A new world war is in the making. Governments from different countries and citizen groups are engaging in daily skirmishes and confrontations through the limitless scope of our new global civilization, personified through the Internet. And, like in more traditional, XX century conflicts, this digital, XXI century warfare also sees the USA taking center stage.
Two days after the FBI director, Robert Mueller, stated to the US Senate that the cyber threat is escalating to such an extent that it soon “will be the number one threat to the country,” the hacktivist group Anonymous posted the recording of a conference call between FBI agents and Scotland Yard officials, in which they discussed efforts to counter hackers and the use of new technologies to spread and organize social unrest.
The content of the call may be of little import to the general public, but the very fact that Anonymous can tap into FBI material shows how serious the threat has become. Along with the taped call, Anonymous published an e-mail, apparently from the FBI, containing the e-mail addresses of all the officials involved in the phone conversation.
At the same time, the hacktivists attacked the websites of several US law enforcement agencies and that of the Greek Justice Ministry, forcing it to go offline for many hours. Anonymous is accusing Athens of behaving irresponsibly in its handling of the long financial crisis, which has brought Greece to its knees and triggered a continental emergency that is threatening the very existence of the European monetary union.
Protests about policies deemed illiberal are but one aspect of the worldwide war Anonymous formally declared last June in a video posted on the Internet, promising action against those governments and businesses most actively engaged in the globalization process.
Less than a fortnight ago, the digital guerrilla group launched a massive attack on US official and corporate computer systems, disabling or defacing many of them for hours. Among the targeted Internet venues were the sites of the FBI, the US Department of Justice, Universal Music, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and Hadopi, the French government agency responsible for intellectual property protection.
The attack was carried out in retaliation for the FBI closing down the globally popular file-sharing website Megaupload, but also as an act of protest against two new bills being debated by the US Congress for the protection of copyrights –the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).
Testifying before the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at its annual Worldwide Threat hearing last Tuesday, Mueller, the CIA director David Petraeus and National Intelligence director James Clapper acknowledged that terrorism is increasingly being replaced by digital warfare in terms of national security. And they stressed how state actors, typically embodied by foreign powers, but also non-state actors such as organized syndicates and militant groups, can represent a serious danger for any democracy because they have the capability to take over or disrupt computerized communication and control centers, bring down power grids or paralyze the electronic systems of public institutions, industries and finance concerns.
Condemning the “wholesale plundering” of American intellectual property and the anti- establishment Internet culture, Clapper emphasized how the raids carried out in the past year by groups like Anonymous or LulzSec on government and business websites “underscore the vulnerability of key sectors of the economy,” while at the same time proving that they have gained “access to potentially disruptive and even lethal technology and know how.”
Anonymous first proved its offensive capabilities on a major scale in 2010, when it disabled the computer systems of credit card giants VISA and MASTERCARD because the two companies, under pressure from the US government, had blocked accounts of the whistle blowing site Wikileaks.
“In the last year,” Clapper said, “we observed increased breadth and sophistication of computer network operations by both state and non-state actors.” And while many attacks are being reported, “many intrusions into US networks are not being detected.”
A major problem in fighting cyber activists seems to be the fuzzy nature of their groups.
Anonymous can hardly be defined as an organization. It has chapters all over the world but it is a nebula of cells made up of hackers, social issues advocates, computer and communications experts who all communicate through blogs and microblogs. It does not have a central structure or a proper chain of command. Aside from a radical stance against the financial elites dominating the world economy, it has no ideological connotations. There are genuine liberals and left or rightwing radicals among its militants. They all share their rejection of the globalization status quo, asserting that it is making the rich richer and the poor poorer, and they support street movements, like Indignados or Occupywallstreet, demanding reform of the world economic system. They fight for free access to, and use of all information available on the Internet. Their declared purpose is to use the means offered by computer and telecom technology to empower the people in the interest of direct democracy, freedom of expression, protection of the environment and the defense of human rights.
In this spirit, in the past few months Anonymous has also launched an anti paedophile crusade, disabling dozens of child porn websites –of the so called ‘darknet’ Lolita City circuit– and publishing names and personal data about hundreds of people from every continent involved with these sites. At the same time the cyber militant group has engaged in a tug of war with Mexican narcotraficking cartels, especially the Zetas –threatening to divulge names and data about their network of informers, supporters, corrupted officials and business frontmen– if they keep kidnapping and killing civilians and social activists, who inform the public about the ferocious, on going drug war through blogs and microblogs. Branding them as snitches, Mexican narcos have made a point of hitting at citizen journalists and netizens who talk about them on cyber forums and social media.
Yet in the eyes of established governments, Anonymous and similar groups are a threat. And they enjoy an intrinsic advantage, according to Clapper, because of the fast evolution of technology, which constantly provides them with new action opportunities and makes it difficult for government entities to defend their computerized systems or provide timely and effective warnings.
All computers and information networks are integrated into a global and vulnerable whole, almost impossible to keep under proper surveillance, even if state agencies and concerned businesses, as Clapper said, cooperate and actively share and exchange security information.
Entry points are countless –they are actually as many as the computers connected to the net– and from each of them any individual, company or country computer network, information system and electronic apparatus can be hit with disruptive software.
The menace, of course, comes not only from hackers or cyber activists, but also from syndicates running international crime schemes and companies engaging in industrial espionage. At the same time, certain countries, according to Mueller and Clapper, use the possibility to access any information system from any computer, stealing data or deranging its functions, in order to further their agenda in the power game on the world stage. More worryingly still, hackings carried out by youth who see the violation of other people’s computers just as a fun challenge can often be related to stealing data for commercial purposes, crime intrigues and/or intelligence warfare.
“We are particularly concerned,” Clapper stressed, “about entities within China and Russia conducting intrusions into US computer networks and stealing US data.” Echoing previous American intelligence alerts, Clapper said that these two countries have been responsible for “extensive illicit intrusions” into US networks. China in particular over the past few years has been repeatedly accused of being behind attempts to break into the information systems of US public and private concerns.
At the end of January, a blog posting from the computer security firm Symantec warned about a Trojan horse program dubbed Sykipot, which seemed to be targeting firms in the defense industry and had been traced back to computer servers in China. The Sykipot attackers, the posting said, “are familiar with the Chinese language and are using computer resources in China.”
The best known case of a Chinese digital offensive is probably the 2009 series of intrusions into Google’s Gmail, which targeted 30 high-tech companies including Yahoo, Adobe, Rackspace and Northrop Grumman. US officials believe that by accessing these firms’ networks, China was trying to obtain intellectual property and source code information. (From) China also seems to have been the origin of last year’s hacking raids into computer systems run by NASDAQ-OMX, the parent company of the NASDAQ stock exchange, and into computers at the International Monetary Fund.
Speaking to senators, however, Clapper also said that Iran’s cyber capabilities have “increased in depth and complexity” over the past few years. Iran’s military recently claimed to have brought down an American drone by hacking into its guidance systems. “We foresee a cyber-environment in which emerging technologies are developed and implemented before security responses can be put in place,” Clapper pointed out.
US government experts have assessed that some 60,000 new malicious computer programs are reported every day. Most of these bugs, worms and viruses can be countered relatively easily, but many manage to operate for some time before they can be neutralized.
In line with the departments of Defense and Homeland Security policies and with a White House drive launched a year ago by President Barack Obama, the question of how to deal with cyber threats has been an issue in Washington for some time. In the next month, Congress is expected to take up debate about pending cyber-security legislation that could create new authorities to protect critical computer networks.
Upon launching his White House digital defense initiative last year, Obama declared that the “cyber threat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation” and that “America’s economic prosperity in the 21st century will depend on cyber security.” Both the House and Senate continue to work toward comprehensive legislation on the issue. The House Committee on Homeland Security is marking up cyber security legislation this Wednesday, 8 January, and the Senate will move to consider a comprehensive cyber security bill later this month. Also, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has indicated that it may hold a hearing on that bill within the next two weeks.
At the Senate hearing, Mueller confirmed that the newly established National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, which brings together all the 18 US security agencies to work on cyber threats, is already operative. “In the same way we changed to address terrorism, we have to change to address cybercrime,” Mueller added, insisting on the need “to build up the collective addressing of that threat.”
The joint task force will certainly look into the case of the taped FBI-Scotland Yard call about the anti-hacking operations and arrests carried out in the past year by American and British intelligence units. Both the FBI and the UK police have independently confirmed the Anonymous computer breach, along with the content of the taped call and the leaked e-mail related to the call. In a statement the FBI said that the content of the phone conversation “was intended for law enforcement officers only and was illegally obtained. A criminal investigation is under way.”
The central e-crime unit of the London’s Metropolitan Police said the matter was being investigated, but also stressed that, at this stage, experts have not warned against any actual operational risks and believe that Scotland Yard computers are sufficiently protected.
It is not known how Anonymous managed to obtain the recording. “The FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now,” teased a comment on one of the Twitter accounts linked to Anonymous, AnonymousIRC. But a lawyer for one of the hackers named in the phone call told the BBC that the taping appeared to have been retrieved as an audio file from an intercepted e-mail, rather than having been eavesdropped upon.
Regardless, the dent to the public image of the two agencies involved is huge.
The 17-minute phone call allegedly took place on 17 January. The leaked e-mail had been sent a few days earlier to law enforcement officials in the US, the UK, Sweden, Ireland and other countries, with an invitation to “discuss the on-going investigations related to Anonymous, Lulzsec, Antisec, and other associated splinter groups.”
While the FBI press office was busy circumstantiating the phone call issue, Anonymous claimed credit for an attack on the website of the Boston police, hacked in reprisal for the city’s “police brutality” in handling the OccupyBoston protests. A few days before that, Anonymous claimed also to have attacked a police website in Salt Lake City, Utah. The attack, which allowed cyber militants to access personal data and information on police informants, detectives, crime cases and residents, seems to be the first of a series of raids planned against local administration entities for the case that the city adopts the new, repressive anti-graffiti laws under discussion at a state level.
At the same time, the Internet venue of the law firm Puckett & Faraj, in Alexandria, Virginia, was forced to close temporarily due to an Anonymous attack. The firm has been under media attention in the past years for representing a US Marine convicted for his role in a 2005 attack in Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of 24 unarmed civilians.
In line with their anti-establishment posture, cyber militants act on the whole front of social and civil action, but their true potential shines when it comes to demonstrative actions such as the raid launched against the Justice Ministry in Greece.
While officially representing a reprisal for the austerity measures imposed on the Greeks by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, these actions actually spell louder than anything else the political message of cyber militants: it is a message against policies implemented throughout the world meant to deal with the global economic crisis; policies that often seem to defend financial corporate interests at the expense of social welfare systems and labor markets.
More importantly, they show that the forces engaged in the global, digital conflict already under way are not only established powers competing for world supremacy, they are also organized groups of citizens –of netizens, to be more specific, some rather aggressive– who fight to keep the Internet a free space. And last but not least, these actions ultimately prove that the front lines of the new war run not only along traditional, national borders but also through the folds of civil society inside every country.
