A Timeline of Cyberwar and Cybercrime
randomhouse.ca1973
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. starts a program to look into technologies that link computer networks.1982
15-year-old Pennsylvanian Rich Skrenta writes the Elk Cloner program, the first computer virus ever found “in the wild.”1984
Author of Neuromancer, William Gibson, coins the term “cyberspace.”February 1998
A series of attacks on U.S. Department of Defense computers is dubbed Solar Sunrise, in which sensitive data was stolen across 500 systems, seemingly from servers around the world. The hack is traced to three teenagers in California.May 1998
Stephen Glass is busted for fabricating, “Hack Heaven,” his story for The New Republic. The article told the fictitious tale of Ian Retsil, a 15-year-old hacker who used a school computer to bypass the security settings of fictional software company Jukt Micronics.May 2000
Quaint by today’s standards, ILOVEYOU, or the Love Letter virus, was a computer worm that attacked tens of millions of Windows computers. A user is sent an email with “ILOVEYOU” in the subject line, and once opened, it overwrites image files and sends itself to the first 50 names in the user’s address book.July 2001
Code Red, and still remembered for how quickly it spread, exploited a flaw in Microsoft operating systems that enabled it to deface and take down some websites. At one point it brought down the White House webpage, and forced other government agencies to take down their websites as well.2003
Anonymous is born on 4chan’s image board.2003
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security combines several of its cyberdefense offices into a new department, the National CyberSecurity Division. Its purpose is to protect government computers from hacks.May 2003
Yet another email worm attacks users, but Fizzer was different—it went after money. Fizzer is the worm that sent out the now-everyday porn and pill email spam. It got so big that Microsoft offered a $250,000 reward for information that would lead to the arrest of its creator.May 2004
The Sasser worm attacks the British Coast Guard, Agence France-Presse, and Delta Airlines. The virus also affects universities, hospitals, and major corporations—and it all came from a 17-year-old German kid.December 2006
Internet-based watchdog and activist group WikiLeaks publishes its first document, a secret decision signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union. The document calls for the execution of government officials.April 2007
A large-scale cyber attack, originating in Russia (and perhaps with government encouragement), brings down major Estonian websites and IT networks, including the president’s office, the parliament, police, and the country’s two largest banks.June 2007
U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates gets his unclassified email account hacked. The attack allegedly coordinated by the People’s Liberation Army in China.December 2008
The Koobface worm—an anagram of Facebook—is first detected on social media platforms.The worm targets users of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter among others, and uses compromised computers to build a peer-to-peer botnet.May 2010
A memo by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service says that the risk of cyber attacks are growing substantially.January 2010
Dozens of Silicon Valley tech companies—including Google—report that hackers from China attacked their computer networks.June 2010
The computer worm Stuxnet, thought to have been created by the U.S. and Israel, attacks the operating systems of nuclear facilities in Iran.October 2010
WikiLeaks posts 391,832 classified U.S. military documents on the war in Iraq. It was the largest leak in history, and revealed instances of the military ignoring detainee abuse and an increase in the civilian casualty count.December 2010
Anonymous targets PayPal and Mastercard in what it calls Operation Payback, a movement to take revenge on companies that have suspended WikiLeaks accounts.January 2011
Hackers from China target not only the Canadian government but also the Defence Research and Development Canada, the scientific and technological arm of the Department of National Defence. The hacks leave officials concerned about how much sensitive information was accessed.April 2011
A hacker steals the names, e-mail addresses, and passwords of more than 70 million users of Sony’s online gaming network. The hack costs an estimated $170 million.September 2011
Conservative MP Bob Dechert admits that he sent flirtatious emails to Shi Rong, a journalist working in for China’s Xinhua news agency. Xinhua is state-controlled, and many believe that some of its correspondents pass information to Chinese intelligence or even operate as spies.October 2012
Ottawa considers banning China’s Huawei, a telecommunications equipment and services company, for fear that the Chinese government is using their products to spy on other countries. Huawei denies the claim.April 2012
Former presidential advisor and counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke publishes Cyber War about the threat of cyber-terrorism. In the book, Clarke warns about an “electronic Pearl Harbor” replete with mass blackouts and subway crashes.February 2013
A 12-storey building on the outskirts of Shanghai is discovered to be the headquarters of Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army—the unit suspected of being behind cyber attacks around the world.March 2013
Internet activist and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz commits suicide at 26. In 2011, Swartz was arrested for allegedly downloading around four million academic journals with intent to distribute them for free.April 2013
Matthew Keys, the deputy social media editor for Reuters, is fired after being indicted on federal charges for conspiring with Anonymous. It’s alleged that Keys conspired with Anonymous in order to hack into and change a news story on the Los Angeles Times website.April 2013
The 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report says that 96 per cent of incidents of government cyber-espionage originate in China. The other 4 percent are from unknown sources.May 2013
In just 10 hours, hackers in more than two dozen countries steal $45 million from thousands of ATMs around the world. They erased withdrawal limits on prepaid debit cards in tens of thousands of transactions. Eight defendants are charged for attacks in December and February.May 2013
All four members of LulzSec, a group of hackers that attacked multiple organizations, are sentenced in the UK for their crimes. Hacking mostly for the fun of it, LulzSec went after Sony, the CIA, and Fox.
Fault Lines: On the Pulse of the Pentagon
The US announced a new military strategy today at a Pentagon briefing. Much of the discussion concerned what could be read as predictable—and cyclic—budget cuts of a post-war drawdown. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta also took pains to mention what wouldn’t feel the fiscal pinch: offensive and defensive cyber security and unmanned systems.
We at Fault Lines have covered and predicted both of these trends.
First with an episode called Cyberwar.
A growing fear of computer hackers—a term encompassing a broad range of entities from digital spy rings to information thieves to cyberarmies of kids, criminals and terrorists (some backed by nation states)—and their potentially massive threat to national security has Washington maneuvering into position to defend its assets from a new style of warfare: one without foot soldiers, guns or missiles. Crucial national infrastructure, high value commercial secrets, tens of billions of dollars in defense contracts—as well as values like privacy and freedom of expression—are at stake.
In this episode of Fault Lines, I enter the domain of “cyber” and speak to a former US national security official turned cybersecurity consultant, a Silicon Valley CEO, a hacker, and those who warn of a growing arms race in cyberspace.
Is the US contributing to the militarisation of cyberspace? Are the reports of cyber threats being distorted by a burgeoning security industry? And are the battles being waged in cyberspace interfering with the Internet as we know it?
Then last week we filed a report titled Robot Wars.
Over the past decade, the US military has shifted the way it fights its wars, deploying more unmanned systems in the battlefield than ever before.
Today there are more than 7,000 drones and 12,000 ground robots in use by all branches of the military.
These systems mean less American deaths and also less political risk for the US when it takes acts of lethal force – often outside of official war zones.
But US lethal drone strikes in countries like Pakistan have brought up serious questions about the legal and political implications of using these systems.
Fault Lines looks at how these new weapons of choice are allowing the US to stretch the international laws of war and what it could mean when more and more autonomy is developed for these lethal machines.
The Hackers of Damascus
businessweek.comVia Businessweek:
Taymour Karim didn’t crack under interrogation. His Syrian captors beat him with their fists, with their boots, with sticks, with chains, with the butts of their Kalashnikovs. They hit him so hard they broke two of his teeth and three of his ribs. They threatened to keep torturing him until he died. “I believed I would never see the sun again,” he recalls. But Karim, a 31-year-old doctor who had spent the previous months protesting against the government in Damascus, refused to give up the names of his friends.
It didn’t matter. His computer had already told all. “They knew everything about me,” he says. “The people I talked to, the plans, the dates, the stories of other people, every movement, every word I said through Skype. They even knew the password of my Skype account.” At one point during the interrogation, Karim was presented with a stack of more than 1,000 pages of printouts, data from his Skype chats and files his torturers had downloaded remotely using a malicious computer program to penetrate his hard drive. “My computer was arrested before me,” he says.
Much has been written about the rebellion in Syria: the protests, the massacres, the car bombs, the house-to-house fighting. Tens of thousands have been killed since the war began in early 2011. But the struggle for the future of the country has also unfolded in another arena—on a battleground of Facebook pages and YouTube accounts, of hacks and counterhacks. Just as rival armies vie for air superiority, the two sides of the Syrian civil war have spent much of the last year and a half locked in a struggle to dominate the Internet. Pro-government hackers have penetrated opposition websites and broken into the computers of Reuters and Al Jazeera to spread disinformation. On the other side, the hacktivist group Anonymous has infiltrated at least 12 Syrian government websites, including that of the Ministry of Defense, and released millions of stolen e-mails.
The Syrian conflict illustrates the extent to which the very tools that rebels in the Middle East have employed to organize and sustain their movements are now being used against them. It provides a glimpse of the future of warfare, in which computer viruses and hacking techniques can be as critical to weakening the enemy as bombs and bullets. Over the past three months, I made contact with and interviewed by phone and e-mail participants on both sides of the Syrian cyberwar. Their stories shed light on a largely hidden aspect of a conflict with no end in sight—and show how the Internet has become a weapon of war.
Stephan Feris, Businessweek. The Hackers of Damascus.
STUXNET: A Declaration of Cyberwar
After going through 2 weeks of every machine (PC and MAC) on home network infected with a virus/malware nothing seems to stop, including it spreading to my android phone using remote control/access on windows, I read this article about last summer’s Stuxnet on Vanity Fair. Well worth the read to the end. Cyberwarfare is looking pretty bleak on how damaging it will become in only a matter of time.
*thanks Dave for link!
Cyber weapons: The new arms race
businessweek.comFascinating article on how hacking has become a real tool of war with potentially severe international consequences, and the rapid growth of an industry devoted to providing weapons for use on computer networks, functioning essentially as an adjunct to national militaries (and criminal organizations).
