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Likes: Originally Posted by SalesServiceGuy
Riots. Arson. Violence.
That was all done by the side you support, dem fanboy.
And it's "You're fired".
Dislikes: 0
Riots. Arson. Violence.
That was all done by the side you support, dem fanboy.
And it's "You're fired".
... let me know when you can add something of value to a discussion about the largest cyber attack on the US in history.
An interesting thing about that, a record number of votes were cast for the loosing candidate. In fact President Trump received enough vote to have won every previous Presidential election.
Another interesting thing, in most Democrat controlled counties and states that were more votes cast than there were registered voters. In some places as much as 25% more. And why did so many ballots only have votes for President and not for any of the down ticket candidates or propositions?
Proven yet or not there must have been some type of voting fraud.
Law enforcement take down three bulletproof VPN providers
The three VPN services provided safe haven for cybercriminals to carry out ransomware attacks, web skimming operations, spear-phishing, and account takeovers.
Law enforcement agencies from the US, Germany, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands have seized this week the web domains and server infrastructure of three VPN services that provided a safe haven for cybercriminals to attack their victims.
According to the US Department of Justice and Europol, the three companies' servers were often used to mask the real identities of ransomware gangs, web skimmer (Magecart) groups, online phishers, and hackers involved in account takeovers, allowing them to operate from behind a proxy network up to five layers deep.
Law enforcement described the three as "bulletproof hosting services," a term typically used to describe web companies that don't take down criminal content, despite repeated requests.
"A bulletproof hoster's activities may include ignoring or fabricating excuses in response to abuse complaints made by their customer's victims; moving their customer accounts and/or data from one IP address, server, or country to another to help them evade detection; and not maintaining logs (so that none are available for review by law enforcement)," the DOJ said today.
Servers were seized this week across five countries where the three VPN providers had hosted content. Europol said it plans to analyze the collected information and start cases to identify and take action against some of the services' users.
Biden says U.S. will 'respond in kind' for SolarWinds hack blamed on Russia
Biden says U.S. will 'respond in kind' for hacking blamed on Russia
President-elect Joe Biden said Tuesday that his administration will retaliate for a massive cyberattack that targeted U.S. government agencies and is believed to have been carried out by Russian hackers.
“When I learn the extent of the damage and in fact who is formally responsible, they can be assured that we will respond. And probably respond in kind. There’s many options, which I will not discuss now,” Biden said during a press conference with reporters that followed his remarks on the coronavirus pandemic, cybersecurity and the upcoming Christmas holiday.
Pressed by a reporter about what sort of responses were being considered, Biden declined to provide detail, saying it was against norms to outline potential attacks on enemies in such a public forum.
In the attack, the hackers used advanced techniques to target government and corporate networks, including those of IT management company SolarWinds, to steal sensitive information. U.S. officials maintain that the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) would need weeks, if not months, to determine the scale and scope of the damage.
U.S. officials maintain that the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) would need weeks, if not months, to determine the scale and scope of the damage.
During his address, Biden noted that both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and outgoing Attorney General William Barr blamed Russia for the cyberattack. He also chided President Trump, who has spent the bulk of his lame-duck period tweeting about supposed election interference.
Trump acknowledged the attack last week, accusing the media of exaggerating its severity while casting doubt that Russia was behind it.
“The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control,” Trump tweeted on Saturday. “Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!). There could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA.”
Hours earlier, however, Pompeo said of the attack, “We can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians.”
Biden believes the White House should make an “official attribution” that Russia was behind the attack.
“This attack constitutes a grave risk to our national security,” he said. “The truth is this: The Trump administration failed to prioritize cybersecurity.”
The rebuke over Trump’s handling of the attack was perhaps the sharpest criticism Biden has leveled at the president since the election. “This assault happened on Donald Trump’s watch, when he wasn’t watching,” Biden added.
The president-elect pledged that his administration will prioritize cybersecurity and seemed resigned to the notion that it was, like the pandemic, one more challenge that he would inherit when he is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
“His failure will land at my doorstep,” Biden said of Trump.
Wow Russian Times?
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Ransomware is such a profitable industry for organized crime that revenues are expected to increase from $3T to over $6T dollars next year!
Savvy IT Managers now advise their clients that it may be impossible to prevent all attacks, you can only mitigate the damages.
The best no cost way to protect yourself is Two Factor Authentication (2FA). Criminals will simply more onto easier targets.
In 2021, business's need to invest in a new technology know as IOC/ Indicators of Compromise.
The cyber security world is quickly shifting from prevention to detection. One needs to understand that no business can be fully protected from all of the bad cyber events that could happen.
The job of an IT Security specialist is to detect any IT breaches as quickly as possible so that an appropriate reaction can be detected quickly, shut it down and stop it in its tracks.
There are two tools that can be used.
- Managed Detection response (MDR)
- Managed Risk Response (MRR)
The task is to quickly identify something on the network that should not be there, usually a processing pattern going on behind the scenes, stop it, shut it down, freeze it in its tracks and deploy security counter measures to eradicate the threat before any solution becomes very costly.
How Russia's 'info warrior' hackers let Kremlin play geopolitics on the cheap
Moscow, with its growing cyber capabilities, appears undeterred by Western sanctions and other countermeasures
The sprawling SolarWinds hack by suspected Russian state-backed hackers is the latest sign of Moscow's growing resolve and improving technical ability to cause disruption and conduct espionage at a global scale in cyberspace.
The hack, which compromised parts of the U.S. government as well as tech companies, a hospital and a university, adds to a string of increasingly sophisticated and ever more brazen online intrusions, demonstrating how cyber operations have become a key plank in Russia's confrontation with the West, analysts and officials say.
Moscow's relations with the West continue to sour, and the Kremlin sees the cyber operations as a cheap and effective way to achieve its geopolitical goals, analysts say. Russia, they say, is therefore unlikely to back off from such tactics, even while facing U.S. sanctions or countermeasures.
"For a country that already perceives itself as being in conflict with the West practically in every domain except open military clashes, there is no incentive to leave any field that can offer an advantage," said Keir Giles, senior consulting fellow at Chatham House think tank.
The scope of Russia's cyber operations has grown in tandem with Moscow's global ambitions: from cyberattacks on neighboring Estonia in 2007 to election interference in the U.S. and France a decade later, to SolarWinds, seen as one of the worst known hacks of federal computer systems.
"We can definitely see that Russia is stepping on the gas on cyber operations," said Sven Herpig, a former German government cybersecurity official and expert at German independent public-policy think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung. "The development of new tools, the division of labor, the creation of attack platforms, has all increased in sophistication over the years," he said.
Jamil Jaffer, a former White House and Justice Department official, said that cyber operations have become "a significant part of [Russia's] play."
"It's allowed them to level up," said Mr. Jaffer, senior vice president at IronNet Cybersecurity.
Russia has consistently denied engaging in state-backed hacking campaigns, including SolarWinds, maintaining that the country isn't conducting offensive cyber operations. In September, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a reset of U.S.-Russia information-security relations.
"Russia is not involved in such attacks, particularly in [SolarWinds]. We state this officially and resolutely," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said recently. "Any allegations of Russia being involved are absolutely groundless and appear to be the continuation of a kind of blind Russophobia," he said.
But analysts say that Moscow has added hacking to its arsenal of so-called gray-area activities -- a type of warfare that stops short of actual shooting -- alongside disinformation campaigns and the use of "little green men," the masked soldiers in green uniforms who appeared with Russian arms on Ukrainian territory in 2014.
...
Jeffrey Edmonds, a former White House and Central Intelligence Agency official who studies Russia at CNA, a nonprofit research organization that advises the Pentagon, said that Russia's cyber operations have numerous simultaneous goals, including gathering intelligence, testing capabilities, preparing for potential conflict by mapping adversaries' critical infrastructure and laying the groundwork for cyber negotiations.
Such operations are a relatively inexpensive and effective way to conduct geopolitics, said Bilyana Lilly, researcher at think tank Rand Corp. That is crucial for Russia, which is facing considerable economic and demographic challenges and whose economy is smaller than Italy's. A 2012 article in an official Russian military journal said that the "complete destruction of the information infrastructures" of the U.S. or Russia could be carried out by just one battalion of 600 "info warriors" at a price tag of $100 million.
Responding to Moscow's increased cyber activity has been a challenge. Washington's retaliation measures -- sanctions, property seizures, diplomatic expulsions, even the cyber equivalent of warning shots -- appear to have done little to deter hacks.
"Russia doesn't see sanctions as an instrument of pressure but as an instrument of punishment," said Pavel Sharikov, senior fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences's Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies. "The Russian government says, 'Yes we understand that you don't like what we are doing, but we don't really care.'"
In recent years, so-called information confrontation has become an established part of Russia's military doctrine, according to a paper co-written by Rand's Ms. Lilly. In 2019, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Russia's General Staff chief, said that in modern warfare, cyberspace "provides opportunities for remote, covert influence not only on critical information infrastructures, but also on the population of the country, directly influencing national security."
Russia's use of hacking to advance its geopolitical agenda initially focused mainly on targets in ex-Soviet countries. A 2007 cyberattack in Estonia disabled websites of the government, banks and newspapers. Later attacks in Ukraine and Georgia knocked out power supplies, disrupted media outlets and targeted election infrastructure, officials said.
More recently, Russian state-backed hackers set their sights on the West. In 2014, they penetrated the State Department's unclassified email system and a White House computer server and stole President Barack Obama's unclassified schedule, U.S. officials said. In 2015, they got into the German parliament, according to German officials, in what experts see as the most significant hack in the country's history.
Since its interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, Russia has been accused of attacks on the French elections and the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics and the costly NotPetya malware attacks on corporate networks. This year, Western governments accused Russia of cyber espionage against targets related to coronavirus vaccines. Russia has denied involvement.
As the operations have grown in scope, Russian hackers' technical abilities have improved, experts say.
In the 2007 Estonia attack, hackers used a relatively crude tool called "distributed denial-of-service" which knocked websites offline by flooding them with data, and did little to hide their trail, with some of their IP addresses located in Russia.
More recent operations have used new reconnaissance tools and methods to cloak operations, including false flag tactics, to make it appear that another country was responsible.
In 2018, federal officials said that state-sponsored Russian hackers broke into supposedly secure, "air-gapped" or isolated networks owned by U.S. electric utilities. In the SolarWinds hack, intruders stealthily used a routine software update to gain access to hundreds of U.S. government and corporate systems undetected for months.
Still, some former U.S. officials said Russia is far from flawless in the cybersphere.
"They're not 10 feet tall. They are detectable," said former senior CIA official Steven Hall, who oversaw U.S. intelligence operations in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Ultimately, how sophisticated Russia is in the cyber realm remains to be seen, said Bruce Potter, chief information security officer at cybersecurity firm Expel. Nations are reluctant to deploy their best cyber tools because doing so would cause countries and companies to rapidly patch a vulnerability.
"They just put down enough to get the job done," he said. "And they get the job done."
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