Hacks Raise Fear Over N.S.A.’s Hold on Cyberweapons
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
When President Obama stated in December[0] that we will deliver a "proportional response" to Russian hacking at the "time and place of our own choosing", it seemed that most of the country was proud, almost gleeful at the thought that we would be striking back. I for one was mortified.
We should not be escalating cyberwar, even if we do have proof of who attacked us. People are going to die. We can see from this article that hacking can cause serious real-world problems.
When we strike back, does Russia then strike back again? What does it look like after four or five volleys? Will entire power grids be down for days or weeks? Will the stock market crash?
It's time for the American people to demand that the N.S.A. become a defensive organization, not an offensive one. And it's time for us to demand peace in general. Cyberwar is war.
[0] http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/15/politics/obama-russia-hacking-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Koch_(hacker)
[2] (German) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB-Hack
But 2M deaths in the last 30 years is not likely correct - this interesting WHO report on the matter suggests the final toll from the radiation would be more like "up to 4k":
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/chernobyl_di...
> The main causes of death in the Chernobyl-affected region are the same as those nationwide — cardiovascular diseases, injuries and poisonings — rather than any radiation-related illnesses
The Chernobyl-affected region includes big parts of Western Europe. Back then in 1986 my godfather was cleaning trains coming from Russia through Ukraine (but not directly from the Chernobyl region) and was contaminated. He lost his teeth and hair. We lived ca. 800 km away from Chernobyl.
On the other hand thanks the river Dnepr the Chernobyl region is connected to the Ukraine ground water system. The astimation of 2M deaths caused by long time effects of contamination comes from a friend from Kiew. She never drunk tap water.
If every claim like this has to be met with a shrug and "I guess we'll never know the truth" then it becomes very hard to ever know anything, because there's always some nutter willing to claim something that's totally at odds with all the available evidence.
I don't think that's right, the German wikipedia article says:
> Im April 1986 kam es zur Katastrophe von Tschernobyl. Karl Koch, zu diesem Zeitpunkt schon lange schwer drogenabhängig und in einem oft zweifelhaften geistigen Zustand, sah dies als unmittelbare Folge eines seiner Hacks an, da er kurz vorher in den Rechner eines Atomkraftwerks eingedrungen war.
Unless my understanding of German is flawed, what I'm reading is that it was Koch's drug-fueled paranoia that made him believe he was responsible for the Chernobyl disaster because he had recently hacked into a computer in a nuclear power station. It doesn't say whether this computer even was in Chernobyl, maybe he didn't know exactly where the computer on the other end was, or maybe it was more paranoia. He was, after all, in a pretty bad state near the end of his "career".
It's such a fascinating and sad story, this guy. I've watched the film "23 nichts ist wie es scheint" (initially because of the RAW/Discordia/Illuminatus Trilogy references) a long time ago, but I don't remember anything about Chernobyl in that film (but it was a long time ago).
There was another film, a US movie IIRC, that tells his story from the side of an FBI or CIA (or some agency) agent chasing him. I forget the title, anyone know?
You don't seem to be proposing that the NSA become defensive, either. If Russia attacks us and we don't respond, that's not even defensive. That's dismantling.
But good job reading my prior comments :)
Defence is only card in this game worth playing especially when it comes to infrastructure attacks.
I'm not sure why we collectively decided to lack courage, but it's unsettling.
In this case courage is stupidity. Why waste time knocking out their power when we can spend that time making our power more secure. You're like a web master with a downed site due to a DDOS going:
> Well I've DDOSed the attacker's site so its okay
no its not, you've achieved nothing. Get with the program; this is a defence world not an offence one.
My mind is open. Convince me. Why is it a good idea to remove the threat of retaliation from our toolkit? It seems like one of the most persuasive reasons not to attack us.
Just put all the effort into keeping the grid up. Absorb all attacks and then export that IP and tech for healthy profit. Its the only winning move.
You're acting like the power grid going offline is equivalent to a thermonuclear explosion. Yes, it will suck, but it's temporary. And afterwards, those exploit vectors will be patched.
No its not, its the whole point. The point of the age of information is that it is a departure from the age of blood and steel. The tactics of blood and steel that you are supporting have no place in this future and are counter-productive. The point of the age of information is that power is no longer solely in the hands of nations. Therefore treating it as a case of "stomping on the bad people" means your attack spread increases from all the nations in the world to all the people in the world. Added to that the evidence of those attacks can and will be forged. You're chasing shadows and its not worth it. Just build a better shield, that's all that matters.
NSA isn't a hardware or software vendor, and the corporations that are don't have much of a profit motive to heavily invest in security. They aren't actually liable for problems unlike say a car manufacturer that releases a faulty product, which leaves what exactly... reputation that takes a hit? But every vendor has bugs and security issues and the market isn't really punishing anyone.
Is the future effectively an enormous government subsidy to profitable corporations (i.e. NSA and other US government agencies basically become extensions of corporate America's QA department)? Is the future heavy regulations to create the proper financial incentives and/or penalties so corporations start seriously spending on security?
It's easy to say "the government should do something!!" but what exactly will that look like?
The reason we're vulnerable is because we're unwilling to pay the cost of finding the exploits but people in developing nations ARE because they work for "less".
Right now our economies and systems reward those that fly by their pants and don't care for security. That is the problem. The free buffet of infinite growth from technology startups is the very thing that also gives us this pain and we need to learn to eat less.
Can you imagine the outcry if a new Linux fork had to seek government approval in order to post their distribution?
Can you expect Google or Oracle to fail to lobby the government to make sure they don't have to get each major revision certified?
Critical infrastructure, IMO, should:
- not use general purpose operating systems
- maybe not use general purpose computers (just build custom FPGA logic to control power grids and stuff)
- not use internet connected computers
- maybe not use computers at all when possible
When we're trying to protect ourselves from the vulnerabilities hoarded by our government, I think that asking them to regulate the OS might just be a step backward.
Or post-apocalyptic.
Iran is educated enough to make nuclear weapons, but you want their program shut down because you think they're not responsible enough to be trusted with nuclear weapons.
The US is educated enough to make cyber-weapons, but I want their program shut down because I think they're not responsible enough to be trusted with cyber-weapons.
Maybe the UK should go on the offensive, wipe a few NSA datacenters, for the long term safety of the British people?
We demand Iran disarm to shame them on the world stage as violators of non-proliferation treaties, and we only do this because they are our "enemy" if they weren't we would care. It cronyism and nepotism just on the scales of nations, and I don't think that can change for a while.
For one thing, your big "guns" weaken your own infrastructure, since you use about the same technology that your adversary uses too. Secondly, your guns can be copied without many problems and then suddenly they are directed at you and your weakened infrastructure.
And at what point, after "cyber-damaging" some piece of critical infrastructure (and/or harming/killing people), does the the other side run out of exploits and just launch actual missiles instead?
What we are seeing now is a huge expansion of deniable and proxy warfare. Everyone is still (I hope) clear that sending an actual tank division across the Polish/Ukraine border would be met with nukes. So the question is, what is the largest most damaging attack that can be carried out without reprisal, and how do the participants find this out?
And of course, the ultimate in deniable attacks is one carried out by the enemy's own forces. Did cyberwarfare crash a US destroyer into a cargo ship? (Almost certainly not, but maybe next time). SWAT-ing is already established as a tactic; could suitably forged communications or "fake news" disseminated via the President lead to the SWAT-ing of a country? There are some suggestions that this applies to the Qatar situation.
Iraq comes to mind, although the forged information came from the invading country's own services.
Only if those tanks are under foreign flags. If they're under "rebel" flags, then nobody cares.
Whether the NSA hoards zero-day exploits or not isn't the big issue since someone will be doing that. The issue is they should be sounding the alarm on whatever broad class of system vulnerabilities they find.
They should be evangelizing against remotely updateable hard drive firmware, against insecure IoT devices and similar things.
What happened to the days when the NSA helped make world class crypto like AES256 in a public forum?
Sounds like the IAD mission. Examples:
- https://github.com/iadgov/Pass-the-Hash-Guidance/blob/master...
- https://www.iad.gov/iad/library/reports/nsa-methodology-for-...
I mention that first one especially because Pas-The-Hash was a major reason the most recent ransomware outbreak was able to get onto already-patched machines.
https://www.nsa.gov/what-we-do/information-assurance/
> Note: The IAD.Gov website uses TLS 1.2, supported by a Department of Defense (DoD) PKI certificate, to ensure confidentiality and integrity for all users. IAD.Gov website users will need to have the current DoD Root and Intermediate Certificate Authorities (CA) loaded into their browsers to avoid receiving untrusted website notifications.
I mean it still doesn't make sense ... Where it says "for all users" it should say "for those who have this certificate installed" because that's what the warning is about. And "to avoid receiving untrusted website notifications" should read "for a more secure connection" because, you know, what's the goal here, really? :)
If organization A searches for exploits for five years in a given piece of software, and organization B does the same, what percentage of the exploits they find will be found by both rather than just one?
If hackers/governments tend to find the same exploits as each other then it makes more sense to take a defensive strategy since you can protect against a large portion of the weapons your enemies develop. But if there's not much overlap in which exploits are found then an offensive strategy may make more sense.
In the nuclear arms race there was basically one type of attack and one set of mitigations. In cyberwarfare there are potentially endless types of attacks, each with its own set of mitigations. This changes the calculus.
The likelihood of one's weapons being stolen and used against you, your allies, or humanity in general is also a huge consideration.
It seems that Russia is happy to continually strike regardless of retaliation.
While the majority of exploits we currently see in the wild are things I think the "defective lock" analogy works well for, there's a subset of attacks that would be equivalent to cutting the lock with bolt cutters.
In those cases, there are specially crafted tools that aren't exploiting a defective lock, they're destroying the basic premise that let the lock work.
I'd say that RowHammer fits that description pretty aptly. It's a cyberweapon. It's not an exploit.
It's so much of a weapon that (as far as I know, someone please correct me if I'm out of date!) there's still no known mitigation strategy that completely solves the problem. We have lots of partial mitigations, but nothing surefire yet.
So... it's both. We certainly have lots of defective locks, but we also have some very nasty tools that exploit some fundamental premises of our tech in clearly malicious ways, and were absolutely designed and implemented to do exactly that.
In this case, I feel that blaming NSA for the exploit and calling those "cyberweapons" is wrong. The entity who put the ransomware on top of them and deployed them built a weapon.
However, a government deliberately hiding results from their medical research, or misleading/exploiting their pharmacy industry would be in a dark ethical corner.
This is a strawman. No one knowledgeable is saying it would create 100% security, just that it would be a net increase in the security of our infrastructure.
What I'm saying is not to do nothing, but rather we need to have a plan for continued attacks (like how spam filters came into being) in addition to trying to get any and all vulns fixed.
Instead of (ab)using somebody else's mistakes to your own advantage (and possibly have it backfire) you could also tell that person about their mistakes so the whole world could benefit and there would be 1 issue less in the world to worry about.
Here's one reason such a stockpile could be used for good: say a previously unknown vuln is attacking "our" (whomever that is for you) infrastructure. The command and control has been traced back to a cluster that's vulnerable to one of the weapons in your stockpile. Now you can potentially disable it, stop it spreading, tell all of them to run an updated version of the code that essentially does nothing, etc. For all I know, this could have happened already.
Where is the responsibility of corporations in all of this? They have a cash pile that dwarfs the entire intel budget and ought to be the FIRST entities that invest in fixing their OWN products, right?
Somewhere around here :-
> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Sorry shareholders, you'll be getting a tiny dividend this year because we are spending a huge part of our 'profit' on backfixing all the shit we let slide said no CEO ever.
Right now, the process is:
1. Find a way to survey the target environment, learn what software and hardware they are running
2. Acquire vulnerabilities to exploit the known target software/hardware, either from a third-party, a contractor, or manual reverse engineering of those specific components.
3. Adapt mission specific payloads to use on the target.
4. Use for as long as needed.
5. Disclose to vendor after the purpose is served.
If the agency mission changed to be purely about discovery and reporting, that might not help the general public. If this were to happen, it seems like the focus would likely be on protection of only software/hardware in classified systems, as that is already their defensive mission. Instead of having things like EternalBlue patched we would have them open and available for a different party to discover. That seems worrisome to me, but I am really curious to know if you might have a different take on how this would work.
Am i to understand that if somebody would manage to steal nuclear warheads and launch them we don't hold the people who failed to protect them responsible?
Obviously that's extremely simplified, but all parties here are at fault. And all we're seeing is a bunch of finger pointing, with not enough defensive and preventative action being taken.
I suspect this attack would have had a similar number of victims without EtBl/DoPu and EtRo.
The existence of 'nation state' offensive tools has little baring on exploitability for poorly configured enterprise network, when most victims were exploited by open source offensive tools, even when patched.
I think concerns include things like WannaCry too though, which did indeed rely primarily on use of EternalBlue.
Backdoors in US infrastructure = invitation to Russia and China to go right through it.
It's a sad fact that the face of proprietary tech is that of a handsome young generic "disruptor", while Open Source / Free Software / Libre / GNU//blah is less-cheerful Steve Wozniak.
i don't see how that could possibly work. just because people won't die directly from a weapon anymore doesn't mean they aren't negatively impacted in this hypothetical scenario. i'm thinking of attacks crippling key infrastructure which could lead to large scale supply shortages
1. Why do they not simply take the weapons of a network? Maybe store it on some physical media, or a computer not networked unless it's time to take a Kim down a notch?
2. Are these "weapons" really that dastardly? Most of these common ransom-ware and viruses are easily avoided, and only succeed because of naive users. Backdoors aren't a weapon, they're there on purpose. Sniffing, spying, and logging can potentially cause some chaos. But are these really some kind of Zero-cool level hyrda's that they can sink oil-tankers with?
The problem is that the large majority of the users is naive.
It's more likely a list of exploits across different devices that give you various levels of access to do as you wish with. Some are probably nothing to worry about, some might be something that gives you the ability to get into the machine and encrypt whole sections.