Syria, China, Iran, Bahrain and Vietnam are flagrantly spying online, media watchdog RSF said, urging controls on the export of Internet surveillance tools to regimes clamping down on dissent.
Tuesday’s report entitled “Enemies of the Internet” also singled out five companies — Gamma, Trovicor, Hacking Team, Amesys and Blue Coat — that it branded “digital era mercenaries,” who were helping oppressive governments.
Syria’s estimated five million Internet users are subject to rampant state spying, Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF, Journalists without Borders) said in the report, which coincides with the World Day Against Cyber-Censorship.
Noting that 22 journalists and 18 Internet users had been jailed, it said the network was controlled by two entities including the Syrian Computer Society (SCG) founded by President Bashar al-Assad.
The SCG, it said, controlled Syria’s 3G infrastructure, while the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment (STE) controlled the majority of the fixed connections.
“When the government orders the blocking of a word, of an URL, or of a site, STE transmits the order to service providers,” it said, publishing a leaked 1999 bid invitation from STE to install a national Internet system in Syria.
The requirements include recording of online and offline activities, copying of all e-mail exchanges from within Syria, and the ability to detect, intercept and block any encrypted data.
Damascus beefed up its monitoring in 2011 “adding new technologies to its cyber-arsenal” including proxy Blue Coat servers, RSF said.
Iran meanwhile is in the process of creating a home-grown Internet system, citing a series of cyber attacks on its nuclear installations, RSF said.
“Applications and services such as email, search engines and social networks are proposed to be developed under government control,” to allow for “large-scale surveillance and the systematic elimination of dissent.”
Twenty Internet users were jailed and one had been killed in the past year, it said, warning against the use of Iranian virtual private networks as it “will be like throwing yourself into the lion’s jaws.”
But in terms of sheer numbers, the “Chinese Communist Party runs one of the world’s biggest digital empires, if not the biggest,” RSF said, adding that individuals and companies have to rent their broadband access from the Chinese state or a government-controlled company.
“The tools put in place to filter and monitor the Internet are collectively known as the Great Firewall of China. Begun in 2003, it allows for access to foreign sites to be filtered,” it said, and to block feeds and content deemed undesirable.
“The Chinese cyber-dissident Hu Jia and his wife Zeng Jinyang have had policemen stationed at the foot of their apartment building for months,” it said.
“China jails more people involved in news and information than any other country. Today 30 journalists and 69 netizens are in prison.”
Bahrain, which with an Internet penetration of 77 percent is one of the most connected states in the Middle East, has seen a dramatic increase in surveillance and news blackouts in the past three years, RSF said.
Vietnam’s network is shoddy in quality but under tight state control. Thirty-one Internet users are in prison and Internet cafes are tightly monitored with users obliged to show identity documents before using them.
RSF called for a ban on the sale of surveillance hardware and software to countries that flout basic fundamental rights and crack down on any opposition.
“The private sector cannot be expected to police itself. Legislators must intervene,” it said.
“The European Union and the United States have already banned the export of surveillance technology to Iran and Syria. This praiseworthy initiative should not be an isolated one.”
File photo shows an Iranian youth using a computer at an internet cafe in Iran’s Hamadan province. Syria, China, Iran, Bahrain and Vietnam are flagrantly spying online, media watchdog RSF said.
Graphic on a report about online spying compiled by Reporters Sans Frontiers, alleging that Syria, China, Iran, Bahrain and Vietnam are the worst state offenders for using Internet surveillance to crackdown on dissent.
Image taken on October 11, 2010 shows Syrian President Bashar al-Assad attending a press conference at al-Shaab palace in Damascus. Media watchdog RSF said Syria’s network was controlled by two entities, including the Syrian Computer Society founded by Assad.
Image provided by Zeng Jinyan shows her husband, Chinese dissident Hu Jia, at their home in Beijing on June 27, 2011. “The Chinese cyber-dissident Hu Jia and his wife Zeng Jinyang have had policemen stationed at the foot of their apartment building for months,” an RSF report said.
Image taken on January 15, 2013 shows a man reading the news on his laptop at a coffee shop in Hanoi, Vietnam. Vietnam’s network is shoddy in quality but under tight state control.
The United States has recently stepped up the rhetoric against China on cyber espionage, with President Barack Obama joined the chorus on Wednesday.
He complained billions of dollars could be lost due to theft of American corporate secrets, following warnings by Pentagon officials that cyber espionage could be a dire threat to America’s national security.
Washington’s allegations show it is rather impatient with rampant backdoor thefts in the digital world, but casting China as a specific culprit for the ubiquitous problem is unfair.
Computer hacking is an emerging threat to global security. Both China and the United States are victims of electronic assaults.
In 2012, more than 14 million computers in China were hijacked and controlled from foreign IP addresses, with more than 10 million of those being controlled from IP addresses in the U.S., according to CNCERT, China’s top Internet coordination center.
In fairness, that does not mean the hackers were American, or that Washington was supporting or condoning the digital attacks against China. With computer technologies evolving so fast, hackers can easily hide or change their IPs. That makes hackers anonymous and difficult to trace.
Using the same logic, any hasty accusation aimed at a specific country for cyber attacks is technologically flawed and politically inappropriate.
Blaming the attacks on Chinese hackers is a rash statement that lacks credible evidence, while picking on Beijing as backing such acts sounds like an insidious attempt to tarnish China’s image.
The Chinese government has launched dozens of campaigns against backdoor spying and malicious software, cutting off remote control by tens of millions of IP addresses.
To eradicate cyber crime on the borderless Internet is barely possible without transnational cooperation. In this new field, the United States and China share common interests.
China-U.S. relations are the most important bilateral relations on earth. Instead of trading barbs and taking aggressive steps against each other, the world’s biggest and second largest economies would do well to combine their efforts to build a safer virtual world.
Security researchers have identified an ongoing cyber-espionage campaign that compromised 59 computers belonging to government organizations, research institutes, think tanks and private companies from 23 countries in the past 10 days.
The attack campaign was discovered and analyzed by researchers from security firm Kaspersky Lab and the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security (CrySyS) of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
Dubbed MiniDuke, the attack campaign used targeted email messages — a technique known as spear phishing — that carried malicious PDF files rigged with a recently patched exploit for Adobe Reader 9, 10 and 11.
The exploit was originally discovered in active attacks earlier this month by security researchers from FireEye and is capable of bypassing the sandbox protection in Adobe Reader 10 and 11. Adobe released security patches for the vulnerabilities targeted by the exploit on Feb. 20.
The new MiniDuke attacks use the same exploit identified by FireEye, but with some advanced modifications, said Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky Lab’s global research and analysis team, on Wednesday. This could suggest that the attackers had access to the toolkit that was used to create the original exploit.
The malicious PDF files are rogue copies of reports with content relevant to the targeted organizations and include a report on the informal Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) seminar on human rights, a report on Ukraine’s NATO membership action plan, a report on Ukraine’s regional foreign policy and a report on the 2013 Armenian Economic Association, and more.
If the exploit is successful, the rogue PDF files install a piece of malware that’s encrypted with information gathered from the affected system. This encryption technique was also used in the Gauss cyber-espionage malware and prevents the malware from being analyzed on a different system, Raiu said. If run on a different computer, the malware will execute, but will not initiate its malicious functionality, he said.
Another interesting aspect of this threat is that it’s only 20KB in size and was written in Assembler, a method that’s rarely used today by malware creators. Its small size is also unusual when compared to the size of modern malware, Raiu said. This suggests that the programmers were “old-school,” he said.
The piece of malware installed during this first stage of the attack connects to specific Twitter accounts that contain encrypted commands pointing to four websites that act as command-and-control servers. These websites, which are hosted in the U.S., Germany, France and Switzerland, host encrypted GIF files that contain a second backdoor program.
The second backdoor is an update to the first and connects back to the command-and-control servers to download yet another backdoor program that’s uniquely designed for each victim. As of Wednesday, the command-and-control servers were hosting five different backdoor programs for five unique victims in Portugal, Ukraine, Germany and Belgium, Raiu said.These unique backdoor programs connect to different command-and-control servers in Panama or Turkey, and they allow the attackers to execute commands on the infected systems.
The people behind the MiniDuke cyber-espionage campaign have operated since at least April 2012, when one of the special Twitter accounts was first created, Raiu said. However, it’s possible that their activity was more subtle until recently, when they decided to take advantage of the new Adobe Reader exploit to compromise as many organizations as possible before the vulnerabilities get patched, he said.
The malware used in the new attacks is unique and hasn’t been seen before, so the group might have used different malware in the past, Raiu said. Judging by the wide range of targets and the global nature of the attacks, the attackers probably have a large agenda, he said.
MiniDuke victims include organizations from Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Montenegro, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom and the United States.
In the United States, a research institute, two pro-U.S. think tanks and a health care company have been affected by this attack, Raiu said without naming any of the victims.
The attack is not as sophisticated as Flame or Stuxnet, but is high-level nevertheless, Raiu said. There are no indications regarding where the attackers might operate from or what interests they might be serving.
That said, the backdoor coding style is reminiscent of a group of malware writers known as 29A, believed to be defunct since 2008. There’s a “666” signature in the code and 29A is the hexadecimal representation of 666, Raiu said.
A “666” value was also found in the malware used in the earlier attacks analyzed by FireEye, but that threat was different from MiniDuke, Raiu said. The question of whether the two attacks are related remains open.
News of this cyber-espionage campaign comes on the heels of renewed discussions about the Chinese cyber-espionage threat, particularly in the U.S., that were prompted by a recent report from security firm Mandiant. The report contains details about the years-long activity of a group of cyberattackers dubbed the Comment Crew that Mandiant believes to be a secret cyberunit of the Chinese Army. The Chinese government has dismissed the allegations, but the report was widely covered in the media.
Raiu said that none of the MiniDuke victims identified so far was from China, but declined to speculate on the significance of this fact. Last week security researchers from other companies identified targeted attacks that distributed the same PDF exploit masquerading as copies of the Mandiant report.
Those attacks installed malware that was clearly of Chinese origin, Raiu said. However, the way in which the exploit was used in those attacks was very crude and the malware was unsophisticated when compared to MiniDuke, he said.
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia –  A former Canadian Navy intelligence officer who pleaded guilty to espionage on Wednesday was selling secrets to the Russians for about $3,000 a month.
Sub-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle showed no emotion as he acknowledged to a Nova Scotia provincial court judge that he understood the consequences of entering guilty pleas to three charges and was voluntarily giving up his right to a trial
Federal prosecutor Lyne Decarie outlined the case against Delisle during a bail hearing in March, saying he voluntarily entered the Russian embassy in Ottawa in 2007 and offered to sell information to them. A publication ban was imposed on those hearings at the time.
At the bail hearing, Decarie read portions of a police statement where Delisle reportedly described the day he walked into the embassy as “professional suicide.”
“The day I flipped sides … from that day on, that was the end of my days as Jeff Delisle,” Decarie read from his statement.
She said he claimed to police that his betrayal “was for ideological reasons” and that he wasn’t doing it for the money.”
Delisle, 41, worked at a naval communications and intelligence center in Halifax that was a multinational base with access to secret data from NATO countries.
Decarie alleged in court that Delisle had access to the facility’s secure and unsecured systems that contained information from Canada and allies, and that he shared mostly military data.
Decarie said Delisle was asked to search for Russian references in the past month on his work computer, then copy it onto a USB key and take it home with him where he uploaded it to an email program that he shared with his foreign handler.
Decarie said Delisle, a father who is divorced from his first wife, received $5,000 for the first couple transfers and then $3,000 every month. Decarie said he began doing it “following some personal problem.”
He came to the authorities’ attention when he was returning from a trip to Brazil to meet a Russian handler in the fall of 2011, Decarie said. He was carrying several thousand dollars after staying the country only four days, raising the suspicions of Canada Border Services agents who shared their concerns with the police and military.
The prosecution said some time after, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police took over the account he shared with the Russians, allowing him to think he was transmitting material to a Russian agent when “it was actually the RCMP opening the email.”
Delisle was arrested in Halifax last Jan. 13 and charged with espionage and breach of trust, making him the first person in Canada to be convicted under the country’s Security of Information Act which was passed by Parliament after the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
Defense lawyer Mike Taylor said the evidence against his client is overwhelming.
“You reach a point in which you say, ‘OK we’re toast,'” Taylor said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “Barring some catastrophic happening there was going to be a conviction.”
Taylor said at no time did his client put any Canadian troops in danger.
“There was no information that indicated where troops were or ships were,” he said.
Taylor also suggested the Russians put pressure on when at one point he tried to stop spying. Decarie said Delisle told officers that the Russians had pictures of his children.
“They had all my information. They had photos of me,” Decarie read from the statement. “They had photos of my children and I knew exactly what it was for.”
Delisle, wearing a blue hooded sweat shirt, jeans and glasses, clasped his hands and appeared unmoved as the judge asked him if he understood the consequences of the plea on Wednesday.
Taylor said no deal on sentencing was reached with the prosecution. Delisle is looking at life in prison, but Taylor said it will be up to the judge. Two days of sentencing hearings will start Jan. 10.
The Canadian military, the government and police have not revealed any details about what information is alleged to have been disclosed. A spokesman for Canada’s defense minister said they’ll reserve comment as the judicial process continues.
Delisle, who joined the navy as a reservist in 1996, became a member of the regular forces in 2001 and was promoted to an officer rank in 2008. He had access to systems with information shared by the Five Eyes community that includes Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
In damage assessments read in court, officials in the Canadian intelligence community said the breaches from 2007 to 2012 could unmask intelligence sources and place a chill on the sharing of vital security information among allies.
“Delisle’s unauthorized disclosure to the Russians since 2007 has caused severe and irreparable damage to Canadian interests,” one official wrote in a statement read by Decarie.
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Associated Press Writer Rob Gillies in Toronto contributed to this report.
Cyber terrorism and espionage have been highlighted as growing threats to Australian organisations and government departments, according to a new annual report by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).
The Annual Report 2011-12, which was tabled in the federal parliament this week, found that ASIO completed more than 150,000 counter terrorism security assessments during the reporting period.
“Emerging technology and an Internet-connected world offer new avenues of espionage,” read the report.
“The espionage threat is evidence by foreign intelligence services seeking agents in relevant positions, including in the Australian public service and working for Australian businesses, but also seeking access to any computer system or network holding data that could be targeted for espionage activity.”
According to the report, cyber espionage state and non-state actors continued to target Australian organisations.
ASIO pointed out that critical infrastructure, such as SCADA networks, is one area organisations need to focus on protecting in Australia.
“Critical infrastructure by its very nature poses a potential target for those who wish to do harm to Australia and so careful consideration must be given to matters having an impact on the security of critical infrastructure,” read the report.
“No single element of critical infrastructure stands alone and the potential for threats against auxiliary assets must also be considered.”
Over the 2011-12 period, ASIO provided 25 briefing sessions on potential or specific threats to critical infrastructure and produced 22 reports. These were sent to more than 153 government and private sector organisations.
Cyber terrorism
Turning to terrorism, ASIO reported that international influences through the Internet will continue to inspire some Australians to potentially join terrorism groups such as al-Qa’ida.
“Over the 12 months, al-Qa’ida and its affiliates have suffered a number of setbacks including the loss of senior figures such as Anwar al-Aulaqi, in Yemen,” read the report.
“The continuing counter-terrorism efforts of Australia’s partners in South-East Asia are also having an effect on regional extremist networks, although terrorist threats persist.”
However, ASIO conceded that these setbacks have not lessened the extent of what the report referred to as “violent jihadist” groups to promote, foster and engage in terrorism.
“The global tempo of terrorist activities, including attacks, attempted attacks, plotting, fundraising and recruitment, remains undiminished.”
CREST
The report went on to highlight ASIO’s connection with the Australian arm of the Council of Registered Ethical Security Testers (CREST) which was established in March 2012.
“CREST Australia is the product of co-ordinated engagement with industry involving ASIO, CERT Australia and the Defence Signals Directorate [DSD] and will have an important role in establishing clear and agreed standards for cyber-security testing.”
According to the report, the CREST standards will help the business sector be confident that the work conducted by CREST-accredited IT security professionals is completed with integrity, accountability and to agreed international standards. In addition, CREST Australia is affiliated with CREST Great Britain.
