Category Archives: state-affiliated hackers

DNS hacks are attacks on critical infrastructure, senior U.S. diplomat says

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Any nation-state behind recent hijackings of Domain Name System (DNS) records should, in theory, be held responsible under the latest cyberwarfare norms agreement made by 20 countries at the UN in 2015, says America’s top cyber diplomat. “One of the norms is disrupting physical infrastructure providing services to the public, and I think that fully encapsulates the internet’s DNS function,” Amb. Robert Strayer told CyberScoop Tuesday on the sidelines of the Atlantic Council’s International Conference on Cyber Engagement. The 2015 UN agreement, outlined in a Group of Government Experts (GGE), affirms that nation-states shouldn’t launch cyberattacks that intend to damage critical infrastructure in other countries. The DNS — which translates human-readable domain names of websites to their machine-readable versions — has a crucial role in directing internet traffic. But subsequent UN talks reportedly fell apart in 2017 over disagreements China and Russia had with the rest of the member states about whether further enhancements to the GGE document would impinge on their right to self-defense in […]

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Manufacturing companies got wrecked by cyber-spies last year, Verizon report says

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Cyber-spies backed by nation-states were behind a majority of data breaches experienced by manufacturing companies in 2016, according to Verizon’s newly published 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report. Verizon identified 620 data breach incidents in the manufacturing sector last year — of which 94 percent could be defined as “espionage” driven and attributable to “state-affiliated” actors. Roughly 91 percent of material stolen in these breaches had been categorized as “secret,” relating to proprietary information owned solely by the victim. Cybersecurity experts say hackers largely target the manufacturing industry in order to steal trade secrets, business plans and valuable intellectual property. Verizon defines cyber-espionage as incidents that include “unauthorized network or system access linked to state-affiliated actors and/or exhibiting the motive of espionage.” “When you make stuff, there is always someone else who wants to make it better, or at least cheaper. A great way to make something cheaper is to let […]

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