Hacks

Outcomes in security tend to be about data loss; stolen pharmaceutical formulas, jet fighter blueprints, patient records, credit card numbers etc. All of these come with a great cost to the victim and make for sexy headlines. But far too little is dissected and analyzed about service disruptions.

Back in the dark days of dial-up connectivity, attackers wouldn’t bother compromising home computers as bots to be used in distributed denial-of-service. The lack of bandwidth made PCs persona non grata in the DDoS world. Instead, attackers targeted Web servers, the only machines with the high-speed broadband connections to make DDoS viable.In the years since, broadband has literally come home and personal machines have been compromised by the millions for everything from spam to flood attacks against websites and online services.

While every corporate general counsel, CIO and anyone with a CISSP will tell you that hacking back against adversaries is illegal and generally a bad thing to do, there are alternatives that companies can use to gain insight into who is behind attacks, collect forensic evidence and generally confound hackers, perhaps to the point where they veer away from your network.

Nearly two years after attackers began what turned out to be a long series of intrusions at Sony, most notably with the PlayStation Network data breach, authorities in the U.K. have fined the company the equivalent of almost $400,000 for not being careful enough with customer data. 

Rarely a day goes by without mention of a targeted attack against some government-related website, massive disruptions in online banking services, or critical vulnerabilities in specialized software running our power plants and water supplies. And all the while, IT and security organizations have thought little about fighting back. Their options were limited to better patching, more security hardware and new firewall rules. That dynamic is changing because the buzzwords active defense and hacking back are creeping into conversations between vendors and customers, IT managers and executives, executives and legal teams. 

A Canadian college student was expelled after reporting a vulnerability in the school’s Web site that potentially exposed private data on more than 250,000 students.The high-achieving computer science major, Hamed Al-Khabaz and another student, Ovidiu Mija, in November were developing a mobile app using Omnivox Web portal software when they discovered “sloppy coding” that could lead to a major data breach. Ominvox is used at hundreds of Canadian campuses, including theirs at Montreal’s Dawson College.

It appears that the attackers behind the Red October cyberespionage campaign are taking their ball and going home. Since the attack came to light on Monday, the attackers have begun shutting down their infrastructure and the hosting providers and registrars involved with some of the command-and-control domains are shutting those down, as well.