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Hackers, Cyber crime, and a New Kind of War.

2011-08-09 · Hank · watch on YouTube · World affairs · news analysis

Lower-confidence wave

2011 videos did not pass the QA gate (17 %); their analysis is shown but less reliable.

Starting from the hack of the Your Pants forum, Hank argues that crime and war are on the cusp of a fundamental shift to cyber attacks (Anonymous, Russian mafia, Chinese hackers, Stuxnet), and worries both about the attacks and about ineffective, internet-harming legislation.

What is said

00:00:00 — Greeting; since Your Pants was hacked Hank thinks about the apocalypse; anatomy of the attack on the forum; data lost

  • ★★ Hank says that since Your Pants was hacked he has been thinking about the apocalypse: script kiddies taking down the forum and the end of the world have surprising similarities. (playful) — 00:00:00 · Your Pants
  • ★★★ Hank explains the attack: a hacker found a vulnerability in the vBulletin software running Your Pants and released an exploit, probably as a simple script, which script kiddies ran to own servers, steal passwords and send spam. (hedged) — 00:00:00 · Your Pants
  • ★★★ Hank says their white-hat security expert, Sam Rudd (ASR), stopped the infiltration before any user data was compromised, but a big hunk of the forum's content has been lost. — 00:00:42 · Your Pants

00:01:11 — A fundamental shift in crime and war; Anonymous hacks the Syrian Ministry of Defense website (hacktivism)

  • ★★★ Hank says we are on the cusp of a fundamental shift in the way crime and war happen, so everyone needs at least a basic knowledge of cyber warfare and cyber crime. — 00:01:11
  • ★★ Hank reports that last night someone identifying with Anonymous hacked the Syrian Ministry of Defense website and posted a message of solidarity with the Syrian people, which he calls hacktivism rather than cyber crime. — 00:01:11

00:01:41 — What keeps Hank up at night: the Russian mafia's hacking revenues; Chinese hackers stealing intellectual property

  • ★ Hank finds it sort of weirdly cool that Anonymous can do these things, but says that is not what keeps him up at night. (hedged) — 00:01:41
  • ★★ Hank says the Russian mafia's hacking team has revenues in the billions of dollars and has collected so many credit card numbers it can no longer sell them. (playful) — 00:01:41
  • ★★ Hank says Chinese hackers, maybe sponsored by their own government, have hacked governments and private corporations for years and stolen billions of dollars of intellectual property. (hedged) — 00:01:41 · China

00:02:10 — Stuxnet: four zero-days, destroyed Iranian centrifuges, probably US-led, its code now freely available

  • ★★★ Hank says Stuxnet, the malware he finds scariest, used four Windows zero-day exploits when no virus had used more than one, infected thousands of industrial computers worldwide but activated only against Iran's uranium centrifuges, which spun out of control and exploded while readouts looked normal. — 00:02:10
  • ★★ Hank says no one knows who built Stuxnet or took credit, but it was almost certainly a multinational project spearheaded by the United States government. (hedged) — 00:02:40
  • ★★★ Hank says releasing Stuxnet was like dropping a new kind of bomb along with its plans: its code is now freely available online and could be modified to break pipelines, shut down power plants or open dams. — 00:02:40

00:03:09 — Was it worth a new kind of warfare; legislation will hurt the internet and never keep up; no solutions; sign-off

  • ★★★ Hank, not usually an alarmist, finds this scary: he is glad Iran's nuclear weapons program was set back significantly but doesn't know if it was worth creating an entirely new type of warfare. (hedged) — 00:03:09
  • ★★★ Hank also worries about the legislation meant to protect us: it will probably ruin much of what's great about the internet and will never be effective, since Congress will always be far behind the hackers. (hedged) — 00:03:09 · United States Congress
  • ★ Hank says he wanted more people to know about this but has no solutions; we must hope hackers are smart enough to know destroying the world is a bad idea. (playful) (hedged) — 00:03:38

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