Friday, August 05, 2011

Hacking from China

A very interesting whitepaper on security and hacking done by China (to be believed). I think this whitepaper is a very good read to get some more understanding in the basics of the role of china in the world of today.

"Starting in November 2009, coordinated covert and targeted cyberattacks have been conducted against global oil, energy, and petrochemical companies. These attacks have involved social engineering, spearphishing attacks, exploitation of Microsoft Windows operating systems vulnerabilities, Microsoft Active Directory compromises, and the use of remote administration tools (RATs) in targeting and harvesting sensitive competitive proprietary operations and project-financing information with regard to oil and gas field bids and operations. We have identified the tools, techniques, and network activities used in these continuing attacks—which we have dubbed Night Dragon—as originating primarily in China. Through coordinated analysis of the related events and tools used, McAfee has determined identifying features to assist companies with detection and investigation. While we believe many actors have participated in these attacks, we have been able to identify one individual who has provided the crucial C&C infrastructure to the attackers."

Global Energy Cyber Attacks Night Dragon - McAfee

swarm computing

Swarm computing is thought to be the next version of cloud computing. Issue is that it is not quite clear what swarm computing is, and it is to some people not clear yet what cloud computing is. For all who are interested in swarm computing you can find some more information below:

"Computing is rapidly moving away from traditional computers.Of the 8 billion computing units will be deployed worldwide this year, only 150 million are stand-alone computers.Many programs in the future will run on collections of mobile processors interacting with the physical world and communicating over dynamic, ad hoc networks.We can view such a collection of devices as aswarm.As with natural swarms, such as a school of fish or an ant colony, the behavior of the swarm emerges from the simple behaviors of its individual members.The swarm is resilient to a small fraction of misbehaving members and to changes in the environment."

Swarm Computing

Also a very interesting source is this presentation from Oracle on swarm computing: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Swarm-Computing