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Pentagon Hit by Unprecedented Cyber Attack
FoxNews ^ | 11/20/08

Posted on 11/20/2008 4:43:58 PM PST by Sammy67

Edited on 11/20/2008 4:48:23 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]

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To: FReepaholic

Mailbox storage is so tiny, at least on the network (non-classified) that I’m on, and giant powerpoint presentations such a huge part of work, that USBs were a critical enabler to simply getting work done.


141 posted on 11/20/2008 7:30:20 PM PST by Strategerist
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To: big'ol_freeper

Thanks for the information.


142 posted on 11/20/2008 7:32:41 PM PST by GOPJ (Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Democrats: 13.2 Republicans: 2.1 -Olson)
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To: potlatch

LOL,,,Harley lays on his back (his couch) and watches

Animal Planet!...;0)


143 posted on 11/20/2008 7:33:07 PM PST by 1COUNTER-MORTER-68 (THROWING ANOTHER BULLET-RIDDLED TV IN THE PILE OUT BACK~~~~~)
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To: GOPJ

Good question but I think you might have directed your question to me by mistake.
FRegards, friend.


144 posted on 11/20/2008 7:35:10 PM PST by unkus
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To: big'ol_freeper
The Company is composed of stories gathered from the actual dancers, choreographers, and office staff of the Joffrey Ballet. Most of the roles are played by real-life company members. While there are small subplots involving a love story between Campbell's character and a character played by James Franco, most of the movie focuses on the company as a whole, without any real star or linear plot. The many real-life stories woven together show the dedication and hard work that dancers must put in to their art, even though they are seldom rewarded with fame, fortune, or even a statue, painting, or album on which to look back.

Wikipedia - I'll keep looking...

145 posted on 11/20/2008 7:36:05 PM PST by GOPJ (Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Democrats: 13.2 Republicans: 2.1 -Olson)
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To: 1COUNTER-MORTER-68; devolve

[LOL,,,Harley lays on his back (his couch) and watches Animal Planet!...;0)

Lol, Piper lays on his back and watches....his eyelids...ZZZZ


146 posted on 11/20/2008 7:39:39 PM PST by potlatch
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To: AFreeBird; All

We do need to replace hardware. Here’s why, and what hardware:

The ASIC’s that run Ethernet interfaces are by and large now made in the PRC.

So let’s say you have an Ethernet chip (either on the mo-bo, or on a NIC card in the PCI). How do you know what logic is in the chip? As long as it performs the Ethernet role properly, how do you know that is ALL that is on that chip?

So here’s how you mount a massive attack that can’t be fixed with software patches:

You create a packet that is forwarded to the NIC/chip that has the correct L2 frame information - let’s say you’ve padded the Ethernet frame with additional information above and beyond the IP payload. The IP stack is going to look at only the IP datagram size, not the whole Ethernet frame. Or let’s say you turn on a particular set of bits in the Ethernet header, which then reads a L2 payload on only specific packets - and this starts the attack sequence.

How much extra stuff could you fit on a chip the size of an Ethernet chip? Oh man... I could have a whole small computer in there. Most of the CPU’s today have much of their die space taken up with FPU’s, cache and memory controllers. If all I wanted was a programmable controller to execute a few instructions to attack the network (or worse, sniff the network and kick interesting packets back out to a capture node), that would not take much logic at all.

How would you know that your Ethernet chipset has this additional logic?

Well, maybe you’d get lucky by fuzzing the Ethernet fields and frames... and maybe you wouldn’t/couldn’t. You could pull the silicon out of the carrier and look at it under a microscope and reverse-engineer it to insure that all that was on the silicon was, in fact, an Ethernet controller.

But the government probably won’t do that. They’ll start pulling equipment off secure networks and insisting on “brand X, revision n.m” specifications for known good Ethernet controllers.

BTW — this idea for an attack has occurred to several of us who are former cisco engineers and employees. We’ve been asking ourselves “why would the Chinese be counterfeiting only interface cards....?” there have been several scandals in DoD purchasing recently where the GSA order has been filled with either counterfeit low-end routers, or a cisco box stuffed with counterfeit line cards.

The solution, ultimately, is to revert to Cold War thinking: for secure comm in the 80’s, I remember that it used to be a requirement for DoD projects that the devices come from certified US companies in US plants, especially CPU’s and any device that created EM emissions. We need a certified secure compute, network and interface hardware platform...


147 posted on 11/20/2008 7:54:09 PM PST by NVDave
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To: NVDave
One wonders how many civilian/consumer products, made in Red China, are potential tools to be used against us all. How much of the technological infrastructure of our financial institutions are potentially compromised? How about private business? Mom and pop operations? Computers on our transportation. Autos, trucks, trains and planes?

Is it plausible to think that our gung-ho free trade principles, regards Red China, et al, could be used against us?

148 posted on 11/20/2008 8:05:55 PM PST by Thumper1960 (A modern so-called "Conservative" is a shadow of a wisp of a vertebrate human being.)
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To: 1COUNTER-MORTER-68
"Harley lays on his back (his couch) and watches Animal Planet!..."

Harley is a couch potato. He needs to get up off that couch and get a job. ;-)

149 posted on 11/20/2008 8:07:33 PM PST by yorkie (The early bird gets the worm; the second mouse gets the cheese)
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Comment #150 Removed by Moderator

To: potlatch

I made my yorkie get off her back and do something useful! (She chases dust bunnies, now!) ;-)


151 posted on 11/20/2008 8:09:51 PM PST by yorkie (The early bird gets the worm; the second mouse gets the cheese)
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To: Biggirl

Big difference between the G4 Power Mac and the G4 iMac. Maybe I just had really bad luck with the two iMacs that I had but then again when mine started acting up it wasn’t hard to find people with the same problem.


152 posted on 11/20/2008 8:14:26 PM PST by Treefiddy
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To: yorkie
That's interesting to me. Yorkies must all like to sleep on their backs a lot. Piper just ‘tries’ to chase squirrels and deer. He took off after a buck today!! Scared me, lol.
153 posted on 11/20/2008 8:17:25 PM PST by potlatch
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To: Sammy67

bump for later read.


154 posted on 11/20/2008 8:20:58 PM PST by khnyny ("The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.")
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To: Sammy67
How much of the Pentagon's equipment is made in China? Who makes their routers?
Why would they allow USB devices in the Pentagon at all? I know business, which have banned these and they don't have secrets anywhere as serious as the Pentagon!
155 posted on 11/20/2008 8:24:38 PM PST by rmlew (The loyal opposition to a regime dedicated to overthrowing the Constitution are accomplices.)
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To: potlatch

Mine is more like a cat - when I take her outside, she has to sniff every crack and craney - and she even gets up on her hind legs, and checks out the flowers in the flower pot.

Her sister who is here a lot sleeps on her back all the time.

They both love to chase lizards, sniff tarantulas, bark at javelinas and deer. Mine tried to attack a javelina once, and I grabbed her just a foot from the pig. It was terrifying! They are sweet, interesting little creatures, yorkies.


156 posted on 11/20/2008 8:24:54 PM PST by yorkie (The early bird gets the worm; the second mouse gets the cheese)
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To: Thumper1960

The thing is, we don’t know. We really don’t. Reverse-engineering a chip under a microscope is really time-consuming work for talented chip engineers. There’s lots of chips and lots of revisions levels to the same make/model of chip involved.

How many products could employ the same tactic? Lots. There’s a lot of non-bleeding edge stuff that is now made in China, on PRC-controlled fabs. Just ho-hum little chips in everything from radios, to consumer electronics, to computers, to... insert your widget here.

Is there a way around this if a problem is found? Thankfully, yes. A fast slap-dash fix in highly sensitive hardware can use network controllers that are implemented on FPGA (field programmable gate arrays), and you can get standard network interface logic packages to blow into these chips. When you’ve programmed the chip to do what you want, you can blow off the rest of the gates so it will never do anything else. This is a spendy solution, but it works and you could have a working controller very quickly that you could slap in place of a PCI card with a faulty chipset, and you’d have a known good interface like... this week. Once you have a source of PCI cards and FPGA’s, the replication process is pretty quick. The FPGA’s are spendy, tho, and your typical $40 Ethernet NIC becomes a $150 to $300+ item with the FPGA plus labor costs.

Longer term, all we’d need is for a company to produce a verifiable chipset on a PCI card and start plugging those controllers in, plug the 10[0,0]BaseT cable into the PCI card and turn off any built-in interfaces.


157 posted on 11/20/2008 8:27:29 PM PST by NVDave
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To: big'ol_freeper

Thank you. Jeez, Loose lips sink ships folks.


158 posted on 11/20/2008 8:27:59 PM PST by ODC-GIRL (Proudly serving our Nation's Homeland Defense)
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To: Treefiddy
As for the DoD I think they should switch to Linux

We were pretty secure using OpenVMS on DEC Alpha Servers. Mainly because there just weren't too many folks out there trying to hack into that system!

159 posted on 11/20/2008 8:29:31 PM PST by HiJinx (~ Support our Troops ~ www.americasupportsyou.mil ~)
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To: NVDave
The solution, ultimately, is to revert to Cold War thinking: for secure comm in the 80’s, I remember that it used to be a requirement for DoD projects that the devices come from certified US companies in US plants, especially CPU’s and any device that created EM emissions. We need a certified secure compute, network and interface hardware platform...

Yea, TEMPEST specs. Heard of it.

Pulling all that back together is going to take a little time since we've spent a lot of time outsourcing technology to our enemies for cheap prices and cheap labor.

Still mitigation can come sooner with a little more thought. Replacing the OS is a prime place to start. Since an OS like Linux is open source, government can verify its security and tailor it for their needs. As for on-board Ethernet, replacement cards (from a reliable source - including the chipsets) can still be plugged in and the on-board chips disabled. Oh and encryption. We should never hear stories about DoD laptops being stolen that have unencrypted data storage, regardless of the department they're assigned to.

Overall though, it will require a retooling of our information equipment procurement process and suppliers.

160 posted on 11/20/2008 8:29:33 PM PST by AFreeBird
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