Cyber Attacks Increasing In Middle East

Syria’s civil war and political strife in Egypt have given birth to new battlegrounds on the Web and driven a surge in cyber attacks in the Middle East, according to a leading Internet security company.

More than half of incidents in the Gulf this year were so-called “hacktivist” attacks – which account for only a quarter of cybercrime globally – as politically motivated programmers sabotaged opposing groups or institutions, executives from Intel Corp’s software security division McAfee said on Tuesday.

“It’s mostly bringing down websites and defacing them with political messages – there has been a huge increase in cyber attacks in the Middle East,” Christiaan Beek, McAfee director for incident response forensics in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), told Reuters.

He attributed the attacks to the conflict in Syria, political turmoil in Egypt and the activities of hacking collective Anonymous.

“It’s difficult for people to protest in the street in the Middle East and so defacing websites and denial of service (DOS) attacks are a way to protest instead,” said Beek.

DOS attacks flood an organization’s website causing it to crash, but usually do little lasting damage.

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a hacking group loyal to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, defaced an Internet recruiting site for the U.S. Marine Corps on Monday and recently targeted the New York Times website and Twitter, as well other websites within the Middle East.

Beek described SEA as similar to Anonymous.

“There’s a group leading operations, with a support group of other people that can help,” said Beek.

McAfee opened a centre in Dubai on Monday to deal with the rising threat of Internet sabotage in the region, the most serious of which are attacks to extract proprietary information from companies or governments or those that cause lasting damage to critical infrastructure.

Cyber attacks are mostly focused on Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, Qatar, the top liquefied natural gas supplier, and Dubai, which is the region’s financial, commercial and aviation hub, said Gert-Jan Schenk, McAfee president for EMEA.

“It’s where the wealth and critical infrastructure is concentrated,” he said.

The “Shamoon” virus last year targeted Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, damaging about 30,000 computers in what may have been the most destructive attack against the private sector.

“Ten years ago, it was all about trying to infect as many people as possible,” added Schenk. “Today we see more and more attacks being focused on very small groups of people. Sometimes malware is developed for a specific department in a specific company.”

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Amazon Goes To Court

Amazon is suing Daniel Powers, its ex VP in charge of global sales for Amazon Web Services because he joined Google in a cloud role.

Taking the new job, asserts Amazon, violates Powers’ non-compete agreement with Amazon, which let Powers go this summer with a reasonable severance package.

There is a risk that Powers could take important information that he learned about the Amazon web services business to its rival, Google, and that is what the firm is seeking to stop.

According to Geekwire Amazon wants an injunction against Powers to prevent him from “engaging in any activities that directly or indirectly support any aspect of Google’s cloud computing business”.

A court filing claims that Amazon has an agreement with Powers that says he will not join a rival for a “limited time following the termination of his employment”.

Powers, it warns, is a veteran who knows the cloud business from “top to bottom”, adding that he has “acquired and currently possesses extensive knowledge of Amazon’s trade secrets and its highly confidential information”.

The complaint says that he has extensive and detailed information about Amazon Web Services’ prospects, business, potential business partners, pricing strategies and goals.

Amazon has not provided us with further comment.

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Chase Building 1/2 Billion Dollar Data Center

The enthusiastic backer of Enron and serial over charger of  mortgage payers, JPMorgan Chase has just splashed out on a new $500 million data center.

CEO Jamie Dimon announced the move which practically everyone in the IT industry finds a bit strange. While Chase is the US’s largest bank, the new facilities are a little big by anyone’s standard. It is about the same about of money that Google and Microsoft in their largest data centres for their cloud networks.

Dimon cited the figure as one of the advantages of being a big size. It can afford to invest cash in this way. Size lets Chase build a $500 million data centre that speeds up transactions and invest billions of dollars in products like ATMs and apps that allow your iPhone to deposit cheques, he enthused.

JPMorgan Chase operates two large data centres in Delaware and a 400,000 square foot facility. It also acquired data centres in its deals for distressed rivals Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual in the early days of the 2008 financial crisis. So why it needs a huge new one is anyone’s guess.

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Cisco Lends A Hand In Fighting Fraud

Cisco released an API at the Interop 2012 Conference this week for its branch routers designed to enable third-party developers to write applications to beef up the security of phone calls over the router network.

The Cisco UC Gateway Services API is a Web-based programming interface that allows customers and developers access to call information over a Cisco ISR G2 router at the edge of a voice network, such as signaling and media. This information can be used to detect and help prevent malicious activity such as social engineering and identity theft scams, contact center account takeover fraud, unauthorized network and service use, and denial-of-service attacks.

Applications written to the API can then apply appropriate action to terminate, redirect or record the call.

Cisco, citing data from the Communications Fraud Control Association, says global telecom fraud losses are estimated to be $40 billion annually.

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