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| Frightening potential: computer viruses & worms |
November 6, 2001 |
By K.K. Campbell
LOWLY,THE WHOLE TOWN IS INFECTED. NO ONE CHANGES ON THE OUTSIDE; PEOPLE STILL PERFORM THEIR DAILY functions. But there’s something different inside...
That’s the plot line from the famous 1950s “Red scare” science fiction thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which zombies co-opt others into being zombies-masses who would eventually rise up and take over planet Earth. It’s also the operating strategy of the Code Red worm that made recent headlines around the world.
Code Red spent a great deal of its time trying to infect other computers, turning them into “zombies” that would all rise up at once to knock out the White House servers. According to the plan, millions of computers would, at a pre-set moment, turn over their system resources to data requests from White House machines, an overload that would shut down servers. It’s a classic denial-of-service attack-but one with enormous punch and robot-like spread.
And this malicious code can be used for kicks, as we’ve already seen, or for far more destructive purposes. Worms could, in fact, be the first battleground in a planned military campaign.
How it works
Code Red only infected systems running Microsoft Windows 2000 and NT, exploiting a security flaw in Microsoft Internet Information Services. A creature of the clock, Code Red had three phases to its cycle:
Phase one: Contagion. At the first stroke of the first day of the month (measured in Greenwich Mean Time), computers infected by Code Red start searching for vulnerable Internet- connected computers to spread the worm- program to their systems. For 19 days the affected number of systems grows exponentially. The more infected computers already exist, the more infections can take place during this “plague” period.
Phase two: Attack. On the 20th day, infected servers cease spreading the worm and the army of zombified machines stand to attention and blast away at a specified Internet domain. In the recent episode, more than 350,000 servers were infected and these machines pounded away at www.whitehouse.gov. Many of these sites were defaced with the phrase “Hacked by Chinese!” The U.S. government had to take some sites down in response.
This phase lasts for eight days.
Phase three: Dormant. When the clock clicks over from the 28th day of the month, all worm- infected systems go into “sleeper” mode. If not patched up by system administrators, the cycle will repeat on the 1st of the next month. The particular flaw in Microsoft servers that allowed this worm is insignificant-the patch is freely available-but the concept behind the attack is powerful and simple.
Networks as weapons
The threat of worms to computer networks is obvious: modern economies are intricately tied to networks and knocking out a nation’s informational infrastructure could be a devastatingly disruptive blow.
Computer Economics, a research company in Carlsbad, Calif., set the current global economic cost of Code Red at US$2.6 billion, including the price of fixing systems and dollars lost to decreased worker productivity, and that could rise much higher.
The firm estimates computer viruses and worms cost US$12.1 billion in 1999 and US$17.1 billion last year.
Despite those numbers, attacks thus far have been relatively minor. But “cyberwarfare” is steadily rolling out and becoming one more weapon in military arsenals and global intrigue.
In October 1998, the FBI opened investigation Moonlight Maze into a series of data raids that were emanating from the Russian Academy of Science. This had been going on for at least a year and targets had included the U.S. Defense Department and other federal government agencies.
In the Kosovo conflict of 1999, the Serbian army targeted two NATO machines, a jet fighter and a NATO Web server in Brussels, which was bombarded with data requests until it slowed to a stop.
The Pentagon claims its own networks were targeted by outsiders. One spokesperson told the press: “During Kosovo, there is no question that day in and day out we got hundreds if not thousands of hits.”
Throughout the summer of 1999, Chinese and Taiwanese supporters whacked each other’s computer networks during a surge in political tension between the old foes.
In October 1999, the Pentagon announced it was opening a cybercentre in Colorado to study ways to attack enemy computer networks. By May 2001, the U.S. Armed Forces had admitted to at least two “cyber attack training exercises.”
Canada has long been considered a conduit to the U.S. in matters of intelligence and spying, and we may see the same effect in the information era. A very wired nation with large and powerful networks, Canada could be used as a staging ground for hackers, who traditionally hide their tracks by bouncing around many systems before reaching their target. The former head of the FBI, Louis Freeh, once even referred to
Canada as a “hacker haven.”
In 1999, two Chinese Army colonels published Unrestricted War. The book asserts one of the ways to tackle a giant like the U.S. is through computer networks.
Code Red self-replicates, so a network of expensive human agents are not required. It is also cheap to create-how many Code Red variations could be produced with a military budget of $1 billion?
It seems science- fiction like, but cyberwarfare is now part of military reality. An attack might include air strikes, naval missiles, airborne troops, tanks, infantry-and computer network attacks. A nation without a strong defence to worms could have central communications centres shut down at the moment of crisis. A pre- planted worm, for instance, could be programmed to stop government information sites, denying the populace access to emergency data, or inserting disinformation onto these sites.
In a more low-intensity, long-term conflict, an endless string of attacks on key economic centres could cause major disruptions in the business of the nation.
All this assumes the target is a modern, wired nation. Against nations with little or no reliance on a computer infrastructure, such as Afghanistan, information attacks aren’t particularly useful. It is more likely that poorer nations will use cyber attacks against richer nations.
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