Tag Archives: cyberwar

Intelligence on Ashiyane and the Iranian Cyber Army






Radio Interview with Galatz [Hebrew]



The show’s website can be found here.

Information Security Intelligence Report for 2010 and Predictions for 2011

Looking back at 2010 shows a widening gap between cybercrime and law enforcement capabilities, in conjunction to nations that have started the cyber-race to develop defensive and offensive capabilities. Most of the attacks analyzed in 2010 depict organizations that fall behind in their defensive strategies as attackers take advantage of a hybrid approach that merges technical merits alongside human weaknesses to cash-out on their attacks.

Cybercrime widens the gap between attack capability and defense mechanisms. Analyzing several of the major attacks of 2010, Security Art notes that organizations were attacked in two key ways. Firstly, through technical exploits such as Aurora, Mariposa, ZeuS, and SpyEye. Secondly, by attacks that bypassed traditional protection methods, and gained access to targets through human-weakness areas such as social media. While businesses focused on defending themselves using security mechanisms such as anti- virus software and perimeter defenses, attackers jumped over these defenses, and proceeded to flood the market with a high volume of malware that now poses a serious threat to security providers in terms of detection rates and response time. However, law enforcement agencies have focused mainly on menial cybercriminals, and have not successfully reduced the impact of online criminal activities. On a national level, we see nations have embarked upon the race to develop defensive and offensive cyber capabilities.

Cyberwar arms race sends nations to shopping frenzy. As CyberWar gained merit (and criticism) during 2010, with the movie-material Stuxnet incident being the poster-boy for news outlets that published every spin-off, speculation, and plain old gossip, the international scene had its own race for the latest and greatest defense mechanisms. The implications of Aurora and Stuxnet made most countries feel their lack of a critical infrastructure defense and the capability to deliver a similar cyber-blow, and many went shopping for weapons. Security Art witnessed the strategic build up of capabilities in some countries, and a more hurried shopping spree (that usually led to amassment of CyberCrime provided tools) in others. This, and the delayed response of organizations such as the UN, the EU, and NATO, left the scene looking more like the Wild West than Silicon Valley.

Expanding digital domain and improved understanding of security will reign in 2011. Our prediction for 2011, drawn from the criminal, political and diplomatic sides of cybercrime that dominated 2010, is that more focus is going to be given to approaching security from a strategic standpoint. Rather than buying “best of breed” products and ticking off compliance sheets, we predict that organizations and countries will apply a more sensible executive-level understanding of what information security means to them. In the expanding personal digital domain (smartphone, tablets, and suchlike), and the continued digitization of all organizational information (from scanned materials to VOIP telephony), security must be applied to more layers than ever before. Countries and organizations will have to adopt additional skill-sets and look for solutions in areas they have not dealt with before.

Please go to http://www.security-art.com/download-report to download the full report, or email [email protected] for additional information.

The power of collaboration (BlueHat post)

Some additional BlueHat wrap-up –  a collaborative post with a dear colleague of mine Fyodor Yarochkin has just been posted on the BlueHat blog.

The interesting thing about this is that my interaction with Fyodor have been as follows:

  1. Email exchange prior to BlueHat, as we were speaking one after the other, and were referring to the same ecosystems but from different points of view.
  2. Meeting in Seattle/Redmond at BlueHat, having some conversations (and drinks, yes, some drinks were involved too) about work, research, and such.
  3. Speaking one after the other.
  4. Working together on a post through online sharing tools where we basically played with throwing ideas around, putting in writing what we thought about them, exchanging some ideas and directions, and coming up with the aforementioned post.

To sum this up quickly, we didn’t really know each other (not virtually either) a few weeks ago, and based on our mutual interests, research and passion we were able to come up with a (somewhat) cohesive post that at least I can stand back and say “damn!, that’s pretty good” (and learn something from).

Only in InfoSec!

Stuxnet Analysis Report



Feel free to download the report form here:CSFI_Stuxnet_Report_V1

