01.11.13
Recent US cyberwar shoeshine ineffective
The message: Iran is behind the attacks on US banking websites. Causing them to load slowly. Sometimes.
Regular readers know it as shoeshine, the term I use to describe national security publicity efforts on pumped up problems which have no relation to what actually threatens or endangers the majority in the US. Which are things like monthly massacres perpetrated by crazy people from American WhiteManistan, rising inequality and an economy that doesn’t work for hundreds of millions.
Shoeshine news is for the benefit of political agendas (in this case add some flimsy piece to arguments that Iran needs to be attacked) and expanded employment in the cybersecurity arms of America’s weapons manufacturers. And McAfee Associates.
Today, TechNewsDaily has collected quote from a bunch of people, including yours truly, on the matter under the title Iran May Not Be Behind Bank Cyberattacks:
There’s really not much evidence that the government of Iran is behind the ongoing wave of cyberattacks on U.S. bank websites, say many security experts.
“I don’t consider any attack I can do in my spare time as ‘nation-state sponsored,'” said Robert David Graham, chief executive officer of Atlanta-based Errata Security.
“[It] could just as well be a loose group of those sympathetic to Iran and the Middle East and angry as hell at U.S. involvement there,” said George Smith, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank GlobalSecurity.org.
“ItsOKNoProblemBro [the hacker instrument used to launch the denial-of-service website attacks in question] is far from sophisticated malware. It’s really rather simple,” said Roel Schouwenberg, a Kaspersky anti-virus researcher to TechNews. “Going strictly by the publicly known technical details, I don’t see enough evidence to categorize this operation as something only a nation-state sponsored actor could pull off.”