Singapore Institute of Management (SIM)

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Preamble (August--September 2011)

Nowhere to Hide from Cyber Attacks

By Roland Tan Chee Teik

IF HACKERSwant to paralyse a government’s or a company’s server, there is very little protection available to the experts in charge of the computer systems. The ferocity of cyber attacks can be witnessed in the recent theft of information belonging to 1.3-million Sega game owners. Sega is the computer games giant famous for games such as Sonic the Hedgehog.
       According to news reports, a group calling itself Anonymous, attacked 91 Web sites in Malaysia in June 2011. More than half of them were government-linked portals. Anonymous said that Malaysia was targeted because of its censorship of films and television shows and its blocking of file-sharing Web sites and such actions “amounted to a denial of human rights”.
      In April 2011, hackers accessed 77 million users’ data from the Sony Playstation network. This caused a week-long outage for users and great embarrassment to Sony. Such blatant acts are a warning to companies that business can grind to a halt if their Web sites are not secured from cyber attacks.
       Awesome damage can be done if evil hackers or terrorists decide to attack a country’s power grid, water supply, or transport system. For example, a hacker can cause chaos by changing the timing of a city’s traffic lights during the rush hour. In the event of war, the enemy would want to put the Global Positioning System satellites out of service so that military communication is halted and guided missiles are rendered useless.
       Nuclear plants are not immune to hacker attacks. According to “Code Wars”, a documentary on the CNBC channel, Iran’s first nuclear power plant at Bushehr was attacked by a sophisticated computer worm designed to disrupt power grids and other industrial facilities using Siemens’ Scada systems. It has been suggested by some that the worm was the work of Israeli and American hackers combined.
       Zeus is the name given to a Trojan horse that steals banking information by keystroke logging and form grabbing. It is spread mainly through drive-by downloads and phishing or “spear phishing” schemes. Accounts at Bank of America, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Monster, Oracle, Cisco, and Amazon were compromised. This Trojan horse can be bought through underground forums from about US$700. Zeus is very difficult to detect even with the latest antivirus software.
      According to msnbc.com, Anonymous is threatening new attacks on major United States corporations and government officials as part of an escalating cyber war against the citadels of American power. Its senior strategist, Barrett Brown, 29, said: “When we break laws, we do it in the service of civil disobedience. We do so ethically. We do it against targets that have asked for it.”
       The hacker group recently targeted US government officials involved in the Bradley Manning case. He is the army private accused of leaking classified US government information to WikiLeaks and is being held in solitary confinement at a military camp in Quantico, Virginia.