Tag Archive for: Turning

From Ukraine to the Whole of Europe: Cyber Conflict Reaches a Turning Point | Business

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PARIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Mar 29, 2023–

Thales:

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(Photo: Thales)

Eastern and Northern Europe on the front lines of the cyber conflict

A new attack geography has taken shape over the last 12 months. At the very beginning of the conflict, the majority of incidents only affected Ukraine (50.4% in the first quarter of 2022 versus 28.6% in the third quarter), but EU countries have seen a sharp increase in conflict-related incidents in the last six months (9.8% versus 46.5% of global attacks).

In the summer of 2022, there were almost as many conflict-related incidents in EU countries as there were in Ukraine (85 versus 86), and in the first quarter of 2023, the overwhelming majority of incidents (80.9%) have been inside the European Union.

Candidates for European integration such as Montenegro and Moldova are being increasingly targeted (0.7% of attacks in the first quarter of 2022 versus 2.7% at the end of 2022) and Poland is under constant harassment, with a record number of 114 incidents related to the conflict over the past year. War hacktivists have specifically targeted the Baltic countries (157 incidents in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and Nordic countries (95 incidents in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland). Germany saw 58 incidents in the past year, but other European countries have been relatively spared, such as France (14 attacks), the UK (18 attacks), Italy (14 attacks) and Spain (4 attacks).

“In the third quarter of 2022, Europe was dragged into a high-intensity hybrid cyber-war at a turning point in the conflict, with a massive wave of DDoS attacks, particularly in the Nordic and Baltic countries and Eastern Europe. Cyber is now a crucial weapon in the arsenal of new instruments of war, alongside disinformation, manipulation of public opinion, economic warfare, sabotage and guerrilla tactics. With the lateralisation of the conflict from Ukraine to the rest of Europe, Western Europe should be wary of possible attacks on critical…

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American hacker says he keeps turning off internet in North Korea

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An American computer hacker says that he is behind a revenge attack that has crippled North Korea’s Internet several times in the last month.

The hacker, who goes by the name P4x, says he had been targeted by the hermit dictatorship’s spies who cyber-attacked Western security researchers in 2021.

The hacker told Wired that he was angered by the attack and frustrated at the lack of response by US authorities,

He said that North Korea had attempted to steal hacking tools and information on software vulnerabilities, which he managed to prevent.

But he remained resentful and decided to exact revenge, and told Wired, “It felt like the right thing to do here. If they don’t see we have teeth, it’s just going to keep coming.”

And he added: “I want them to understand that if you come at us, it means some of your infrastructure is going down for a while.”

The North Korean internet outages took place at around the same time the country was carrying out a string of weapons tests, leading some observers to suggest it could be the work of a foreign country.

During the outages the country’s websites, which only number several dozen, all appeared to go down at the same time.

The hacker’s claim cannot be independently verified, but Wired says P4x provided screen recordings of his actions.

He has so far declined to reveal how he broke into the North Korean system to unleash a denial-of-service attack on its servers and routers.

Observes say that very few North Korean citizens have any access to the internet, and the websites impacted mostly carry government propaganda.

He told Wired that it was “pretty interesting how easy it was to actually have some effect in there”.

P4x says he has launched a new dark website for hackers called FUNK, which stands for F U North Korea, to continue to take action against the country.

“The goal is to perform proportional attacks and information-gathering in order to keep NK from hacking the western world completely unchecked,” he said.

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Chip Shortage Has Manufacturers Turning to Lower-Tech Models

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Manufacturers struggling with a shortage of semiconductor chips are finding workarounds, executives said, redesigning products, shipping uncompleted units and focusing on older, lower-tech models.

After pushing for years to add digital features like screens and wireless connectivity, makers of appliances and vehicles are reversing, temporarily, to continue supplying products to dealers and consumers amid a shortfall in semiconductors that industry officials project will last into next year.

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Super-Secure Processor Thwarts Hackers by Turning a Computer Into a Puzzle

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We have developed and tested a secure new computer processor that thwarts hackers by randomly changing its underlying structure, thus making it virtually impossible to hack.

Last summer, 525 security researchers spent three months trying to hack our Morpheus processor as well as others. All attempts against Morpheus failed.

 

This study was part of a program sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Program Agency to design a secure processor that could protect vulnerable software. DARPA released the results on the program to the public for the first time in January 2021.

A processor is the piece of computer hardware that runs software programs. Since a processor underlies all software systems, a secure processor has the potential to protect any software running on it from attack.

Our team at the University of Michigan first developed Morpheus, a secure processor that thwarts attacks by turning the computer into a puzzle, in 2019.

A processor has an architecture – x86 for most laptops and ARM for most phones – which is the set of instructions software needs to run on the processor.

Processors also have a microarchitecture, or the “guts” that enable the execution of the instruction set, the speed of this execution, and how much power it consumes.

Hackers need to be intimately familiar with the details of the microarchitecture to graft their malicious code, or malware, onto vulnerable systems.

 

To stop attacks, Morpheus randomizes these implementation details to turn the system into a puzzle that hackers must solve before conducting security exploits.

From one Morpheus machine to another, details like the commands the processor executes or the format of program data change in random ways. Because this happens at the microarchitecture level, software running on the processor is unaffected.

A skilled hacker could reverse-engineer a Morpheus machine in as little as a few hours, if given the chance. To counter this, Morpheus also changes the microarchitecture every few hundred milliseconds.

Thus, not only do attackers have to reverse-engineer the microachitecture, but they have to do it very fast.

With Morpheus, a hacker is confronted with a computer that has never been seen before…

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