CSF_Week_7_Discussion_Reply
Post 1
Spear phishing is the act of sending and emails to specific and well-researched targets while purporting to be a trusted sender. The aim is to either infect devices with malware or convince victims to hand over information or money.
US Universities
In March 2018, the Department of Justice indicted nine Iranian hackers over an alleged spree of attacks on more than 300 universities in the United States and abroad. The suspects are charged with infiltrating 144 US universities, 176 universities in 21 other countries, 47 private companies, and other targets like the United Nations, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the states of Hawaii and Indiana. The DOJ says the hackers stole 31 terabytes of data, estimated to be worth $3 billion in intellectual property.
The attacks used carefully crafted spear phishing emails to trick professors and other university affiliates into clicking on malicious links and entering their network login credentials. Of 100,000 accounts hackers targeted, they were able to gain credentials for about 8,000, with 3,768 of those at US institutions. The DOJ says the campaign traces back to a Tehran-based hacker clearinghouse called the Mabna Institute, which was founded around 2013. The organization allegedly managed hackers and had ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Tension between Iran and the US often spills into the digital sphere, and the situation has been in a particularly delicate phase recently.
The effectiveness of spear phishing comes down to a combination of both technical and psychological reasons. “Spear phishing emails are quite hard to detect because they are so targeted. “They look like normal business emails with normal business chitchat, so it's really hard for spam detection systems to realize it's not a genuine email. Spear phishers exploit that because you don't want your spam protection blocking genuine emails as end users get frustrated and business processes start to fall down.
Post 2
Identity Theft: American privacy was put to test when traveler’s photos and documents were exposed as a result of a malicious attack. This has raised a lot of concern about the competence of custom officials and border regulations at large. According to the border officials, the hackers managed to obtain photos showing travelers' faces as well as license plates in an attack that not less than 100, 000 people were affected. The photos showed the people exiting and entering U.S. borders covering the period of a month and a half.
The officials maintained that only the photos and license plates were exposed while other identifying documents like the passports were not exposed. They also maintained that the attack was not done by a foreign country like China’s 2014 attack that exposed 22 million people. The attacked raised tough questions among the congress members where they asked questing whether the government has broadened its cross border surveillance to cub such security surges (Washington, 2009) They regretted such an attack saying it had the potential of exposing the privacy of innocent people.