Misha Glenny on #cyber-security

The problem with cyber is that your assets are not the weapons that you control. Your assets are the vulnerabilities of your actual and potential enemies. In order to know your enemies’ vulnerabilities you have to find out where they are, and once you have got hold of them you cannot afford to let go.

Misha Glenny, author of Dark Market: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You chooses five books on cybersecurity in The Browser FiveBooks Interview: Misha Glenny on Cyber Security.


He says there are three main types:


► cyber-crime
► cyber industrial espionage
► cyber-warfare


Here he discusses his book with Charlie Rose


refs

wiki:Stuxnet

Stalking the wily hacker by Clifford Stoll

Stalking the wily hacker


An astronomer-turned-sleuth traces a German trespasser on our military networks, who slipped through operating system security holes and browsed through sensitive databases. Was it espionage?


May 1988 vol. 31. No. 5 COMMUNICATION OF THE ACM


wiki entry on Stoll’s 1989 book, The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

Hackers break into a lucrative career

Hackers break into a lucrative career


Joseph Menn, FT, 19 October 2011

…a potentially lucrative career awaits for skilled researchers – or even teenagers – who can challenge the vulnerabilities of some of the world’s best-known websites.

#cyberwar ♦ Cyber Weapons: The New Arms Race ♦

Cyber Weapons: The New Arms Race


The Pentagon, the IMF, Google, and others have been hacked. It’s war out there, and a cyber-weapons industry is exploding to arm the combatants


By Michael Riley and Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg Businessweek, 20 July 2011

Senior Defense Official Caught Hedging on U.S. Involvement in Stuxnet

Senior Defense Official Caught Hedging on U.S. Involvement in Stuxnet


Kim Zetter, Threat Level blog, Wired, 26 May 2011


Report on upcoming CNBC programme, CodeWars: America’s Cyber Threat

Google, Cloud Computing and the Surveillance -Industrial Complex

Google, Cloud Computing and the Surveillance-Industrial Complex


by


Christopher Ketcham and Travis Kelly


CounterPunch, April 1-15 2010

Reaching for the kill switch [Economist, 10 Feb 2011] [http://econ.st/ibIVxg]

Reaching for the kill switch


– The cost and practicalities of switching off the internet in Egypt and elsewhere


some points:


* The bulk of Egyptian surfers used only 5 ISPs


* In the US the top 5 ISPs account for only half the market/ top 10 ISPs 70%


* “In Egypt the authorities forced joint ventures run by Britain’s Vodafone and France Télécom to suspend call and data transmission, citing the laws which govern their licences. Even after the operators were allowed to restore their services, the authorities used them to send propaganda messages. One read: “The Armed Forces asks Egypt’s honest and loyal men to confront the traitors and criminals and protect our people and honour and our precious Egypt.”


* Counter-measures: e.g. Tweet provided ” speak-to-Tweet” service


* “In 2007 the authorities in Myanmar cut internet connections to counter anti-government demonstrations. Two years earlier a similar move severed services in Nepal. During the unrest in Tunisia in January, the authorities censored some news and social networking sites; Iran and Thailand have done likewise. Following ethnic riots in its Xinjiang province in 2009, China blocked e-mail, text messages and all but a handful of websites in the region as part of disruption that lasted for ten months; it has lately blocked searches for “Egypt” on several popular microblogging sites. But only North Korea denies its entire civilian population any access to the net.”


* “Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an intergovernmental think-tank in Paris, estimates that the network shutdowns alone may have cost Egypt as much as $90m.”
* A much cited slogan of late on the web is “If your government shuts down your internet, it’s time to shut down your government.”


* Estonia made internet access a human right in 2000. France has followed suit. A law passed in Finland last year guarantees every citizen a broadband connection.

#Internet #Egypt ~ How Egypt Killed the Internet [http://on.wsj.com/hMdA4J] [http://bit.ly/hH4AnD]

How Egypt Killed the Internet


* The techie side simplified for the Netwit

#INTERNET #internetcensorship ~ Internet censorship in Australia and how it compares to other countries

Internet censorship in Australia


Australia is a surprising example of internent censorship. There was a recent TV report of the opening of the Canberra Cybersecurity Centre, to which American officials were invited.

When you look at the Reporters Without Frontiers map, even if you don’t know the colour code, it is easy to work one out, with China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Tunisia and Cuba the darkest most censored countries. This suggests Australian and South Africa are next worst, which might surprise some. Since the yellow is Britain, the U.S., etc, and Africa is a light blue: this can only mean since Africa’s internet development is not advanced it won’t censor much, but that that the yellow countries do censor to some extent.

A small amount of research shows the issue of internet censorship by country isn’t as straight forward as one might assume. Nation-State Routing: Globalizing Censorship has tables which purport to show the effect of a country’s domestic internet censorship policies on international traffic. Again, another surprise: The U.S. is top of the list followed by Britain and Germany with China 8th. Another measure shows:

“Collectively, these results show that the ‘West’ continues to exercise disproportionate influence over international routing, despite the penetration of the Internet to almost every region of the world, and the rapid development of China and India.”

Perhaps cipherpunk Julian Assange knew something we didn’t and was keen to get out of there!

Why not try Herdictweb, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, where you can type in a website to see if it is blocked. Can’t be bothered? Just watch the map at the top highlighting inaccesible sites and when.

refs.

Website Maps Global Web Blocks
Herdict uses volunteers to monitor Internet censorship, filtering, and outages.

#INTERNET #encryption #PgP #P2P ~ Who owns the Internet and does it matter?

Well, I don’t that’s for certain. Just the PC, some copper cables and a router. I’ve got a computer ID and a URL for any site I maintain. I’ve no idea what happens to those little packets of digital data that stream in and out of the router. They tell me Skype is encrypted, but how would I know?

Plenty of people can learn lots about me. Social media give a lot away to anyone caring to look. Governments will almost certainly have automatic systems to check who is saying what to whom on the Internet. If they don’t they will be buying the software to do so right now.



Internet black holes

The logical direction is a full-encrypted P2P world. The downside of a PgP P2P (as opposed to client-server, where only servers supply) world is no one else can know what’s being said between these two people. (Entrance, stage left, cipherpunk Julian Assange, encryption software in hand) Sometimes even Internet People might be happy for their governments to have ways of finding things out. The trend is more towards individuals giving up their privacy in return for what the Internet and Web provides in exchange. Both governments and non-governmental organisations are taking full advantage of this while it lasts.

The give-up-your-privacy-social-media seem to be in a cross over graph with Govt 1.0 which is in the process of changing to Govt 2.0, most wholeheartedly in local govt. At the moment social media are just underneath the cross-over. WikiLeaks and others are pushing the whole thing up to the cross-over a lot quicker. The biggest thing from WikiLeaks will be a unrelenting exposure of kleptocratic government. Even non-kleptocrats will be worrying about this: so many democratic govts. have cosy relationships with kleptocrasies. France recently had one with Tunisia. Was that because they were selling them french made armaments? Some of the U.S.A’s best friends are keptocrats. Easier to do big arms deals with them, too. Who does Indonesia buy its military harware from? Israel, which is not a kleptocracy except in that the U.S. govt.hands an awful lot of American tax payer’s money over to it without asking. So in a sense it’s an inverse Kleptocracy, in which a state not individuals receives the handout. So the U.S. govt. is doing the stealing from its own people to keep another sate going.

Who owns the Internet is an important question. If governments feel they are getting locked out of individuals lives, they may want to more impose rules on Internet usage that P2P-type people don’t want or like.

Tim Bermers-Lee is the most prominent advocate of a neutral Net. Most people haven’t the faintest idea what this would mean or require in practice. It’s not going to happen if every no-democratic state keeps control of the copper wires, optical fibe and satellites they put into space.

The reason I found Wikileaks interesting and thought it would be a good idea to set up a WikiLeaks dedicated blog, was partly because it was an ideal opportunity to re-examine the wider implications of the Internet and Web. Anyone with half an ear for the digital zietgeist can’t fail to read up on the implications of WikLeaks and other areas of change in the digital arena.

One of these things is the Govt 2.0 The problem arises when a yawning Govt. 2.0 gap builds up, say between authoritarian states and democracies. This is not exactly a firm basis for net neutrality (or open data) if the U.S. becomes compeletely open and China remains closed. In fact, the ways things go, it is inevitable that the U.S. will drag China kicking and screaming intop the open world

Both types of states have an interest in reading the minds of their citizens. Interestinglt social media such as faceBook and twitter are the simplest and easiest way for them to do so. Every new digital technology has a downside.

P2P proper only arrives when there is Pretty Good privacy for all. And yet no govt. wasnt this because they have got used to checking on peopoe with the technology uptodate.

Coinciding with a recent WikiLeaks leak a lot of publicity for Govt 2.0 and visualisation techniques through the work on the WikLeaks data but others.

repost:

OPEN DATA Initiatives and visualisation techniques