CYBER ATTACKS

CYBER ATTACKS

Did you know that Cyber attacks for today exceed 1,523,196 and is about half a million less than yesterday's 2,043,871 cyber attacks. If you don't believe me, you can verify it for yourself here. The malware families that account for about 40 percent of all recorded attacks are from the Worm32.Conflicker, the Virus.Win32.Sality, the Cutwail botnet and the Neutrino Exploit kit. These treats have been  religiously turning MS Windows computers into DDoS and spam-spewing botnet drones for at least the  past five years. But now, that Cryptowall ransomware version 4 was released, corporate cyber security companies are on a back foot. This is exactly what is portrayed in the Series Mr. Robot when Evil Corp's entire data centre got hacked and  encrypted with 256-bit AES encryption.

Hacks taking place every the day

The trick to doing this, is to open a backdoor through some unauthorized remote administration software. Once this is done, you essentially own the target computer system. Trojans like Cryptowall, Netbus, Back Orifice and SubSeven have several customizable options to get the job done.

Looking at the daily cyber war far between attacking countries like USA, China,  Portugal,  Germany,  Russia,  Sweden,  United Arab Emirates,  United Kingdom,  Netherlands,  and Turkey, etc, and target countries like USA  India,  Chile, Sweden,  United Kingdom, Taiwan,  Poland,  Brazil,  Norway,  Russia, flinging virus and Trojans at one another is bound to strain relations.

Hackers are attacking targets across all borders

Some of the malware threats are:- 

Worm32 Conflicker
Banker.Win32.Bancos.K
Trojan.Win32.ZeroAccess.A
Worm.Win32.Brontok.B
Trojan.Win32.Virtu.A
Trojan.Win32.Mwzlesson.A
Virus.Win32.Sality.
Operator.Andromeda.gx
Operator.Cryptowall3.bbe
Operator.Trojan.Win32.Grafter.e.a
Trojan.Win32.Smokeloadr.C

FSOCIETY

F-Society, Fsociety, fSociety, fuck society.

Mr. Robot is probably the best series I've seen in 2015. The story line revolves around an anarchic, highly secretive, anti-establishment  hacker group named "fSociety" based in Coney Island New York, intent on recruiting Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) to help them with their mission to destroy the conglomerate E Corp and in the process cancel world debt . Elliot is  a socially anxious yet morally righteous "white hat" super-hacker,  whose day job with Allsafe Cybersecurity is to protect E Corp's servers against external exploits. Fsociety contact Elliot using a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDoS) attack that takes E Corp offline, but leaving a message in the DAT file on  one of E Corps servers for him. As a result Eliot becomes cautiously affiliated to  "fSociety"  which is led by Mr. Robot (Christian Slater). After disabling the rootkit that was responsible for the DDoS, instead of deleting the file, he changed its root attributes, granting himself sole access.

Elliot, Mr Robot and Darlene after the E corp crash.

Elliot is a social outcast, skitso, a little nutso and very different, continually hallucinating about traumatic incidents that he experienced as a child by his father who was his best and only friend. Living alone and lonely, existing in his own mental space and his own reality, his narcotics-clouded brain, blocked out the fact that the alluring coder Darlene (Carly Chaikin) is actually his sister, even though they interacted to some degree, and that fSociety's imaginary leader "Mr. Robot" was in fact their late father. Elliot also frequents a therapist, Krista Gordon who assists him to deal with his anger, his anxiety and  his introversion but not out of choice. He is a hacker my night and exposes offenders who he feels needs to tow the line. At the end of it all, Elliot's  often unreliable  mind couldn't piece together E Corp's take down nor could he recollect whether or not he orchestrated it.

Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) in Mr Robot

In their  determination  to bring down the world corporate structure, fSociety members adopts a disguise that looks somewhat like the the Monopoly Man when flighting their video manifestos, making demands that E-corp donate all the ill-gotten gains to charity and give all the clients a reprieve. But when E-Corp doesn't comply with their demand, they encrypt all their data with 256-bit AES encryption ransomware, disabling all banking, credit transfers, credit card purchases etc. In the real world, to decode AES-256 bit encryption would take approximately trenonagintillion  years to exhaust half the combinations of a AES-256 key. Restated, some  ~6.7e40 times longer than the age of the universe which is estimated to be 14 billion years in existence.

Support for fSociety for cancelling the debt of masses

All this has a very current day ring to to it especially as ransomware is used to encrypt business computers globally. Ukranian hackers have been instrumental in extorting money out of American businesses with CryptoWall and CTB Locker for almost three years and there isn't much that the FBI and the CIA can do about it.  Mr Robot series paints a picture of a global corporation that is the villans, and the hacker collectives, each battling with his own mentally and personal socially issues, as the heroes that society roots for.  The underlying message says that all it takes to destroy the financial world is a few crackpot hackers and and internet connection.

However, the series does however gives laymen especially the corporate types a perspective of the data world of cyber spying, viruses, honeypots, spiked emails, trojans, rootkits, ransomware, encryption keys and other computer system vulnerabilities. The TOR network and onion routing protocols are mentioned a few times and in the very first episode it is highlighted that whoever owns the end nodes, owns all the data that traverses it. Meaning if any hacker owns the ISP of the business his targeting then every bit of data that flows through their data pipe belongs to him or her.

Scenes showing hackers destroying their own computer equipment "wipe down mode" is a bit overboard, and microwave oven and incinerator are a bit dramatic since power supplies and computer boxes are incapable of retaining any data. Most experienced hackers cover their tracks very well and leave no evidence behind unless they want to be caught. Except for the hardrives, the computer's BIOS, routers, cellphones and flash memory, the majority of other computer components save no information about use whatsoever. 

A CPU cooking in a microwave

Computer hardrives, hubs/switch, power supplies incinerated

Besides, the Computer Abuse and Fraud Act is notoriously difficult to navigate and just as difficult to prosecute suspects. Considering hackers using  the TOR browser is routed through several connections all over the world and changes their IP number through proxies at least 3 times masking  their true identity online and making their connection appear as if it is coming from another country like Estonia for example. So the "IP address evidence" that is left behind  is not theirs but rather totally anonymous.  In fact the FBI has been paying a university crack team a million dollars to decode the TOR onion protocol yet more than 2 million hacks  are taking place daily globally.

TORRENTS

TORRENTS

Man is a self centered social creature with an inmate need to associate with other like minded social creatures. As such, they hob-nob, mingle,  brag and boast about themselves, their abilities, their possessions and their achievements to the point that it makes other people  sick of their bullshit. Today the Internet is inundated with social networking apps with dozens more still pending, not to mention those on the distant horizon. Platforms for these hyper social individuals that just crave the needs to be in everyone else's face, faking it as if they going to win an Oscar for it. Currently the most prominent of these platforms are Facebook, Twitter, PerfSpot, Instagram, MySpace, Bebo, Xing,  Sonico, Millat Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc, but in no particular order. 

Admittedly social networking has made global communication easy, quick, transparent and very convenient, especially for those who have family and friend abroad. One would think that Telcos are loosing millions in revenue, since nowadays few people are using the telephone networks for telephonic communication. But in reality that's is a myth, they are not loosing millions but instead raking in billions in revenue from bandwidth sold to virtually everyone who owns a smart phone or has an internet connection. Yet most people only use a fraction of the data bandwidth that they pay for monthly, forfeiting several megabytes if not gigabytes. Instead of the Telcos allowing their patrons to accumulate or consolidate their unused bandwidth over time, they usurp it, and this translates to an even greater bottom line for these giant Telco world wide. 

There are some people that are pissed, who hate these policies, and see this as corporate theft and are angered by it, to the point that they resorting to hacking  Telcos. Case in point,  the Talk-Talk lost thousands because of ongoing hack attacks. Their CEO very calmly apologized to the patrons for their inability to secure their networks, but never for stealing from their clients. Be that as it may,  another "social networking platform" known as Torrents can quite easily be used to spend your excess data bandwidth instead of donating it back to these already wealthy Telcos and at least get some books, movie series, full movies, etc in return. A Torrent is a digital file that contains metadata about files and folders to be distributed and uses trackers to interconnects peer to peer networks. 

Bit torrent, Tribler, μTorrent, Tixati, Bittornado, Vuse, Mediaget, Frostwire, Bitlord, Deluge,  Bitcomet, etc... are just a few Torrent clients for Windows, Mac, Android and Linux, amongst several others. Torrents allows your computer to connect to hundreds of other host computers globally. However, the files you choose to download are not hosted on any particular computer but on hundreds of computers strewn all over the internet each seeding a few bytes of the file you need  until the file is fully downloaded. Torrents can be used to download anything from computer software, books, tutorials, music, movies, series, and even porn, if that tickles your pink parts. 

They are very unlike the regular social networking apps that allow people to pass off  their bullshit as insight and their fake comments as caring, spending endless hours umbilicaled to the networks and setting themselves up to be get hacked. Once the files you chose are downloading your computer seeds the file to others who also wish to have the file in question. Torrents can download at speeds of more than  1.5G in an hour or as slow as a 10 megabyte files taking several hours to download. However, Torrents are frowned upon by the authorities and many Torrent sites like Piratebay , and Kickass, Isohunt,  have been forced to close down because of "copyright infringement". However prior to this, these sites have been duplicated and operate in the.org domain. There are also several other Torrent sites like Megatorrents,  Torrentz,   Limetorrents, Torrentfreak, etc. So take extra care when downloading ,  copyright  computer software,  music, books, etc, because the authorities, spooks and government agencies, could track your IP and prosecute you under US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An alternative is to use the Tor browser if you wish to browse anonymously, without leaving behind a browser history. Several of the Torrent sites are hosted on servers that serve pornographic materials, so if you a bit of a prude, steer clear of Torrent sight because popups can turn out to be quite embarrassing especially if you using a computer in a public place.