Here's the hacking group responsible for the Colonial Pipeline shutdown
www.cnbc.com
DarkSide makes ransomware hacking tools, but only largely goes after for-profit companies from English-speaking countries.

"We are apolitical, we do not participate in geopolitics, do not need to tie us with a defined government and look for our motives," the statement said. "Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society. From today we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future."

Protected organizations not to be harmed include hospitals, hospices, schools, universities, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies. Also apparently protected are entities based in former Soviet countries. Fair game, then, are all for-profit companies in English speaking countries.

little cringe being apolitical mercenaries but based because they usually attack Anglo colonialist countries :amerikkka:

    • GenXen [any, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      The term is kind of a catch all, created to spread FUD to boomers who are still complaining about having to upgrade to Windows XP twenty years ago.

      There are plenty of tools and techniques that can be used by folks with little to no technical background that can do quite a bit, like metasploit . You can create SPAM/Phishing campaigns and play around with common exploits that systems may not have been patched with yet, etc. When I think of the details of the official narrative of the DNC hack from 2016, I believe that it's feasible that it could have been carried out by little more than what comes in the box with Metasploit.

      But then there's the types of folks that build those tools or find those exploits, that have a much deeper understanding of how a computer operates on a hardware level. I often assume that the type of person testing out things like memory stack overflow and heap spray attacks that aren't getting paid to be the true 'on the spectrum' types that will obsessively work at a task requiring high repetition. In many cases, exploits in an OS are built on top of hardware level attacks, and advanced hacks require multiple contributors with differing skill sets: hardware hackers, OS kernel devs, etc.

      Compare the DNC hack to the attach on Iranian nuclear facilities. The factors that made the hack on Iranian nuclear facilities through the Stuxnet worm so clearly state sponsored was that it included hardware level attacks for specific centrifuge models. It's one thing to buy a PS3 or laptop off the shelve and find hardware exploits for it, but a centrifuge isn't an easy to access item for everyday people. On top of that, it included several unknown ('0 day') exploits for Windows to be able to get access to the centrifuges. This worm was obviously assembled by a team of actual highly skilled experts from multiple disciplines (with obvious ties to intelligence agencies) and not by a bunch of keyboard warriors suffering from the Dunning–Kruger effect while shit posting on 4Chan.

      • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        . The factors that made the hack on Iranian nuclear facilities through the Stuxnet worm so clearly state sponsored was that it included hardware level attacks for specific centrifuge models. It’s one thing to buy a PS3 or laptop off the shelve and find hardware exploits for it, but a centrifuge isn’t an easy to access item for everyday people. On top of that, it included several unknown (‘0 day’) exploits for Windows to be able to get access to the centrifuges. This worm was obviously assembled by a team of actual highly skilled experts from multiple disciplines (with obvious ties to intelligence agencies) and not by a bunch of keyboard warriors suffering from the Dunning–Kruger effect while shit posting on 4Chan.

        lol yeah the stuxnet attack is really interesting, I mean for bad reasons and it's very obvious it was carried out by us intelligence.

    • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Depends on what you want to do really, and what you consider "hacking". Like finding a hidden directory on my router's manufacturer's website, so I can download "secret" unlocked firmware for my router? Pretty easy. Actually coding malware that operates on a modern operating system? You'll need a lot of technical skill and insight to do that.

      Then again a ton of hacking is manipulating features of a software product that weren't designed to be used or combined in a certain way. The recent Facebook hack/data leak for example? Exploited the "friends of friends" feature that wasn't rate limited at the time to get everyone's information. While the technical skill required for such a thing is not extremely high, you have to know where to look and have a general idea of how such a program works in order to execute such a attack.

        • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I mean hackers still program/create their own tools to exploit things. For example at the beginning of the pandemic groups created tools that would search Zoom for meetings/rooms without a password or host controlled entry, and join a random Zoom meeting that fits said criteria. This was the culprit of a lot of the "Zoom sniping" that happened at the beginning of last year. But it's nothing like the movies lol

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      So how hard is it to be a hacker?

      How crappy is your target's electronic security?