Can Hackers Destroy The Internet?

Botnets, trojans, SQL injections and DDoS attacks.  Most internet users have no idea what those things are, or how they are shaping the future of their connected lives.  One thing is certain, more computers and wireless devices are going to be compromised this year than were last year.  Some companies will go out of business as a result. State secrets will be revealed.  A mysterious charge will appear on your credit card bill each month.
Over 70,000 new cyber security threats are discovered on a daily basis.  Even the strongest networks are not safe from hackers. Last year’s well-reported hacks included the Central Intelligence Agency, U.K. Treasury, Lockheed Martin, and Sony’s famous compromise of 77 million online user accounts in August and again in October 2011. The Apple operating system is not safe. PC systems are definitely not safe. Android smartphones are a mobile hackers favorite platform.
Some will be the handiwork of hactivist groups like Anonymous, trying to make a socio-political point by interrupting corporate and government computer servers; others will be multimillionaire criminals hiding out in Moscow, writing malware so sophisticated, like the new Foncy trojan that it disguises itself as an EA Sports NFL Madden 2012 download.  Click on it, and instead of Tom Brady throwing spirals to the Brady Bunch, this program will remotely operate your Android phone. Only, it’s not crank calling your girlfriend. It’s downloading your credit card information.
“Cyberspace is crucial for social and economic development and we are getting to a point where attacks can destroy the internet infrastructure,” said Alexander Ntoko.  He’s the head of the corporate strategy division at the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency. Ntoko is also responsible for managing the execution of the ITU’s Global Cybersecurity Agenda, a global framework for international cooperation launched by the ITU Secretary-General way back in 2007 in response to calls from ITU members for someone to organize a global effort to rebuild trust and security in the information society.
Eugene Kaspersky is the jovial, traveling salesman and CEO of Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, one of the biggest internet security firms in the world. He is not as upbeat on stage as he appears in real life. He is the Nouriel Roubini of cyber space, the web’s own Dr. Doom.
“If we fail to patch these holes in the internet that all of these threats — from hactivists to cyber gangs to state sponsored cyber attacks like Stuxnet — then the internet as we know it is gone,” he told a gathering of about 100 journalists and IT specialists in Cancun this week.
“We Are Legion. We Do Not Forgive. We Do Not Forget.” — Anonymous
What’s in store for 2012? The usual, only kicked up a notch. Every year, the wall around the internet gets broken down a bit more. The cyber Orcs of Middle Earth are beating down the gates and they keep coming. Waves and waves of them in fact keep marching over the hills, like the CGI armies of endless muscular bad guys in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Where does it end, you wonder.  You just keep seeing Orcs as far as the eye can see.
This year will see more Advanced Persistent Threats, or APT,  state-sponsored cyber attacks, more Android OS malware, new MacOS malware, stolen certicates and more crypto attacks, super sophisticated attacks against big security firms like VeriSign, and more attacks against the cloud.
In the internet story, there are five main and supporting actors. The most spectacular antagonists are the hactivists like Anonymous and LulzSec; the most dangerous are the criminal gangs like ZeuS; and the most sophisticated actors are the nation states that were behind the stuxnet worm that infect Iran nuclear power plants in 2010. The protagonists in all this are the software giants and the IT security firms like Symantec, McAfee and Kaspersky, to name the top three.  Anonymous will try to hack into Google again this year.  Nations will continue with their cyber wars.  In 2012, all of these guys will have at each other on a daily basis.
And it’s getting worse.
“The internet was not designed with security in mind and now we are all scrambling to patch the various platforms out there to keep it safe. There are tons of people working on this now and every day they find more holes in the system so you are reaching a point where the internet as we know it will probably always exist, but it will coincide with another internet where anonymity is impossible,” said Roel Schouwenberg, Senior Anti-Virus Researcher at Kaspersky Lab in Massachusetts, their U.S. headquarters.

The New York Times looked into this as recently as 2009. It’s not a new concept. I asked Roel if people in the IT security business were seriously thinking that a safer, secondary internet was possible, if not a necessity. “I think everyone would like to have a new internet at this point. It’s just getting more and more crazy.”
Apparently, a lot of influential people agree with him, not just the IT security guys who profit from internet security.  More governments are looking into cyber security now than ever before.  They see it as one of the most important security problems in the world. Forget uploading an SMS Trojan that keeps texting 1-900 numbers. What about Iran breaking into the CIA computers and discovering the name of every deep cover agent in the Middle East? What if LulzSec wants to protest the military industrial complex and cracks into Lockheed Martin’s specs for a new F-35 and posts it on their website?
That’s made the internet the fifth domain of the military going forward. Ex-CIA director and current Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said recently that the U.S. has to be prepared not only to defend against cyber attacks, “but if necesary we are going to have to be prepared to be be aggressive when it comes to cyber efforts as well.”
Some companies have been hacked out of business.  Dutch firm DigiNotar was providing the digital infrastructure to the Dutch government before hackers made a fool of it. It was hacked repeatedly in July 2011.  The hackers generated websites like the Mossad, CIA and M16 as being the source of the attacks. But IT security analysts working on the DigiNotar hack found another site that was sourced. An unknown, written in Farsi: RamzShekaneBozorg.com.  Translated, it means, God, great cryptologist, I will sacrifice my life for my leader. Or something like that.
Was it an Iranian government operation? Was it a Muslim in The Netherlands?
Cyber criminals can earn millions. They have made enough money to retire, buy night clubs, yachts, and move their businesses into the real world. If the police have not collected sufficient info on them, they will get away with helping make the internet the dark alley it is becoming.
Stefan Tanase, Senior Security Researcher at Kaspersky said that in 1994 there was one virus discovered every day. In 2011, there was one new virus discovered every second. “Cyber criminals are behind most malicious code. They are making profits. They are reinvesting those profits. And they have exit strategies. It’s becoming mature,” he said.
Mega Upload started back in 1998 from the humble beginnings in the bargain basement biz of stealing calling card numbers they got from hackers in the U.S. “That’s how Kim Dotcom at Mega started his career,” said Tanase during a presentation to media on Tuesday. Behind him on a screen, a heavy set Kim Dotcom is on some beach with a big yacht in the background, an exotic girl in a bikini laying at his feet in a green-blue sea.  Kim was making $50 million a year when he got arrested last month for copyright infringement.
The criminal code writing gang known as Koobface earned $2 million a year until info was disclosed about them by Facebook in 2011.  The Russians and Ukrainians behind Koobface are now on the run.
Hactivists, cybercriminals, and state sponsored cyber attacks are all turning the internet inside out. That doesn’t just impact a laptop. It impacts smart phones and tablets, too. Anything that is wired to a computer server on line is threatened by these actors.  The problem is, no one in government or law enforcement has a handle on it. They can’t even agree how to define cyber crime and cyber warfare.
“If it causes serious financial damage, it is a cyber crime,” said Kaspersky. “If there is a damage to a nation’s infrastructure, owned by the state, and done by another state, then it is an act of war. If hactivists and cybercriminals are behind it, it is possible to investigate it through police. If it is against a nation, then Interpol can get other countries to investigate. And if one country doesn’t want to get involved, then maybe they are the ones launching the attacks,” he said.
The IT security and software industry is still unsure what to do with all the information. They believe that learning how malware creators work, and how their programs work, will help protect internet structures from attacks.

The best solution would be to create an internatioanl cyber security agency, which defines rules of engagement for cyber attacks by a state, said Kaspersky.  Still, that would not help in stopping the ZeuS’ or LulzSec’s of the web.
“If you look at all the malware modifications a year ago for mobile devices alone, you would see maybe 30 to 40 modifications per month. Now we get 30 to 40 modifications a day,” said Denis Maslennikov, a long haired Russian malware analyst based in Moscow. Talking about mobile malware to Denis is like talking about Manchester United to a working class Brit; the New York Yankees to a kid raised in Brooklyn.
He flipped open a simple, old school, black Samsung cell phone. “Look, 99% of the malware created is to generate profits and they are succeeding. That’s why I’ll never get a smart phone.”

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