World Watch
national notoriety as the “414s,” hackers who used a modem- equipped, eight-bit Apple II+ microcomputer to break into federal government networks.
Five years later, 23-year-old college student Robert Morris launched a worm that charged through the ARPANET, knock- ing some 6,000 computers out of service by overwhelming their memory banks replicating itself. As serious as that was, Morris had no specific malicious intent: He was just bored, and more than a little curious.
In 1998, things got even more serious. Two California teens exploited vulnerabilities in Sun Microsystems’ Solaris operating system to take over more than 500 computer systems in gov- ernment agencies, military facilities, and private corporations. Experts originally suspected the attack came from for- eign spies, but learned later that as frightening as that intrusion was, it had more to do with juvenile mischief than military malice.
The next year, as many organizations gearing up for a feared network Year 2000 computer system meltdown, the “Melissa” virus prowled the Internet, causing some $80 million worth of dam- age in thousands of comput- ers.
Intruders from Abroad
Then foreign hackers got into the act. The invasions of U.S. government computers by Germany’s Chaos Computer Club prompted a spy hunt, generating stories chronicled in several books and turning underemployed astronomer Clifford Stoll into a national hero. And in 1999, a Filipino computer student unleashed the “I Love You” virus and infected millions of com- puters. prompting the European Union to promulgate a global Cybercrime Treaty.
The list goes on: In the year 2000, websites run by Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Datek and many other popular internet service providers, were swamped by “distributed denial of service” attacks. The attacking hackers had taken over powerful com- puters at the University of California at Santa Barbara, which let them commandeer hundreds of other computers to flood target Web servers with unmanageable requests for data.
In 2001, the “Code Red” worm infected servers running Microsoft Windows operating systems and caused $2 bil- lion worth of damage trying to overpower the White House website. Slick counter-programming by White House staffers, the Defense Information Systems Agency staffers who manage White House communications, and what the Post called an “ad-hoc partnership” of virus hunters and technology compa- nies blocked that threat.
www.hispanicengineer.com
How Secure Are We?
Those attacks, and the 2002 denial-of-service attacks on the 13 “root” servers that are at the core of the Internet, prompt- ed intense questioning of the security of the Internet itself. Today, it is not just curious and mischievous individuals such as the 414s and the much-maligned Kevin Mitnick, who sparked a national manhunt with his invasions of computers in banking systems, telephone companies and the Digital Equip- ment Corporation, but organized raiding groups working to create thousand-computer “botnets” to steal computer users’ passwords, bank and credit account information, and other sensitive information.
...organized raiding groups [are] working to create thousand-computer “botnets” to steal computer users’ passwords, bank and credit account information, and other sensitive infor- mation...
One example is the “Koobnet” network, using computers in many countries, exploited “pay-per-click” and “pay-per- install” facilities to steal more than $2 million between June 2009 and June 2010, accord- ing to the Information Warfare Monitor, which operates out of the Citizen Lab at the Univer- sity of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.
Foreign Government CyberBandits
More damage is caused by state actors, as was seen in that 2008 invasion of Central Command computers. In 2009,
a denial-of-service attack from computers in North Korea shut down websites for the Treasury Department and Federal Trade Commission, and tried those at the Pentagon and the White House. Similar attacks hit computers in South Korea, and grew in attempts on servers at the National Security Agency, De- partment of Homeland Security, the Nasdaq Stock Exchange and The Washington Post. The White House and Defense Department fended off the attacks, though.
The 2007 attack on computer networks in Estonia, called by Wired magazine “the most wired country in Europe,” caused many countries to re-examine their cyber defenses. Experts disputed Estonia’s claim of state-sponsored attacks from Rus- sia, prompted after the Baltic nation removed from promi- nence a Russian war memorial, but several noted the refusal of Russian authorities to cooperate with Estonia’s investigators. Be that as it may, others said it was unlikely such an attack could be launched from Russian soil without the knowledge and approval of Russian leaders. The incident did cause military leaders around the world, especially in NATO, to re- examine their own networks’ vulnerabilities.
Intrusion from China In the U.S., a January 2010 Christian Science Monitor report revealed that Chinese hackers broke into Google’s Gmail system, apparently targeting Chinese human-rights activists.
HISPANIC ENGINEER & Information Technology | 2011 45
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