NSA facility is likely cause….
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah state officials have seen what they describe as a sharp uptick in attempts to hack into state computers in the last two years, and they think it related to the NSA data center south of Salt Lake City.
The increase began in early 2013 as international attention focused on the NSA’s $1.7 billion warehouse to store massive amounts of information gathered secretly from phone calls and emails.
“In the cyber world, that’s a big deal,” Utah Public Safety Commissioner Keith Squires told a state legislative committee this week.
While most of the attempts are likely innocuous, cyber experts say it is possible low-level hackers, “hactivists” unhappy with the NSA’s tactics, and some foreign criminal groups might erroneously think the state systems are linked to the NSA.
“Maybe these hackers are thinking: ‘If we can attack state systems, we can get info that NSA isn’t releasing,” said Richard Forno, director of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s, graduate cybersecurity program.
The state tracks the attempts with an automated system it purchased after a breach of health care information in 2012. The system detects, stops and counts the attempts to get into the computers, Squires said.
With that new equipment in place in January 2013, the state was seeing an average of 50,000 a day with spikes up to 20 million, Squires told The Associated Press. In February 2013, the number rose to an average of 75 million attacks a day, with up to 500 million on some days.
Attacks include direct attacks on websites, emails fishing for passwords, and something called “port scans,” where people probe a computer looking for weak spots.
The NSA didn’t immediately have any comment about the attacks.
Tim Junio, a cybersecurity researcher at Stanford University, said what officials refer to as “attacks” are likely just “noise from low-tech people rather than concerted efforts for meaningful foreign intelligence collection.”
But both Forno and Junio agree the NSA data center could draw the attention of hackers who think they can target state-run utilities that power the center. Being able to disrupt an NSA operation in any way would bring international notoriety to a foreign state or criminal group, Junio said.
State officials acknowledge that part of the increase is driven by an overall rise in hacking across the country. Hackers’ motivations vary, and it was impossible to determine what might be behind the activity in Utah.
Some steal personal information, like customer lists, to commit identity theft. Some take control of email servers to steal messages, send unwanted advertising or disguise the origin of their communications. Some steal corporate or government secrets from email or cloud servers, or use unlocked file servers as digital “dead drops” for their hacking tools, pirated movies, stolen files and more.
For hackers seeking notoriety, the NSA would be a prized target because it employs the world’s best hackers and routinely gives advice about how to keep computers safe from online criminals.
*** How much more do you really need to know?
In the 10 years since the Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center first asked experts about the future of cyber attacks in 2004 a lot has happened:
Some suspect the Russian government of attacking or encouraging organized crime assaults on official websites in the nation of Georgia during military struggles in 2008 that resulted in a Russian invasion of Georgia.
In 2009-2010, suspicions arose that a sophisticated government-created computer worm called “Stuxnet” was loosed in order to disable Iranian nuclear plant centrifuges that could be used for making weapons-grade enriched uranium. Unnamed sources and speculators argued that the governments of the United States and Israel might have designed and spread the worm.
The American Defense Department has created a Cyber Command structure that builds Internet-enabled defensive and offensive cyber strategies as an integral part of war planning and war making.
In May, five Chinese military officials were indicted in Western Pennsylvania for computer hacking, espionage and other offenses that were aimed at six US victims, including nuclear power plants, metals and solar products industries. The indictment comes after several years of revelations that Chinese military and other agents have broken into computers at major US corporations and media companies in a bid to steal trade secrets and learn what stories journalists were working on.
In October, Russian hackers were purportedly discovered to be exploiting a flaw in Microsoft Windows to spy on NATO, the Ukrainian government, and Western businesses.
The respected Ponemon Institute reported in September that 43% of firms in the United States had experienced a data breach in the past year. Retail breaches, in particular, had grown in size in virulence in the previous year. One of the most chilling breaches was discovered in July at JPMorgan Chase & Co., compromised. Obama Administration officials have wondered if the breach was in retaliation by the Putin regime in Russia over events in Ukraine.
Among the types of exploits of individuals in evidence today are stolen national ID numbers, pilfered passwords and payment information, erased online identities, espionage tools that record all online conversations and keystrokes, and even hacks of driverless cars.
Days before this report was published, Apple’s iCloud cloud-based data storage system was the target of a so-called “man-in-the-middle” attack in China that was aimed at stealing users’ passwords and spying on their account activities. Some activists and security experts said they suspected the Chinese government had mounted the attack, perhaps because the iPhone 6 had just become available in the country. Others thouThe threat of cyber attacks on government agencies, businesses, non-profits, and individual users is so pervasive and worrisome that this month (October 2014) is National Cyber Security Awareness Month.
To explore the future of cyber attacks we canvassed thousands of experts and Internet builders to share their predictions. We call this a canvassing because it is not a representative, randomized survey. Its findings emerge from an “opt in” invitation to experts, many of whom play active roles in Internet evolution as technology builders, researchers, managers, policymakers, marketers, and analysts. We also invited comments from those who have made insightful predictions to our previous queries about the future of the Internet.
