First up in today’s roundup of cybersecurity tech news: a light hearted hack, brought to
you by Anonymous.
Hacktivists gained unauthorized access to the Chinese government’s polar research
website.
And they decorated it with flags and memes, we’ve got the anonymous logo, the Taiwan
number wan meme, solid meme - one of my favourites.
Anonymous also posted some historical Chinese flags, as I understand it these are from the
pre communist era.
There’s also 3 embedded youtube videos which don’t display in the wayback machine for
whatever reason.
But by pulling these out of the source, I found one is Taiwan’s national anthem, another
is a very catchy anti communist song which dates back to the early 50s.
And then there’s a song called fragile, it’s sung in Mandarin and this song has
become a bit of a meme in East Asia because is satirises the politics of Taiwan and makes
fun of how pro CCP people get so wound up and triggered by the smallest of transgressions
against the Chinese government, one example being the banning of a winnie the pooh film
in China after people starting commenting on the uncanny resemblance between president
Xi and Winnie the pooh.
It seems Anonymous just gained the ability to create a blog post on the website, as opposed
to root access to the entire website itself.
At a guess I imagine they compromised the credentials of an author on the website, someone
with permissions to publish blog posts.
And after translating the header for the post, it says the “project leader” for this
post, is one “Zou Jianjun”, perhaps this is the name of the account they hacked.
Scrolling down, Anonymous brings up the Ukraine crisis and makes some suggestions about how
to prevent “full-blown WW3”.
If you want to read more into that I’ll link the archive to the hacked page below,
as Eastern European geopolitics isn’t really my forte, and none of this reads like particularly
original ideas.
I only learned of this hack from the hacking subreddit as it wasn’t really covered in
western media at all, but I suppose that’s not too surprising because it was a really
niche website that was hacked, China’s polar research institute.
Since the hack, the whole website has been taken 100% completely offline.
Android is getting a 2G kill switch, allowing users to disable 2G at the modem level on
their phones, and I know what you’re thinking, Seytonic - who cares?
I haven’t used 2G in a decade anyway, a kill switch to turn it off is something I
just have no use for - besides 2G infrastructure is being dismantled as we speak, if it hasn’t
already been torn down.
Well, that’s kinda missing the point, the fact that modern phones even support 2G is
a big security problem - and bear with me here because this needs some explaining.
Research published last year analysed the encryption that 2G uses (this encryption is
proprietary by the way, it’s not publicly available, the researchers were only able
to carry out this analysis because they were given the algorithms “by an anonymous source”).
The researchers found that 2G uses in some cases 40 bit encryption to protect communications,
by modern standards this encryption might as well not even be there, because an attacker
can passively intercept traffic like SMS’es and then just decrypt them on the fly.
Using 2G is like downgrading your WiFi to WEP, you’d be a fool to think it’ll protect
you.
And it gets worse, with 2G there is no authentication between a mobile phone and a cell tower, so
anyone could set up their own 2G cell tower and a phone would happily connect to it.
A fake cell tower could even downgrade communications to GEA-1, this is that encryption standard
which uses 40 bits.
So, as you can see, 2G is a bit of a mess - whilst it may still be actively used in
developing countries, the rest of the world has no use for it, it’s one of those lingering
legacy technologies that many of our phones still support.
Until now!
Kinda.
The option to turn it off only exists on newer android phones, like a pixel 6, older Android
phones simply don’t support the controls needed.
And no luck on iPhones, no kill switch for you guys.
Fun fact, the reason why such weak encryption was even used in 2G to begin with was due
to export restrictions, back when 2G was developed, exporting anything over 40 bit encryption
was seen as a national security issue so that’s what they decided to cap it at.
Usually state sponsored hacks I cover on this channel relate to some kind of espionage,
typically it’s intelligence gathering, but you’ve got some sabotage sprinkled in there
as well.
However North Korea is the only country which really focuses on financially motivated hacks.
When you’re one of the most economically sanctioned countries in the world, you’ve
gotta make money somehow.
And a new report reveals how North Korea stole nearly 400 million dollars worth of crypto
last year alone.
That’s up from 300 million dollars in 2020.
And while 2018 was a pretty good year for them, that seems to have been a one off.
However, the general trend is on the up, and these numbers are all the more impressive
when you realise North Korea’s GDP is less than 20 billion dollars.
So 400 million dollars represents a pretty decent chunk of income for Kim’s regime.
And notice the line on the graph here, all this cash originates from just a handful of
hacks, last year only 7 cyber attacks produced this pot of gold.
North Korea isn’t spraying low grade phishing emails, they're using very targeted and advanced
techniques to pull off heists each worth tens of millions of dollars.
They typically target investment firms and cryptocurrency exchanges, one example being
in August of last year, when North Korean linked hackers managed to swipe 91 million
dollars worth of crypto from the cryptocurrency exchange liquid.com.
After the heist they laundered the crypto by exchanging it for other coins then they
mixed it before likely selling it for fiat on an Asian exchange.
As well as cashing out their W’s, North Korea is also playing the long game - currently
they’re sitting on 170 million dollars worth of unlaundered coins, that represents the
takings from “49 separate hacks spanning from 2017 to 2021” - I can only guess they’re
hodling, hoping that their coins will one day moon.
Who knows what happens to all that cash they steal, a UN report says it’s used to fund
North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction program.
The full report on North Korea’s crypto dealings by chain analysis is really a pretty
interesting read, I’ll link it in the description if you want to learn more.
This video is sponsored by Linode, who are giving you $100 worth of free cloud computing.
Linode is a totally customisable cloud hosting platform - whether you’re looking to quickly
spin up a VPN, website or host a kubernetes cluster - Linode has you covered.
If it runs on linux it’ll run on linode.
Linode just announced availability of their NVME block storage, the first alternative
cloud provider to officially support this state of the art hardware.
Linode’s philosophy is to focus on providing all the tools a developer really needs at
competitive prices.
Use the link in the description now to claim your free $100.
You know the drill, shoot me a like for the youtube ai and follow me on the instagrams
for behind the scenes contents.
I’ll see you in the next video.