Sony Hack and aftermath, Begining an era of Cyber War !!!!!!

• The Sony servers were hacked allegedly by North Korea hackers at the behest of their leaders in order to protest for the : The Interview” a movie by Sony Picture , putting their supreme leader in bad frame.
• This lead to compromise of various servers of Sony Pictures, loss of many unreleased pictures and otherwise sensitive information and data, besides receive of threatening emails by Sony Pictures employees as alleged by them
• This forced Sony Pictures to subsequently postpone the release of the movies
• Also came into the picture the statements form US presidents and counter statement from North Korea, escalating in retaliatory cyber attacks on each other.
• Is this start of A full fledged Cyber war?
• Maybe Yes or maybe its just a case of Cyber Vandalism as said by Mr Obama.
• Lets say goodbye to 2014 and welcome 2015 with New, Unknown challenges of Cyber Space

 

Cyber Threats:The Year That Was 2014

1. The year of 2014 was a hectic and busy year for CISOs and CIOs. There were many revelation by ex- Employees about their agencies gathering information or spying on even friendly nations in the name National Security.
2. Wikileaks, Snowden, PRISM etc scared the hell out of common Internet users as well as Governments across the world. Everyone felt naked. There was an aura of Disbelief that swept across EU and other friendly nations of US when it was revealed that their data transmissions were intercepted by NSA to "Quell " any suspected Terrorist strikes.
3. Similarly revelation of many long standing Bugs and vulnerabilities by various independent researchers introduced the cyberworld of Heartbleed, Shellshock,etc . It's possible that these vulnerabilities had been exploited by them for years.
4. Lastly not to mention was the case of iOS being targeted big time by WireLurker.
5. Are we going to see the resurgence of old bugs or there are going to be some new evils that will emerge in 2015!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ICANN Hacked ....Again

   image source: www.darknet.org.uk

• The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is responsible for the coordination of maintenance and methodology of several databases of unique identifiers related to the namespaces of the Internet, and ensuring the network's stable and secure operation.(Wikipedia definition).
• It address the issue of domain name ownership resolution for generic top-level domains (gTLDs).
• As per the information available, ICANN has been subject to a spear-phishing attacks since November 2014.
• The attack has caused the loss of email credentials, names and addresses of personal  user details stored in Centralised Zone Data System. 
• Besides this the ICANN blog, ICANN wiki and WHOIS information portal has also been compromised.
• Since its creation, ICANN has been the subject of criticism and controversy.
• This is not the first such attack targeted towards ICANN. In June 2008,  a Turkish gp "NetDevilz" hijacked the ICANN site and redirected it to site giving out message as  "You think that you control the domains but you don’t! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don’t you believe us?"
• Here is the first hand information given by ICANN on its site   https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2-2014-12-16-en

Sony picture hacking linked to allegedly to unreleased film on North Korean supreme leader

The recent hacking attack on Sony Pictures that resulted in loss both in terms of finances as well as the leaking of digital prints of unreleased motion pictures.
It has been observed by FBI that potential threat exists for  Business in US particularly from the similar malware attack that would wipe out data when infected .
Besides leaked movies, Sony Pictures also lost information related to emails and casting details of yet to be produced motion pictures

The movie, The Interview, slated for a Dec 25 release, featured a plot to assassinate Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader of the DPRK, leading to speculation that hackers from North Korea may have been responsible for the incident.