CyberWire Daily - The CyberWire 1.4.16

Episode Date: January 4, 2016

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Russian cyber operators versus Ukraine's power grid. And intelligence services seek to improve cooperation against terrorist threats. I'm Dave Bittner in Baltimore with your Cyber Wire summary for Monday, January 4, 2016. ISIS returns to the Internet with defiant videos, showing no signs of having been slowed down in cyberspace by either government action or worldwide revulsion. They've also got a new spokesman who's said to be menacing, and they've increased the presence of children in their inspirational and recruiting clips. Twitter's crackdown on hate tweet is surely directed in part against Dash, but ISIS social

media operators have shown considerable resilience in the past, with the ability to cycle rapidly through accounts. Governments are experiencing some success in criminal investigations of ISIS-inspired terror as the UK convicts some plotters, the US arrests an alleged adjunct to the San Bernardino massacre. French authorities appear to derive significant clues about the Paris attacks from phone data. Security services in Europe, led by German police and intelligence agencies, continue to pursue closer collaboration. They face, among other challenges, analytical ones.

As obvious as the ISIS general line may be, analysts are finding it difficult to reach ground truth in the details of jihadi plans and policies. Bogus leaks seem to be clouding the operational picture. Some ISIS sympathizers are attempting to use PayPal vulnerabilities to channel funds to Daesh. Security researcher Brian Krebs is among those noticing attempts on their accounts. Anti-ISIS hacktivists continue to display either scattershot aim or willingness to attack a diverse set of targets. One group, New World Hacking, possibly aligned with Anonymous,

claims responsibility for last week's DDoS operations against both the BBC and Donald Trump's campaign for the U.S. presidency. The BBC operation was, they say, just a test with no harm intended. The Trump attack was directed against his rhetoric, specifically those statements New World Hacking regards as anti-Muslim. Both attacks were short-lived in their effects. Turkish hackers, either patriotic hacktivists or state-sponsored actors, probably the former, deface Russian foreign ministry accounts as tensions between the two countries remain high. Ukraine investigates a cyber campaign against its electric grid, which Ukrainian intelligence

services unambiguously blame on Russia. ESET links the hacks to black energy, especially its Killdisk tool. Joining other tech leaders, Microsoft announces it will henceforth warn users of state-sponsored activity it detects around their accounts. Do you know the status of your compliance controls right now? Like, right now. We know that real-time visibility is critical for security, but when it comes to our GRC programs, we rely on point-in-time checks.

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That's why we're thrilled to partner with ThreatLocker, a cybersecurity solution trusted by businesses worldwide. ThreatLocker is a full suite of solutions designed to give you total control, stopping unauthorized applications, securing sensitive data, and ensuring your organization runs smoothly and securely. Visit ThreatLocker.com today to see how a default-deny approach can keep your company safe and compliant. www.cyberwire.com is what? Well, a hacker is someone who, you know, looks for and exploits weaknesses in computer systems or networks, and typically someone who does that illegitimately or illegally. Okay, that's a hacker. That's hacking. Now, there can be white hat hackers who are legitimate

vulnerability researchers, and there can be black hat hackers. Usually when people say hacker, they're typically talking about a black hat. So what's a hacktivist? There are all kinds of people who take action against computer systems and networks, and they can be distinguished and classified by their motivations. So, for example, a state intelligence service might hack for purposes of espionage. A cyber criminal has obvious criminal motives. What are they doing? They're looking to steal identities. They're looking to steal money. They're looking to extort ransoms, things like that. A hacktivist is someone who isn't motivated by money and who's not directed by a state. So a true hacktivist is motivated by political or religious or ideological

considerations. That's a hacktivist. What's the general view of hacktivists? Are they looked upon as being a force for good or a good force for bad, or does it depend? It depends on what you mean. And if you look around the world, you'll see different hacktivist riots, cyber riots going on all the time. There's a lot of cyber rioting,

for example, in South Asia. And you see what people call patriotic hacktivism going on with people swapping hacks between Armenian and Azerbaijani. Describe to me what you mean by a cyber riot. What is that? A cyber riot is when you have, it's like a riot in physical space, except it's conducted in cyberspace. So what's a riot like? It's when you've got a lot of disorganized people running around, breaking things, looting, causing disorder. That's a riot. And a cyber riot is doing that in cyberspace.

So if you've got a lot of people all of a sudden defacing websites, breaking into databases, things like that, and they're not doing it for any kind of obvious criminal motivation or for any kind of obvious, under any kind of obvious central state direction. That's probably a cyber riot. And it's blurry because just as you have people who riot to protest or to break things, you've also inevitably got the people who are running along behind the other rioters looting from stores. The same thing happens in cyber rioting. Is the mission to do harm or is the mission to get attention generally? Classically, the mission is to get attention.

So a very common form of hacktivism is the website defacement. When people talk a lot about ISIS as a cyber threat, it's not really a high-grade cyber threat. It's very unlikely that ISIS, for example, is going to break into the American electrical power grid and shut down a bunch of nuclear power generation stations. That's really unlikely in the extreme. What does happen is you find small, poorly protected targets that someone who's sympathetic to ISIS will deface a web page and it will say, hacked by ISIS, or we support the caliphate, some message like that.

That's a typical kind of hacktivist move. And that explains also why so many small media markets and municipalities in the American Midwest seem to have attracted the attention of ISIS hacktivists. Why? Because they're low-hanging fruit. They generally tend to be not particularly well-resourced and not particularly strongly defended. So, John, what's the history on hacking? I mean, when we look back to the beginnings, are there any notable stories that stand out? You know, hacker hacking hacking or a hack in the broadest sense is something that refers to somebody who attains a detailed inside working understanding of how some software hardware works.

So people years ago used to call that a hack if you figured out how to do something with a piece of hardware or software. And that usage persists today. You see it even in expedited usage in things like life hacking. The guy who will post a video to YouTube showing you how you can take your microwave popcorn bag and turn it into a bowl so you don't need a bowl to serve your popcorn in. Well, that's a life hack. And there are people who talk about that. But as far as an operation against a non-cooperating information technology system, I think you go back to the 1970s when there were the famous phone freaks at that time, spelled with a P-H. And these were people who figured out ways of manipulating the early telecommunication switches through making certain tones. And the urban legend that may for all I know be true, that if you blew the

toy whistle from a Cap'n Crunch cereal box into your telephone, the bell system would let you make a long distance phone call for free. That's an example of phone freaking. And if you look at today's hackers, they're probably the lineal spiritual descendants of the old phone freaks from the 70s. Interesting. John Petrick, editor of the Cyber Wire. Thanks for joining us. We'll talk again soon. And now a message from Black Cloak. Did you know the easiest way for cyber criminals to bypass your company's defenses is by targeting your executives and their families at home? Black Cloak's award-winning digital executive protection platform secures their personal devices, home networks, and connected lives. Because when executives are compromised at home, your company is at risk. In fact, over one-third of new members discover they've already been breached. Protect your executives

and their families 24-7, 365, with Black Cloak. Learn more at blackcloak.io. and that's the cyber wire we are proudly produced in maryland by our talented team of editors and producers i'm dave bittner thanks for listening Your business needs AI solutions that are not only ambitious, but also practical and adaptable. That's where Domo's AI and data products platform comes in. With Domo, you can channel AI and data into innovative uses that deliver measurable impact. Secure AI agents connect, prepare, and automate your data workflows, helping you gain insights, receive alerts, and act with ease through guided apps tailored to your role. Data is hard. Domo is easy. Learn more at ai.domo.com. That's ai.domo.com.