clydeiii/cybersecurity · Datasets at Hugging Face

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4 September 2008
Experts call for united global action against cyber attacks
The world has to unite against the growing menace of cyber terrorism, IT
experts said Thursday, evoking a recent "cyber war" against Georgia as the
latest example of the threat.
"The world has finally woken up and understood that cyber security needs a
global approach and is a very serious matter," Estonian politician Mart Laar
told a cyber security forum in the Estonian capital Tallinn.
Estonia had to deal with attacks on government websites blamed on Russian
hackers in the spring of 2007.
Official Georgian websites suffered a similar cyber offensive last month in the
wake of Russia's military offensive on Georgian soil. Estonia was among
several states that stepped in to host hacked Georgian websites.
"The cyber war against Georgia in August demonstrated how it has become
part of the real war on the ground and we must act," Laar added.
According to Laar, cyber attacks against the Georgian websites came a day
ahead of Russia's August 8 military action in the country, a move roundly
condemned in the West.
Robert Kramer, vice-president of public policy for CompTIA, the Computing
Technology Industry Association uniting the world's top IT firms, underscored
that global cyber security starts at home with the average Internet user.
"The weakest link in cyber space is the human being behind the computer
with not enough awareness and skills on IT security matters," Kramer told the
forum.
Heli Tiirmaa-Klaar, an IT expert with Estonia's defence ministry, repeated the
warning.
"People everywhere need to understand that your unprotected computer at
home can be used as a tool in cyber-war," she said.
Tim Boerner, an IT security expert with the US Secret Service, said experts
noted increased attacks on Georgian web sites weeks before the first bombs
fell on Georgia.
"Over one million computers worldwide were used during the cyber attacks
against Estonia in spring 2007," he added.
An ex-Soviet republic that broke free from Moscow in 1991, the tiny Baltic Sea
state of Estonia joined the European Union and NATO in 2004.
It has become a leader in global IT development and has focused heavily on
cyber security since suffering the wave of cyber attacks in early 2007.
WASHINGTON POST (blog)
16 October 2008
By Brian Krebs
Russian Hacker Forums Fueled Georgia Cyber Attacks
An exhaustive inquiry into August's cyber attacks on the former Soviet bloc
nation of Georgia finds no smoking gun in the hands of the Russian
government. But experts say evidence suggests that Russian officials did little
to discourage the online assault, which was coordinated through a Russian
online forum that appeared to have been prepped with target lists and
details about Georgian Web site vulnerabilities well before the two countries
engaged in a brief but deadly ground, sea and air war.
The findings come from an open source investigation launched byProject
Grey Goose, a volunteer effort by more than 100 security experts from tech
giants like Microsoft and Oracle, as well as former members of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, Lexis-Nexis, theDepartment of Homeland Security and
defense contractor SAIC, among others.
The group began its inquiry shortly after the cyber war disabled a large
number of Georgia government Web sites. Starting with the Russian hacker
forum Xaker.ru (hacker.ru), investigators found a posting encouraging wouldbe cyber militia members to enlist at a private, password-protected online
forum called StopGeorgia.ru. Grey Goose principal investigator Jeff Carr said
the administrators of the hacker forum were keenly aware that American
cyber sleuths were poking around: Within hours after discovering the link to
the StopGeorgia site, Xaker.ru administrators deleted the link and banned all
access from U.S.-based Internet addresses.
At StopGeorgia.ru, project members unearthed a top-down hierarchy of
expert hackers who doled out target lists of Georgian government Web sites
to relative novices, complete with instructions on how to exploit vulnerabilities
in the sites in order to render them inaccessible. Following a July defacement
of the Georgian president's Web site that was blamed on Russian hackers, the
Georgian government blocked Russian Internet users from visiting
government Web sites.
But Carr said StopGeorgia administrators also equipped recruits with
directions on evading those digital roadblocks, by routing their attacks
through Internet addresses in other Eastern European nations. The level of
advance preparation and reconnaissance strongly suggests that Russian
hackers were primed for the assault by officials within the Russian government
and or military, Carr said.
"The fact that the StopGeorgia.ru site was up and running within hours of the
ground assault -- with full target lists already vetted and with a large member
population -- was evidence that this effort did not just spring up out of
nowhere," said Carr, speaking at a forum in Tysons Corner, Va., sponsored
by Palantir Technologies, an In-Q-Tel funded company in Palo Alto, Calif.,
whose data analysis software helped Grey Goose investigators track the
origins and foot soldiers involved in the cyber attack. "If they were planning
ahead of the invasion, how did they know the invasion was going to occur?
The only way they could have known that is if they were told."
Initially, security experts assumed that the sites were felled via "distributed
denial of service" (DDoS) attacks, a well-known method of assault that uses
hundreds or thousands of compromised personal computers to flood a
targeted site with so much junk traffic that it can no longer accommodate
legitimate visitors. But investigators soon learned that attackers were
instructed in the ways of a far more simple but equally effective attack
strategy capable of throttling a targeted Web site using a single computer.
Security researcher and Grey Goose investigator Billy Rios said attackers
disabled the sites using a built-in feature of MySQL, a software suite widely
used by Web sites to manage back-end databases. The "benchmark" feature
in MySQL allows site administrators to test the efficiency of database queries,
but last year hackers posted online instructions for exploiting the benchmark
feature to inject millions of junk queries into a targeted database, such that
the Web servers behind the site become so tied up with bogus instructions
that they effectively cease to function.
"Not only can a small number of users bring down the back end databases, it
indicates that there was some form of planning, reconnaissance, and some

4 September 2008

Experts call for united global action against cyber attacks

The world has to unite against the growing menace of cyber terrorism, IT

experts said Thursday, evoking a recent "cyber war" against Georgia as the

latest example of the threat.

"The world has finally woken up and understood that cyber security needs a

global approach and is a very serious matter," Estonian politician Mart Laar

told a cyber security forum in the Estonian capital Tallinn.

Estonia had to deal with attacks on government websites blamed on Russian

hackers in the spring of 2007.

Official Georgian websites suffered a similar cyber offensive last month in the

wake of Russia's military offensive on Georgian soil. Estonia was among

several states that stepped in to host hacked Georgian websites.

"The cyber war against Georgia in August demonstrated how it has become

part of the real war on the ground and we must act," Laar added.

According to Laar, cyber attacks against the Georgian websites came a day

ahead of Russia's August 8 military action in the country, a move roundly

condemned in the West.

Robert Kramer, vice-president of public policy for CompTIA, the Computing

Technology Industry Association uniting the world's top IT firms, underscored

that global cyber security starts at home with the average Internet user.

"The weakest link in cyber space is the human being behind the computer

with not enough awareness and skills on IT security matters," Kramer told the

forum.

Heli Tiirmaa-Klaar, an IT expert with Estonia's defence ministry, repeated the

warning.

"People everywhere need to understand that your unprotected computer at

home can be used as a tool in cyber-war," she said.

Tim Boerner, an IT security expert with the US Secret Service, said experts

noted increased attacks on Georgian web sites weeks before the first bombs

fell on Georgia.

"Over one million computers worldwide were used during the cyber attacks

against Estonia in spring 2007," he added.

An ex-Soviet republic that broke free from Moscow in 1991, the tiny Baltic Sea

state of Estonia joined the European Union and NATO in 2004.

It has become a leader in global IT development and has focused heavily on

cyber security since suffering the wave of cyber attacks in early 2007.

WASHINGTON POST (blog)

16 October 2008

By Brian Krebs

Russian Hacker Forums Fueled Georgia Cyber Attacks

An exhaustive inquiry into August's cyber attacks on the former Soviet bloc

nation of Georgia finds no smoking gun in the hands of the Russian

government. But experts say evidence suggests that Russian officials did little

to discourage the online assault, which was coordinated through a Russian

online forum that appeared to have been prepped with target lists and

details about Georgian Web site vulnerabilities well before the two countries

engaged in a brief but deadly ground, sea and air war.

The findings come from an open source investigation launched byProject

Grey Goose, a volunteer effort by more than 100 security experts from tech

giants like Microsoft and Oracle, as well as former members of the Defense

Intelligence Agency, Lexis-Nexis, theDepartment of Homeland Security and

defense contractor SAIC, among others.

The group began its inquiry shortly after the cyber war disabled a large

number of Georgia government Web sites. Starting with the Russian hacker

forum Xaker.ru (hacker.ru), investigators found a posting encouraging wouldbe cyber militia members to enlist at a private, password-protected online

forum called StopGeorgia.ru. Grey Goose principal investigator Jeff Carr said

the administrators of the hacker forum were keenly aware that American

cyber sleuths were poking around: Within hours after discovering the link to

the StopGeorgia site, Xaker.ru administrators deleted the link and banned all

access from U.S.-based Internet addresses.

At StopGeorgia.ru, project members unearthed a top-down hierarchy of

expert hackers who doled out target lists of Georgian government Web sites

to relative novices, complete with instructions on how to exploit vulnerabilities

in the sites in order to render them inaccessible. Following a July defacement

of the Georgian president's Web site that was blamed on Russian hackers, the

Georgian government blocked Russian Internet users from visiting

government Web sites.

But Carr said StopGeorgia administrators also equipped recruits with

directions on evading those digital roadblocks, by routing their attacks

through Internet addresses in other Eastern European nations. The level of

advance preparation and reconnaissance strongly suggests that Russian

hackers were primed for the assault by officials within the Russian government

and or military, Carr said.

"The fact that the StopGeorgia.ru site was up and running within hours of the

ground assault -- with full target lists already vetted and with a large member

population -- was evidence that this effort did not just spring up out of

nowhere," said Carr, speaking at a forum in Tysons Corner, Va., sponsored

by Palantir Technologies, an In-Q-Tel funded company in Palo Alto, Calif.,

whose data analysis software helped Grey Goose investigators track the

origins and foot soldiers involved in the cyber attack. "If they were planning

ahead of the invasion, how did they know the invasion was going to occur?

The only way they could have known that is if they were told."

Initially, security experts assumed that the sites were felled via "distributed

denial of service" (DDoS) attacks, a well-known method of assault that uses

hundreds or thousands of compromised personal computers to flood a

targeted site with so much junk traffic that it can no longer accommodate

legitimate visitors. But investigators soon learned that attackers were

instructed in the ways of a far more simple but equally effective attack

strategy capable of throttling a targeted Web site using a single computer.

Security researcher and Grey Goose investigator Billy Rios said attackers

disabled the sites using a built-in feature of MySQL, a software suite widely

used by Web sites to manage back-end databases. The "benchmark" feature

in MySQL allows site administrators to test the efficiency of database queries,

but last year hackers posted online instructions for exploiting the benchmark

feature to inject millions of junk queries into a targeted database, such that

the Web servers behind the site become so tied up with bogus instructions

that they effectively cease to function.

"Not only can a small number of users bring down the back end databases, it

indicates that there was some form of planning, reconnaissance, and some