begun to enter into our lexicon,
Kapersky Lab's Roel Schouwenberg believes the recent DigiNotar attacks
may have greater consequences than the Stuxnet virus in terms of the
scope of its disruption and potential impact in putting "cybersecurity
and cyberwar on the political agenda". That may ultimately be a good
thing, since greater emphasis on cybersecurity may be necessary if we
hope to stop the phrase "Cyber Pearl Harbor" from entering into our
history books.