14 DAY TRIAL // This was clearly the week of the cyberwar as there were so many news about it and so many people panicking and agitating on this matter. It all started with a piece of news that appeared in the Financial Times - the Pentagon had been hacked in June and some parts of its computer system had been taken down. Hacker traces pointed to China but the Chinese president Hu has stated that their country is against hacking and that even their government has nothing to do with it.
Many countries are preparing for cyberwar, deploying all sorts of measures, some offensive and some defensive. The US policy is their classic one - they sit there nicely, but if feeling threatened or if attacked, they will engage in cyberwar as well.
The Germans want to use spyware in order to track down any possible terrorist activity, while the English are trying to convince ISPs to police the web. The Chinese have said nothing about the way they regard PC security, but they do host close to half of the malware in the world and hackers from that country have attacked numerous governments. The fact which is not known is whether they were linked to the Chinese PLA or not.
Cyberwar is something to be taken very seriously. This form of warfare cannot cause damage by itself, but can help cause a great amount of damage, which is just as bad!
Also, a powerful weapon in such a conflict would be the botnet. I had a material on Friday about this. The Storm created network is said to have more computing power than the world's 500 super computers put together, while being only 10% online. If that doesn't equal huge power, then, what does? Also, since it's in the hand of hackers, it also equals a huge threat.
That was the week's most important piece of news, with the Pentagon acknowledging getting hacked and all that, but we also had some serious subject on hacking. Apart from all the common hacking news we get everyday, there were two more severe situations - one in Texas, at the A&M University and one with the Limewire crook. The University has been hacked by an ex-student that had a degree in computers while the Limewire case was something that is actually a common thing, but only now has come to our attention. A lot of people share files that contain personal data, such as their federal tax returns. All hackers do is download them from the ones that are na?ve enough to share them and then just scam-scam-scam! Read it here in full.
Also, this week, many security researchers have stated their worries regarding the fact that nowadays it's easy to be a hacker. New malware has seriously dumbed down hacking. You can just click a button and poof! You've got your own virus! Of course, the real threats such as PRG or like Storm are made by veteran black-hatters and not by newbies. The concerning thing is that with these new programs, the number of "kindergarden-hackers" is going to grow.
I can't think of any real good news that we had this week. The Bank of India site has been put back online safe and sound and some security experts are blaming the Russian Business Network for the hack. It's a good thing that the site is safe and operational again, but apparently nothing can be done against the RBN, even if somebody actually proves they're guilty.
The "Indian issue" news were on Tuesday, and during the same day we learned that Sony patched up that problem with the rootkit. In case you didn't know, they were using rootkit technology as software for one of their USB thumb-drives. This sort of tech almost acts like a Trojan virus, so you can imagine how much people "liked" it. In any case, they have issued a new driver for it and things seem to be good now. That being said, I guess that Tuesday was the best day of the week for security, as we only got bad news for the rest of it.
Also, we had some pretty important news in the "Vulnerabilities" section. These week's "ill" programs were: Firefox, Total Commander and Starcraft. Also, in the same category, I had a material about how Web 2.0 is far more dangerous than the Internet has ever been. Malware and hackers have evolved with the Net and not only your computer, but you as well can be unsafe while browsing the Web.
My favorite piece of news this week was "The Virus Review" a material in which virus evolution over the past 25 years has been presented.
This week I have only one piece of advice for you and it's Storm related:
Install an AV on your PC now and get disinfected fast! If you got Storm, you need to rip it off your machine's hard drive, because with your computer infected, the hackers will get stronger. Advise other people to do the same.
