Attacks on Government:

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Topic: Anonymous hacks 100 Turkish Government Sites

• As part of Operation Anti-Sec, Anonymous has compromised the Turkish governments network of sites, and locked the administrators out.
• A number of the sites appear to be for Hospitals and other medical facilities
• The group released a 20MB archive on ThePirateBay, a complete dump of the content of each of the compromised sites.
• Many of the sites were defaced
• In a Cyber Warfare type situation, these types of actions could disable critical government functions, everything from weather forecasts to tax filing.

Submitted by: Acidpunk

Topic: Florida Elections Database Hacked

• The database contained the names, usernames and plaintext passwords of election workers and polling stations
• Username was first initial, last name, and password was first initial, last initial and 4 numbers. These passwords are too predictable and horribly insecure.

Submitted by: Deathwalk

Topic: Attacks on RoK Gov might have been Drills by DPRK

• Attacks that crippled South Korean (Republic of Korea) government websites in July 2009 and again in March 2011 might have been cyber warfare drills conducted by North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea)
• Attacks were likely reconnaissance to start building a detailed plan of attack in the event of war.
• Much of the attack came from within South Korea, it is speculated that the virus was left on a number of South Korean file sharing sites, and then the resulting botnet of infected computers was used to take down the government websites.

Attacks on Media:

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Topic: Washington Post hacked, 1.27m email addresses leaked

• The Washington Post’s Jobs site was compromised on June 27th and 28th
• 1.27 Million Usernames and email addresses were leaked
• The Washington Post claims that no passwords or other personal information were stolen (were the passwords just hashed, and therefore ‘not disclosed’, or did the attackers not gain access to the passwords?)

Topic: Fox News Twitter hacked, False Obama Death Notice

• The @foxnewspolitics twitter account was hijacked and false news of US President Obama’s assassination was posted.
• As with all incidents of this nature, it is being investigated by the Secret Service
• BBC Coverage

Submitted by: beyere5398 and LeifAndersen

The Future:

Topic: The Pentagon Establishes Cyber Warfare Retaliation Policy

• The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war
• Foreign directed hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country’s military
• If a cyber attack causes significant disruption (for example, to the power grid), or death, then the attackers will be met with conventional armed force.
• New York Times coverage

Topic: More is happening than we actually know

• By reverse engineering a crashed EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane, the Chinese were able to begin intercepting encrypted US Navy communications
• A few weeks after President Obama’s election, the Chinese flooded communications links they knew were monitored by the NSA with unencrypted copies of intercepted communications, proving they had compromised American communications links.

Topic: Cyber Warfare will be constant and often subtle

• The attacks on RSA earlier this year were not conclusively linked to Cyber Warfare, they could have been the work of a lone hacker, a small group, or an organized government
• The RSA hack later led to the compromise of secure systems at Lockheed Martin and other US arms manufacturers.
• Earlier this year we also saw the compromise of a large number of email accounts belonging to government and military officials. This type of reconnaissance can be used to gather information that would allow attackers to break in to more secured systems over time.
• Many attacks go unnoticed, as the perpetrators keep the systems just to be used to launch future attacks from. As we saw in the RSA hack, the attackers used an offsite webserver they had compromised earlier to send the data to, to avoid connecting directly to RSA and possibly leaving a trail. They then destroyed the webserver, breaking the link back to them
• In the past was have discussed the similar tactic of Island hopping, compromising an outward facing system such as a web, mail or monitoring server, or the desktop of a secretary or other lower level employee, and then slowly gathering more and more information in order to compromise the true targets of the attack.

Submitted by: Raventiger

Roundup:
South Korea army, University to start Cyber Defense major – Submitted by: refuse2speak
Anonymous hacks apple server, leaks usernames and hashed passwords
The Fog of Cyber Warfare – A battle without borders? – Submitted by: Raventiger
Chicago Mercantile Exchange Secrets and Source Code Leaked To China

Copies of vsftpd 2.3.4 downloaded from official mirrors contain backdoor – Submitted by: stmiller
Dropbox TOS gives them broad copyright license over your files – Submitted by: rakudave
Targeted phishing helped hackers earn 150 million in June – Submitted by: stmiller

Bitcoin BLASTER:
Lawyer Attempts To Trademark Bitcoin
First bitcoin app for Android, but is it safe?
BTCGuild suffers major DDoS Attack