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How Hacker Attacks Work In Tandem With New Cybersecurity Exec Order
The Truth Behind The News
Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
February 19, 2013
The nameless, faceless hacker group called Anonymous hacked into Walla!, an Israeli server and syphoned an estimated 600,000 email account information, user details and other data.
Published on Pastbin.com, a website used by the hacker community, were email address and passwords in 93 different posts.
Walla! stated: “The information published is useless, since the allegedly exposed passwords are encrypted and therefore cannot be used. However, we are working on ‘hermetically’ sealing off user details in Walla! accounts.”
The campaign named #OpIsrael was launched last December in response to fighting between Hamas and Israel. At the time, many websites were hacked, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Bank of Israel and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The hack included a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that flooded the websites targeted with traffic until they crashed.
Anonymous announced their alliance with Gaza by stating: “… [When] the government of Israel publicly threatened to sever all Internet and other telecommunications into and out of Gaza they crossed a line in the sand. As the former dictator of Egypt Mubarack learned the hard way –- we are ANONYMOUS and NO ONE shuts down the Internet on our watch…”
Anonymous denies being a cyber-terrorist group, yet their behavior has been directly causational to the tightening of restrictions on the internet.
Earlier this month, Anonymous hacked into the Federal Reserve Bank and published more than 4,000 banking executives tallied on a spreadsheet with account information, logins, credentials, IP addresses, hashed passwords, contact information; and cell phone numbers for bank presidents, vice presidents and more.
Under Operation Last Resort, the hackers also attacked the Department of Justice (DoJ), the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the US Sentencing Commission (USSC) websites.
Joining with WikiLeaks, Anonymous used Flame in order to obtain what came to be known as the “Syrian Files” that were used to embarrass the Syrian government to expose “their interests, actions and thoughts.”
Flame, the cousin of Stuxnet, was designed and used by the US and Israeli government against Iran and other designated enemies to conduct cyber-warfare against the nation’s infrastructure. Anonymous’ use of the government-sponsored virus is curious. Considering that their leak benefitted the US government against Assad, it appears that Anonymous was hacking for the gain of their alleged enemy.
Last year, the leaked version of President Obama’s cybersecurity executive order is a compromise by the administration offered to those concerned about Big Brother controls invading US citizen’s privacy on the Web. One concession outlined is the sharing of internet traffic information by the US government and private sector corporations involving critical infrastructure and electrical grid. Social media companies would not be held under the same mandate.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), specifically Secretary Janet Napolitano, will be given the sole power of oversight to reference top-secret intelligence reports only known to her to bases identification of cyberthreats and individual targets.
Last week Obama signed executive order (EO) “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity” which outlines “the need for improved cybersecurity” because of “repeated cyber intrusions into critical infrastructure.”
Private sector corporations will be expected to provide the federal government with information about cyber threats. With notification provided to Eric Holder, the US Attorney General and James Clapper the director of National Intelligence (NI) instructions on how to deal with cyber threats will be disseminated; along with unclassified reports in an effort to protect “the US homeland”.
These instructions will be given to law enforcement agencies to outline how to protect intelligence, methods approved by the federal government, operations and specified investigators to be used for these purposes.
This EO also expands the Enhanced Cybersecurity Services (ECS) program that partners with the Department of Defense (DoD), the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) and the DHS.
The sharing of information from the private sector to the federal government will exponentially increase under the guise of cybersecurity and protection of critical infrastructure.
DHS will consult with “the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council; Sector Coordinating Councils; critical infrastructure owners and operators; Sector-Specific Agencies; other relevant agencies; independent regulatory agencies; State, local, territorial, and tribal governments; universities; and outside experts” to advise on cybersecurity.
The director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop “framework to reduce cyber risks to critical infrastructure” called “Cybersecurity Framework” (CSF) that will “include a set of standards, methodologies, procedures, and processes that align policy, business, and technological approaches to address cyber risks.”
Through Big Brother controls established in the EO, surveillance on online activities will increase at the whim of the federal government with the catch-all of protecting national and cyber security as justification for all actions taken therein.
Real-time sharing of digital information on US citizens between the federal government and state and local law enforcement agencies will become the norm as the recommendations of interagency heads decide what will happen.
2013-04-23 16:00:19
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