12 November 2013

Olympics Were Safe from Cyber Attacks

Security experts claim that provisions were in place to prevent cyber terrorism at the London 2012 Olympics, but it wasn’t a major concern, as most of notable events were rudimentary DDoS attempts or financial fraud.

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BT has run through worst-case scenarios for cyber terrorism during the Olympics, including putting together provisions for the shutting down of largest power networks. Besides, despite the over 200 million malicious incidents reported during the entire event, only 77 tickets required a human response from analysts.

All those events were described as anything that could be flagged as a potential threat – like a single DDoS attempt or defacement. The experts revealed that necessary defenses were created over 7 years of preparation, while the London 2012 site appeared to be the most popular on the planet during the Games.

Over the course of the 2012 Olympic games, "quite a few" DDoS attacks were reported, along with unsophisticated DNS amplifications, coming "from everywhere". Security analysts admitted that they had to deal with quite serious staff, which potentially would have had impact if the right controls hadn’t been in place".

The targets against the American banks, for example, demonstrate that cyber attacks are becoming more sophisticated, not just as hacktivism but a lot more concerted. In other words, there’s evidence clearly about criminals becoming more sophisticated in using such types of instruments now for financial gain.

Some of the hacktivist campaigns over the last 18 months involved the core people evangelizing their point of view on why they wanted to carry out their attacks. In the meantime, there were different scenarios, some being very capable, some being there to participate without realizing what they were doing.

BT has distanced itself from culpability if malicious events did run on its own infrastructure. The company pointed out that it had a huge consumer base in the United Kingdom, and there definitely were people buying DSL circuits from it with nefarious purposes. However, the end users were the ones who were the motivated criminals, while BT supplying services to its customers entered that contract in good faith with its subscribers, and it was up to users whether they break the law or not.

NSA Hacked Search Engines’ Datacenters

The press has recently run a chilling story about the NSA hacking into the Google and Yahoo datacentres. According to the NSA papers, seen by the reporters, the National Security Agency carried out “full take”, “bulk access” and “high volume” operations on both Yahoo and Google networks.
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Such large-scale harvesting of online data would be illegal in the US, but it looks like the operations took place overseas, where the spooks were allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner.

An ex-NSA chief analyst admitted that the agency has platoons of lawyers, whose task is to figure out how to stay within the law while maximizing data collection by exploiting every loophole.

The search giants maintain fortresslike data centers across 4 continents, connected with thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable. For instance, Yahoo’s internal network is transmitting entire e-mail archives from one data center to another, which is when the agency could pounce.

Security experts point out that tapping the Google and Yahoo clouds would allow the National Security Agency to intercept communications and view the content at its leisure. NSA agents had to circumvent gold-standard security to get the information. In the meantime, the weak point might have been some of the premium data links that Google and Yahoo have been buying or leasing.

According to the insiders, they had reason to believe that their private, internal networks were safe from prying eyes, but apparently not.