To end this module I'd like to talk a bit about cyber war and cyber terrorism.
Incidents of both types of warfare have already been launched.
The first cyber war broke out in 2007 when China attacked Germany and the US
soon after Estonia became victim of another wave of cyber attacks.
We'll look into this later
cyber warfare will emerge as a more and more prevalent reality.
Unfortunately Why is the it's easy to attack a computer system.
It's easier than attacking let's say a commuting system.
You don't need many resources or planning.
You don't even have to be at the scene of the crime.
It's not hard to locate the missile launcher in the first picture of the slide.
The Russians learned that the hard way when they tried to plane it in Cuba.
The bottom picture shows a typical housing estate.
You can launch an effective cyber attack from there and attack which is impossible to detect.
You don't need a nuclear missile silo either an internet connection will be enough.
What are the methods of cyber warfare.
First espionage
is very easy to send information over the internet without attracting any one's attention.
It's possible to hide data in the picture posted on a service.
The picture can be viewed by anyone but only the person who's in the know can read the letter hidden
in the image.
Can you do this in the Internet of course you can Arab Spring is a good example of how effective Internet
propaganda and networking can be all Arab governments attempted to significantly reduce or even ban
Internet services.
While the outcome wasn't successful this whole situation the first of its kind really makes one thing
will now move on to denial of service attacks trying to think of what could happen if there was no internet
for a day a week or a month.
You wouldn't be able to read your e-mails log into your account in a social networking service.
Your smartphone wouldn't work and you wouldn't be able to buy or sell anything online.
But that's not all it's possible to attack and stop or at least hinder the functionality of specialist
computer systems.
Electricity water supply or television or all services that can be remotely blocked.
A magnetic cloud can even block those systems which are not connected to the Internet.
The final point in this module We'll talk about some specific instances of cyberwar.
First there is Estonia in 2007
the attacks began around the time when a monument commemorating Soviet soldiers the Bronze Soldier of
Tallin was removed from the city center
first speculation's pointed to the Russian Federation as being behind this attack.
The DOS attack which lasted for three weeks targeted banks and administration infrastructure
embassies were blocked for three weeks the country's information flow services were paralyzed.
The Kremlin refused to assume responsibility for the sabotage.
But at the same time admitted that it would be able to run a large scale attack of this kind.
A year later as some of you may remember Russian forces invaded Georgia
standard military operations were concurrent with cyber attacks that targeted government servers torrent
networks were utilized all network traffic was redirected to governmental Web sites this resulted in
the complete denial of service which means the government Web sites and Georgeann press agencies websites
were all blocked.
Another instance of cyber warfare occurred in 2010 when Google detected that some of their accounts
set up on Google servers were being monitored
e-mail accounts that belong to Chinese dissidents were monitored by sniffer programs and stolen klank
computers.
This was revealed also because a lot of simultaneous connections to one account were detected from many
locations in China.
It turned out that incoming and outgoing information on the accounts had been spied on for a long time.
Accounts of U.S. and EU based Chinese human rights activists were also targeted in the same way during
its investigation.
Google also found traces of attacks that hit some high tech American companies.
These attacks aimed to steal intellectual property and technologies that were being developed by the
companies.
The last case I'd like you to know about is the Stuxnet worm.
We're moving on to the latest history now the worm hit Iran in June of 2010.
It was a highly specific were written for PC devices that hit itself by using a rootkit.
The technology used to develop sticks and it had to be highly sophisticated as the motivation behind
the attack was to impede the Iranian nuclear program.
The virus might have been spread into uranium enrichment plants through a U.S. flash drive.
The infected drives would have needed to be connected to a computer that controlled centrifuges used
for cooling nuclear fuel.
The Iranian stuff broke basic security rules.
The virus exploited vulnerabilities that were unknown at the point of attack.
The U.S. and Israel have been obviously speculated to be involved in the attacks.
The virus caused centrifuges to malfunction by slowing them down and making them work faster after a
few weeks.
This behavior should have been immediately detected at the uranium enrichment plant and immediate steps
should have been taken.
The Iranians had replaced about 1000 centrifuges before they understood that they were under attack.
The nuclear program was not stopped however.
Two Iranian scientists were later killed in bomb explosions which can also be linked to the attack.
Summing up it has to be highlighted that cyber criminals don't seek publicity.
They don't want to be media heroes dangerous rationale behind their attacks as motivated by greed or
national interest.
This is an indirect reason which explains why we don't hear much nowadays on cyber attacks.
They aren't launched to bring their creators fame.
They're intended to be stealthy and bring money.
Thank you.