Security Breaches of History

In 1981, it was discovered by the CIA that Russian KGB agents were stealing technology and software from US factories and researchers, some of which was to assist with the construction of a major natural gas pipeline through Siberia. When the US learned about this, Ronald Reagan and the CIA Director, William Casey, devised a plan. A program called Farewell was installed into several computers that they knew would be stolen. The Farewell  program was designed to run push valves, turbines, and other equipment to their breaking point and then reset them so no alarms would be triggered. Eventually, in the summer of 1982, the equipment failed and caused a massive explosion in Siberia. The explosion was so large that it could be seen from space and was the largest non-nuclear blast ever recorded. The explosion was called an equipment failure until 2004, when the CIA made the incident public. The exact origin and design of the Farewell  program has not been released, though versi...

Agent.BTZ is possibly one of the most famous cyber attacks in American history. In 2008, a flash drive with the bug was inserted into a computer at a military base in the Middle East. Once in, it spread to other systems. To combat the bug, the military created a task force called ‘Yankey Buckshot’. This task force was tasked with containing the bug, which took nearly 14 months to do. This bug spreads by generating a AUTORUN.INF file in each drive it can reach. It then scans the system for useful data, opens a backdoor, and sends the information through. The main issue with Agent.BTZ is that it replicates itself and changes constantly. As of 2014, there was still traces of the bug in some systems, that’s why their efforts were to contain it instead of destroy it. The origin of the bug is still unknown, though it is theorized that it may have originated from Russia or China. This bug was written in Assembler (x86-32 bit) and is now thought to be created by a single person. In 2...

I am creating this blog to fulfill requirements for my Cyber Security masters class. I plan to write about interesting security breaches and attacks from the 14 year old boy who hacked an ATM to the crippling attack against the military in 2008, agent.btz. I am also currently reading 'Ghost in the Wires' written by Kevin Mitnick, one of the most notorious 'computer break-in artists' in the world. I want to write about this topic because I believe that history does repeat itself even with technology that is constantly evolving. I believe that while the technology changes, human factors and reasoning stay relatively the same so understanding what people did and why can be extremely helpful when it comes to preventing attacks.