The day after its discovery, there are few doubts that the infamous malware dubbed Flame (or sKyWIper) has been developed by a government with significant budget and effort. The complexity of the malware suggests that it has been used for a huge cyber-espionage campaign and, easily predictable, Israel is listed as the main culprit, even if in good company if it is true, as argued by some bloggers, that the malware was created by a strict cooperation coproduction between CIA and Mossad.
Israeli vice Premier Moshe Ya’alon has contributed to fuel the Flame: speaking in an interview with Army Radio, Ya’alon has hinted that Jerusalem could be behind the cyber attack, saying “Israel is blessed to be a nation possessing superior technology. These achievements of ours open up all kinds of possibilities for us.” In light of this statement, it does not appear a simple coincidence the fact that the main victims of the cyber weapon, as reported by Kaspersky Lab, are nations who may not be just considered in good neighborhood relations with Israel.
Consequently it is not that surprise the fact that the same interview has been readily reported by the Iranian News Agency Fars (which has interpreted it as a sign of liability and has hence blamed Israel for waging cyber war in Iran) as well as it is not that surprise the tone of several comments to an article posted on the Haaretz newspaper’s Web site (“Nice One Israel, Proud of You!!!!”).
Of course it is too soon to jump to conclusion,in any case, whether Israel (and U.S.) is behind Flame or not, I could not help but wonder how it is possible that a malware has been able to go undetected for at least 5 years. Are endpoint protection technologies really dead, leaving us at the mercy of a (cyber)world ruled by APTs?
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data is inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated) at hackmageddon.com. And follow the author of this article @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Irony of fate: not even a day after the publication of a provocative article on the role of Cyber Warfare for maintaining peace, a new cyber threat appears, which is destined to leave an indelible mark on the cyber weapons’ landscape.
Today is one of those days that the Infosec Community will remember for a long time. It looks like the mystery of the malware targeting the Iranian Oil business a month ago has come to a solution, and it is not that kind of conclusion we would have hoped and expected.
The malware, which has been dubbed Flame (Kaspersky), or sKyWIper (CrySyS Lab), or also Flamer (CERTCC), has some unprecedented features that make it one of the most complex threats ever discovered:
The Cyber Weapon Malware is a sophisticated attack toolkit, It is a backdoor, a Trojan, and has worm-like features (three in one). According to Kaspersky its development has taken a couple of years and it will probably take year to fully understand the 20MB of code of Flame.
According to CrySyS Lab Flame has been in the wild since 2007, having been seen in the following geographical regions: Europe on Dec 5 2007, The United Arab Emirates on Apr 28 2008 and the Islamic Republic of Iran on Mar 1 2010;
Flame is controlled via an SSL channel by a C&C infrastructure spread all around the world, ranging from 50 (Kaspersky) to 80 (CrySyS) different domains;
Flame owns many capabilities, including sniffing the network traffic, taking screenshots, recording audio conversations, intercepting the keyboard. C&C operators may choose to upload up to about 20 modules, which can expand Flame’s functionality;
The complete set of 20 modules is 20 MB in size when fully deployed (about 20 times larger than Stuxnet and maybe it is the reason why it wasn’t discovered for so long);
Flame includes a piece of code (about 3,000 lines) written in LUA, a not so common occurrence for malware;
Top 7 affected countries include Islamic Republic of Iran (189 Samples), Israel/Palestine (98 samples), Sudan (32), Syria (30), Lebanon (18), Saudi Arabia (10), Egypt (5).
Flame appears to have two modules designed for infecting USB sticks: “Autorun Infector” (similar to Stuxnet) and “Euphoria” (spread on media using a “junction point” directory that contains malware modules and an LNK file that trigger the infection when this directory is opened);
Flame may also replicate via local networks using the following:
The printer vulnerability MS10-061 exploited by Stuxnet – using a special MOF file, executed on the attacked system using WMI;
Remote jobs tasks.
When Flame is executed by a user who has administrative rights to the domain controller, it is also able to attack other machines in the network: it creates backdoor user accounts with a pre-defined password that is then used to copy itself to these machines.
So far
So far no 0-day vulnerabilities have been found, despite the fact that some fully-patched Windows 7 installations have been compromised, might indicate the presence of high-risk 0-days.
With no doubt a beautiful piece of malware written with the precise intent of Cyber-Espionage. Besides the resounding features of the malware, I found particularly interesting the same infection mechanism used by Stuxnet, that make me think of (another) possible double agent implanting the first infection.
This (legitimate) suspicion is also reinforced by the disarming conclusions issued by CrySyS Lab:
The results of our technical analysis support the hypotheses that sKyWIper was developed by a government agency of a nation state with significant budget and effort, and it may be related to cyber warfare activities.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data is inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated) at hackmageddon.com. And follow the author of this article @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
In the same hours in which I was publishing my post on Cyber Weapons, news agencies all around the world have begun to release (few) details about a new alleged Cyber Attack targeting the Iranian Oil Ministry, the National Iranian Oil Company and several other state-owned businesses.
Of course Iran is not new to Cyber Attacks targeting Critical Infrastructures (do you remember Stuxnet and the possible hoax of Duqu Stars?), in any case it is too soon to draw any connection with Stuxnet or any other kind of State-Sponsored Attack, even because, according to the scant information available, only a server providing public information has been harmed.
Probably this malware has nothing to deal with cyber weapons but, just for fun, I cannot help but notice that this alleged Cyber Attack came in the same day in which, among many doubts, Iran has announced to have reverse-engineered the U.S. stealthy RQ-170 Sentinel drone captured by Iran in December 2011.
Nearly in contemporary with the breaking news that a judge in New Zealand’s High Court has declared that the order used to seize Kim Dotcom’s assets is “null and void”, writing another page inside the endless MegaUpload saga, The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s largest BitTorrent sites, made another clamorous announcement. Tired of countering the block attempts that forced, last month, to switch its top-level domain, possibly to avoid seizure by U.S. authorities, and in October 2011 to set up a new domain to get around ISP blocking in Belgium, the infamous BitTorrent site is considering the hypothesis to turn GPS-controlled aircraft drones into proxies, in order to avoid Law Enforcement controls (and censorship) and hence evade authorities who are looking to shut the site down.
The drones, controlled by GPS and equipped with cheap radio equipment and small computers (such as Raspberry Pi), would act as proxies redirecting users’ traffic to a “secret location”. An unprecedented form of (literally) “Cloud Computing”, or better to say “Computing in the Clouds”, capable to transfer, thanks to modern radio transmitters, more than 100Mbps at over 50 kilometers away, more than enough for a proxy system.
A Predator drone carries a few servers…as tin cans would trail a newly marriedcouple’s car
This is essentially what MrSpock, one of the site’s administrators, stated in a Sunday blog post (apparently unavailable at the moment). Curiously the drones are called “Low Orbit Server Stations”, a name not surprisingly much similar to the “Low Orbit Ion Cannon”, the DDoS weapon used by the Anonymous collective, capable of evoking very familiar hacktivism echoes.
Actually this is not the first time that hackers try to use air communication to circumvent Law Enforcement controls. At the beginning of the year, a group of hackers unveiled their project to take the internet beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit.
What raised some doubts (at first glance this announcement looks like an anticipated April Fools), is not the the use of a Low Orbit Server Stations, but the fact that moving into an airspace would be enough to prevent Law Enforcement Controls (and reactions).
Drones are subject to specific rules and restrictions and can only fly along reserved corridors to deconflict them from civilian and military air traffic. And they have to land every now and then, unless someone thinks these pirate robots can be air-to-air refueled.
As a commenter of The Hacker News correctly pointed out: “There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about who “owns” the airspace of a given country“: definitely a drone flying too high would be classified as a threat and forcibly removed by an air force, a drone tethered to ground would be subjected to local zoning laws, while a drone broadcasting from an “intermediate” height would probably violate a number of existing laws and forced to shut down.
At the end it is better to turn back to “Ground Computing” as opposed to “Cloud Drones”. As a matter of fact “it’s probably a lot easier to find a friendly government and host a normal server in that country“.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated) at hackmageddon.com. And follow the author of this article @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
I have just published a timeline covering the main Cyber Attacks targeting Military Industry and Aviation, but it looks like the latest events will force me to post an update, soon.
Although perpetrated with very different timelines, origins and motivations behind them, the last three days have seen a new wave of attacks against military industry that has unexpectedly become the point of intersection between cybercrime and cyberwar.
The first clamorous attack was disclosed a couple of days ago, when the Sunday Times revealed that alleged Chinese Hackers were able to penetrate into computers belonging to BAE Systems, Britain’s biggest defence company, and to steal details about the design, performance and electronic systems of the West’s latest fighter jet, the costly F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The hacking attack has raised concerns that the fighter jet’s advanced radar capabilities could have been compromised and comes few weeks after papers about the future British-French drone were stolen in Paris.
Apparently, once again, an APT-based attack, or maybe one of its precursors, since it was first uncovered nearly three years ago. In any case, according to the sources and the little information available, it lasted continuously for 18 months, exploiting vulnerabilities in BAE’s computer defences to steal vast amounts of data. A fingerprint analogous to other similar cyber operations, allegedly generated from China such as Operation Aurora or the controversial operation Shady RAT.
Details of the attack have been a secret within Britain’s intelligence community until they were disclosed by a senior BAE executive during a private dinner in London for cyber security experts late last year.
Curiously the F-35 seems to be a very attracting prey for hackers as it was already the victim of a Cyber Attack in 2009; once again the latest attack is believed to be originated from China, who is showing a restless cyber activity.
Although completely different for impact and motivations, a second attack has just been announced by the infamous hacking collective Anonymous, which, in name of the #OpFreePalestine operation, has published the contact details for senior staff at BAE (hit once again), Lockheed, Gulfstream Aerospace, a division of General Dynamics, and the United States Division Of Israeli Owned Arms Company Elbit Systems. An attempt to embarrass military industry considered involved in the events happening in Palestine.
Although the data dumps apparently contain little valuable information (according to V3.co.uk many of the telephone numbers listed are for company headquarters, while several of the names appear to be out of date), the latest attacks represent a quantum leap in the Middle East Cyber War, after the “reign of terror” threatened by Anonymous against Israel.
The F-35 JSF is not only the most advanced stealthy fighter plane of the next future. It is also the most expensive. That’s why some partners have been compelled to downsize their initial requirements because of cuts imposed by the increasing unit price (with the new contract the total unit cost for an LRIP 5 jet is 205.3 million USD!!).
Apparently these cuts are interesting even the IT Security budgets of the manufacturers.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated) at hackmageddon.com. And follow the author of this article @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
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