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Showing posts with label Cyber Weapons. Show all posts
Security
Candiru Cyber Export Cyber Security Cyber Weapons Government Israel NSO Group Security

Israel Limits Cyberweapons Export List from 102 to 37 Nations

 

The Israeli government has limited the number of nations to which local security businesses can sell surveillance and offensive hacking equipment by nearly two-thirds, reducing the official cyber export list from 102 to 37. 

Only nations with established democracies are included in the new list, which was obtained by Israeli business publication Calcalist earlier today, such as those from Europe and the Five Eyes coalition: 

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US. 

Autocratic regimes, to which Israeli corporations have frequently sold surveillance tools, are strikingly absent from the list. Spyware produced by Israeli businesses such as Candiru and the NSO Group has been attributed to human rights violations in tens of nations in recent years, with local governments using the tools to spy on journalists, activists, dissidents, and political opponents. 

The government has not issued a comment on the list's update, according to Calcalist journalists, and it is unclear why it was cut down earlier this month. The timing, on the other hand, shows that the Israeli government might have been driven it to make this choice. 

The list was updated a week after a covert meeting between Israeli and French officials to address suspicions that NSO Group malware was deployed against French President Emmanuel Macron. The announcement coincided with the US sanctioning of four monitoring firms, including Israel's Candiru and NSO Group. 

The penalties are reported to have sent NSO into a death spiral, with the business sliding from a prospective sale to French investors to losing its newly-appointed CEO and perhaps filing for bankruptcy as it has become company-non-grata in the realm of cyberweapons. 

Azimuth Security co-founder Mark Dowd discussed Israeli-based surveillance distributors and their knack for selling to offensive regimes in an episode of the Risky Business podcast last month, blaming it on the fact that these companies don't usually have connections in western governments to compete with western competitors. 

With the Israeli Defense Ministry tightening restrictions on cyber exports to autocratic regimes, the restricted cyber export list is likely to make a significant hole in Israel's estimated $10 billion surveillance sector.

As per a study released earlier this month by the Atlantic Council, there are roughly 224 firms providing surveillance and hacking tools, with 27 of them located in Israel.
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Ministry of Defense
Cyber Crime Cyber Weapons Hacking Japan malware Ministry of Defense

A Defensive Malware On The Cyber To-Do List of Japanese Government




Japanese government likes to stay ahead of disasters, be it natural or for that matter, cyber-crime related.

In the same spirit Japan’s Defense Ministry has decided to create and maintain cyber-weapons in the form of “Malware”.

The malware is all set to contain viruses and backdoors and would be the first ever cyber-weapon of Japan’s.

According to sources, it will be fabricated not by government employees but professional contractors tentatively by the end of this fiscal year.

The capabilities and the purpose or the way of usage hasn’t been out in the open yet.



Reports have it that the malware is just a precautionary measure against the attacker if in case the Japanese institutions are ever under attack.

As it turns out the malware is one of the endeavors of the Japanese government towards modernizing and countering China’s growing military threat.

The country also plans on widely expanding its reach into cyber battlefield (which is now an actual battle field) tactics.

Many major countries ambiguously have been using cyber weapons and now Japan’s next on the list.

The country’s government believes, being cyber ready and holding a major cyber-weapon in hand would keep countries that wish to attack at bay.

But as it turns out, this tactic hasn’t fared well with other countries as much as they’d like to believe.

This happens to be the second attempt at creating a cyber-weapon stash after 2012 which didn’t bear results like it should’ve.

Earlier this year the Japanese government passed a legislation allowing the National Institute of Information Communications Technology to hack into the citizens’ IoT devices using default or weak credentials during a survey of insecure Iot devices.

All this was planned to secure the Iot devices before the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to avoid Olympic Destroyer and attacks like VPNFilter.

So it turns out, that these efforts at strengthening the cyber game of Japan’s originate from the chief of Japan’s Cyber-security department who happens to not even OWN or USE a computer.
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FBI
Cyber Weapons Digital Sabotage FBI

Digital Grenades Implanted In Industrial Networks




Industrial digital sabotage is an on-going yet an unyielding growing concern to the United States, particularly after the US spearheaded the utilization of cyber weapons when it shattered Iran's nuclear centrifuges in 2010.

The weapon, as per the experts is known to turn off power grids, derail trains, cause offshore oil rigs to list,  transform petrochemical plants into bombs and close down factories.

The federal authorities have, twice in two months, issued open alerts, better known as public warnings that remote hackers are seeking for different ways to penetrate the U.S. electric grid and different parts of the national critical foundation. With the sole intent of embedding digital grenades that are lethargic until the point that the hacker's sponsor considers it to.

 Md., author and CEO Robert M. Lee of Dragos, a modern cyber security firm in Hanover with his researchers chart the exercises of remote hacking groups plotting industrial damage. They say hackers are growing new, more complex, cyber weapons at an animating pace, and are becoming bolder simultaneously.

"My Intel team is tracking eight different teams that are targeting infrastructure around the world, what we're seeing almost exclusively maps to nation states and intelligence teams,..” says Lee, 30, who put in five years working at the National Security Agency and the Pentagon's Cyber Command before forming his own organization three years prior.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, in his yearly evaluation to Congress in February said that Russia, China, Iran and North Korea represent the greatest cyber danger to the United States. Paul N. Stockton, a former assistant secretary of defence for homeland security who is currently managing chief of Sonecon LLC, an economic and security advisory firm in Washington says that,

"Adversaries want to hold our infrastructure at risk. They are seeking to establish persistent, sustained presence in infrastructure networks. They are preparing the battlefield today so that if needed they can attack in the future,"

U.S. what's more, Israeli cyber warriors pioneered the trail on the industrial cyber damage when they utilized the Stuxnet digital worm to cause axes at Iran's Natanz nuclear facility to spin out of control and thus break, perpetrating a noteworthy mishap on Iran's endeavors to enhance uranium to control nuclear weapons and reactors.

Lee says that Dragos has identified signs that the hacking group is working far outside of the Middle East, their underlying target, and have focused on various types of safety systems.

Indeed, even last October, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI issued an alert that foreign hackers had focused on "vitality, water, avionics, atomic, and critical manufacturing divisions." Private cyber security organizations, like the FireEye, a Milpitas, Calif., cyber security company that additionally explored the Triconex attack, pointed the finger at North Korea for the probing.

Presently while a limited local outage could caution citizens, Lee is unmistakably worried about the hitting gas pipelines, petrochemical plants, transportation systems and high-end manufacturing plants also including pharmaceutical organizations.

With respect to the United States' part, the Pentagon's Cyber Command has hostile digital weapons equipped for wreaking annihilation on an adversary country, U.S. authorities say yet it hasn't offered a show of its quality since hitting Iran in 2010. Furthermore, advisors like Stockton say U.S. ventures must plan versatility despite cyber-attack, giving remote countries a chance to soak in stress over what comes next.


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