Mikko Hypponen: Three types of online attack

In the 1980s, in communist Eastern Germany,

if you owned a typewriter,

you had to register it with the government.

You had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter.

And this was done so the government could track

where the text was coming from.

If they found a paper which had the wrong kind of thought,

they could track down who created that thought.

And we in the West

couldn't understand how anybody would do this,

how much this would restrict freedom of speech.

We would never do that in our own countries.

But today, in 2011, if you go and buy a color laser printer

from any major laser printer manufacturer

and print a page,

that page will end up

having slight yellow dots printed on every single page,

in a pattern which makes the page unique to you and to your printer.

This is happening to us today.

And nobody seems to be making a fuss about it.

And this is an example

of the ways our own governments are using technology

against us, the citizens.

And this is one of the main three sources of online problems today.

If we look at what's really happening in the online world,

we can group the attacks based on the attackers.

We have three main groups.

We have online criminals.

Like here, we have Mr. Dmitry Golubov,

from the city of Kiev in Ukraine.

And the motives of online criminals are very easy to understand.

These guys make money.

They use online attacks to make lots of money --

and lots and lots of it.

We actually have several cases of millionaires online, multimillionaires,

who made money with their attacks.

Here's Vladimir Tsastsin, from Tartu in Estonia.

This is [Albert] Gonzalez.

This is Stephen Watt.

This is Bjorn Sundin.

This is Matthew Anderson, Tariq Al-Daour

and so on and so on.

These guys make their fortunes online,

but they make it through the illegal means

of using things like banking Trojans

to steal money from our bank accounts while we do online banking,

or with keyloggers

to collect our credit card information

while we are doing online shopping from an infected computer.

The US Secret Service,

two months ago, froze the Swiss bank account

of Mr. Sam Jain right here,

and that bank account had 14.9 million US dollars in it

when it was frozen.

Mr. Jain himself is on the loose; nobody knows where he is.

And I claim it's already today

that it's more likely for any of us to become the victim of a crime online

than here in the real world.

And it's very obvious that this is only going to get worse.

In the future, the majority of crime will be happening online.

The second major group of attackers that we are watching today

are not motivated by money.

They're motivated by something else --

motivated by protests,

motivated by an opinion,

motivated by the laughs.

Groups like Anonymous have risen up over the last 12 months

and have become a major player in the field of online attacks.

So those are the three main attackers:

criminals who do it for the money,

hacktivists like Anonymous doing it for the protest,

but then the last group are nation states --

governments doing the attacks.

And then we look at cases like what happened in DigiNotar.

This is a prime example of what happens when governments attack

against their own citizens.

DigiNotar is a certificate authority from the Netherlands --

or actually, it was.

It was running into bankruptcy last fall,

because they were hacked into.

Somebody broke in and they hacked it thoroughly.

And I asked last week,

in a meeting with Dutch government representatives,

I asked one of the leaders of the team

whether he found plausible that people died

because of the DigiNotar hack.

And his answer was: yes.

So how do people die

as the result of a hack like this?

Well, DigiNotar is a CA.

They sell certificates.

What do you do with certificates?

Well, you need a certificate if you have a website

that has https, SSL encrypted services,

services like Gmail.

Now we all, or a big part of us, use Gmail or one of their competitors,

but these services are especially popular in totalitarian states like Iran,

where dissidents use foreign services like Gmail

because they know they are more trustworthy than the local services

and they are encrypted over SSL connections,

so the local government can't snoop on their discussions.

Except they can,

if they hack into a foreign CA and issue rogue certificates.

And this is exactly what happened with the case of DigiNotar.

What about Arab Spring

and things that have been happening, for example, in Egypt?

Well, in Egypt,

the rioters looted the headquarters of the Egyptian secret police

in April 2011,

and when they were looting the building, they found lots of papers.

Among those papers was this binder entitled, "FinFisher."

And within that binder were notes from a company based in Germany,

which had sold to the Egyptian government

a set of tools for intercepting, at a very large scale,

all the communication of the citizens of the country.

They had sold this tool for 280,000 euros to the Egyptian government.

The company headquarters are right here.

So Western governments are providing totalitarian governments with tools

to do this against their own citizens.

But Western governments are doing it to themselves as well.

For example, in Germany,

just a couple of weeks ago, the so-called "State Trojan" was found,

which was a Trojan used by German government officials

to investigate their own citizens.

If you are a suspect in a criminal case,

well, it's pretty obvious, your phone will be tapped.

But today, it goes beyond that.

They will tap your Internet connection.

They will even use tools like State Trojan

to infect your computer with a Trojan,

which enables them to watch all your communication,

to listen to your online discussions,

to collect your passwords.

Now, when we think deeper about things like these,

the obvious response from people should be,

"OK, well, that sounds bad, but that doesn't really affect me,

because I'm a legal citizen.

Why should I worry? Because I have nothing to hide."

And this is an argument which doesn't make sense.

Privacy is implied.

Privacy is not up for discussion.

This is not a question

between privacy

against security.

It's a question of freedom

against control.

And while we might trust our governments right now, right here in 2011,

any rights we give away will be given away for good.

And do we trust, do we blindly trust, any future government,

a government we might have 50 years from now?

And these are the questions

that we have to worry about for the next 50 years.