Friday, May 9, 2008

Can Honeypot save the Nasty Cyber Attacks?

In a recent nasty cyber attack by some mean hackers who flooded the Epilepsy Foundation's website with hundreds of pictures and links with rapid flashing images. I would say it is like giving 'Electric shocks' to the priveledged people.

Cyber attack leading to severe migraine and near-seizure reactions in some site visitors who viewed those images. People with photosensitive epilepsy can get as near as seizure reactions, when they are exposed to flickering images, a response could be caused by video games and cartoons too.

The hackers who infiltrated the Epilepsy Foundation's site didn't appear to care about profit. The harmful pages didn't appear to try to push down code that would allow the hacker to gain control of the victims' computers, for instance.

In another recent attack, hackers exploited a simple coding vulnerability in Sen. Barack Obama's Web site to redirect users visiting the community blogs section to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's official campaign site.

Many bot-herders are advanced techies operating in developing countries with large populations such as Russia or China, sending out attacks with names such as Canadian Pharmacy, hiding phishing links in images and viruses in spreadsheets, and registering a series of phishing sites with similar names.

Many organizations use a fast-flux network of shells, making it harder to track malicious Web traffic to its source.

Bot-herders and other 'spam kings' are difficult to track down, especially in so many different jurisdictions and areas around world, with no enforced policies against them

"In this situation, it's really a matter of knowing your enemy -- and it's a refining process at that."

On the benevolent side, intelligence arsenal including the Honeypot are helping researchers to learn more about the malicious activity going on in the cybersphere.

It's like plugging an unpatched computer into the Internet. It's vulnerable to attacks, just like in the real world. Then it generates alerts based on virus activity and monitors it in real time. It allows us to gain information, and to see the enemy's next move.

Other initiatives, such as the large-scope Operation Bot Roast -- an active campaign to track down botnets, find operation control centers and the organizations behind them -- have been only partially successful, as several holes remain in the overall infrastructure.

E-mail services, ISPs, registrars, search engines and software makers are also vulnerable to attacks and sometimes reluctant to cooperate in the fight against cybercrime.

That's how these guys stay alive. Our active support could help track them down with their names for phishing and malware hosting. The researchers spend most of our time trying to mitigate the threat, finding out what's going on with malware and reporting to the authorities.

I am sure a collaborative effort achieved between the researchers, the security industry and other authorities working at these levels could build a firewall hard to peneterate for the hackers up there on the web

No doubt, the anti-crime effort goes all the way down to the individual.

No comments: