Cyber Warefare, How Do They Do It?

[legoboy]

In recent days with all the chit chat of Anonymous and Megaupload e.c.t I wanted to know how exactly they are doing it and compared to say the cyber warefare of China.

So far it seems the Chinese hackers are still a level about Anonymous, but I was curious do they use like a special super program run from a super computer to steal and access files? or can it really actually just be done on laptop. If it's a supercomputer/program then perhaps they are just lucky to have the bonus equipment.

I wanted to kind of get an idea of the skill levels between the Chinese hackers who have supposedly stole US Military Secrets vs the skills of Anonymous who so far look like they can take down any website in the world with ease.

 

[phreeky]

You're probably better off asking this on a computer based forum. But I'll just point out some common misunderstandings and perhaps point you in the right direction if you want to understand it more.

Firstly you have to understand what it is that is being "hacked". A website? A web interface to a database system? An internal database system? And many alternatives.

This is important because it determines how secure something needs to be and how much it matters. For example websites are normally amazingly insignificant - consider them online sales people with megaphones. Now the stuff that anonymous does to "take them down", that could compared to getting a bunch of people to shout really down and drown them out. Very unsophisticated.

Web interfaces to database systems, which you may even consider to be your online banking system, are much like a website in many ways - they can be "taken down" in a similar fashion. But that's normally all they do. They cannot view data or access data.

Beyond that, including accessing data such as online banking and equivalent systems, it gets more complicated. Most are far more simple than people realise though - social engineering plays an important role, such as phishing via simple emails and fake websites or combined efforts such as getting users employed at an organisation to go to websites that exploit vulnerabilities in internet browsers.

The crux of the matter is that secure systems CAN and ARE in place in many organisations, but unfortunately humans are involved and taking advantage of someone attempting to log into a fake website linked from an email or being naughty and sharing a USB key between work and home is all too common and easy.

My opinion is that Anonymous would have some talented members, but I doubt it's many and ultimately it doesn't need to be, they just make tools that the others use.

 

[PCShogun]

Like Phreeky says, the tools are not as sophisticated as you might think. The best security can be defeated by an uneducated or nonchalant computer user.

One common method for taking a site down is the "Denial of Service" attack. Many "tojan" programs that people get on their computer are designed to add your computer to a system known as a 'botnet'. These botnets can be controlled by a central console running on the botnet owners pc. He simply instructs all the pc's on his botnet to begin hitting the website and it litterally floods with requests and it cannot handle it. it usually crashes the site or at a minimum, causes the site to ignore further requests during the duration of the attack.

Another attack is the "Social Engineering" attack. This usually requires some interaction with a user. They broadcast millions of emails to people saying things like, "please login to your bank account and verify your balance as we have noted a discrepancy." They have a pretty little login here button in the email so the user clicks it. They are then sent to a web site that looks like their bank but isn't. Then it takes there name, login id, and password, files it in a database, then directs them to the real bank website. Later, the hacker uses the captured info to access their bank account and steal the funds.

There are many other themes and scenarios of the above types of attacks. More sophisticated attacks exist. If you want to see a really complex one, read about STUXNET.