Special Interest Groups’ Use of Social Media as a Weapon

There are hundreds of special interest groups involved in a wide variety of interests ranging from commerce, health, or art, to community development or religion. There are also groups that are involved in political and social causes. This excerpt from Social Media Warfare: Equal Weapons for All examines well-established special interest groups and the various types of special interest groups, as well as issues related to these groups: health care; guns, hate, and social media warfare; abortion debates and violent acts of extremists; environmentalists and eco-terrorists; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) rights and social media warfare; and religious bias and discrimination in social media warfare.

The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) Releases the Encyclopedia of the Most Prominent Hacktivists, Nation State, and Mercenary Hackers

The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, a leading cybersecurity think tank, has published its most recent research report entitled Know Your Enemies 2.0: A Primer on Advanced Persistent Threat Groups. The report is an encyclopedia of bad actors stemming from the nation state, mercenary, and hacktivist arenas and details the characteristics and intricacies of the world’s most prolific threat groups.

Authors James Scott (ICIT Co-Founder and Senior Fellow) and Drew Spaniel (Visiting Scholar) cover threat groups not by use of a particular ranking system, rather by the dominant players categorized by geography, including China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Zero days, malware, tool kits, exploit techniques, digital foot prints and targets are covered in-depth. The report covers 40 bad actors including: Blue Termite, the Elderwood Platform, Deep Panda APT 30, APT 2, Tarh Andishan, Ajax, Dark Hotel, Bureau 121, Energetic Bear, Uroburos, Sofacy Group, the “Duke” family, Carbanak, SEA, Animal Farm, Hellsing. and Shrouded.

He Said; She Said

Anonymous Hackers Declare Assault on Israel in support of Palestinians

Israel Says It Repelled Most Attacks on Its Web Sites by Pro-Palestinian Hackers

Anonymous hacks Israel; Israel says they're amateurs. He said; she said. We'll never know.

Anonymous Attack Protests Web Laws, Catches Innocents

Of course, like terrorists everywhere, they believe there are no innocents.

Anonymous and cybervigilantism in Mexico

Nice analysis of how hacktivism is evolving to challege a corrupt Mexican government and the drug cartels.

Anonymous denies it's behind the 'kill Facebook' campaign, but retaliates against BART

Does it matter that Anonymous didn't hit Facebook? When Bay Area Transit shut off cell phone service to prevent a protest, which Anonymous didn't like, it hacked BART systems and released customer data, more than likely data of some of its supporters. Sounds like asymmetric warfare to me. What does Anonymous care about a little collateral damage. As a commuter rail rider, though, I would not complain it all public transportation systems blocked all cell phone traffic.

When does hacktivism become a criminal activity?

RIM is threaten with being hacked if it for helps UK cops stop riots. Credit card companines were hacked for cutting off Wikileaks. When does hacktivism become a criminal activity? It's an interesting situation. Many would argue that Wikileaks engaged in criminal activity by releasing the State Dept documents, and that cyberthugs got payback. It's really not a big step to from using social media to organize demonstrations to using it to organize flashmobs for rioting and looting. The role of social media in the Middle East uprisings not withstanding, does it's use to forment crime warrant warrant cooperation between service provides and government. Civil disobediance frequently leads to demonstrations, and demonstratios to riots as the original intent is corrupted by those who see an opportunity for criminal profit.

What's this say about the security of service providers? I don't know why I was surprised that Wilileaks supporters were able to hit MasterCard and Visa. You'd assume their security was good, and obviosuly the assumption was wrong. Is RIM as vulnerable? It'll be interesting to see if it's hacked regardless of whether or it cooperates with UK cops. Is there anything it can do to prevent it now that it's been warned.

Jim Tiller suggested that enterprises really can't "protect and detect," but can only "respond." If true, then perhaps hackers don't need to penetrate systems, but just threaten. This opens a new area of threat.