Actually, we are back to DEF CON.
After two years, we are back to DEF CON.
And this year, we wanted to talk about something new.
Actually, also two years ago, we were talking about something new.
We will talk about asymmetric digital warfare.
What is it? What is the point today?
What will happen in the future?
And we will take a very good example,
which is the Department of Defense FCS program,
which stands for Future Combat System.
Before starting, I want to tell you that
you will not get all the information you need
out from this speech directly,
because the speech comes together
with the release of the second episode of our comics.
If you go on zoneh.org website,
we already published, one month ago,
the first sample, actually, of Hacker Comics ever,
which was quite successful,
and I suggest you to go there and download it.
It's for free, of course.
And the second episode, it is complementary
to the speech we are going to have today.
If you want to understand everything what we are going to talk,
and if you want to get even more deep examples,
you definitely have to go, either to download
the comic from our website,
or we will distribute later, to all of you,
a CD, which is actually, was signed originally also by us.
We are the authors of the comic.
And this is the PDF file containing the comic book.
There will not be any questions and answers section.
We don't have the time,
but we will ask you a couple of questions.
To those who are capable to answer,
we will give a nice T-shirt,
with the cover of our comic book,
which is that one.
Anyway, my name is Roberto Preatoni.
I am the founder of zonedge.org,
which is the last mirror,
the defacement mirror archive.
All of the others, they closed.
It's a hell of a job to do it.
Maybe the next year in DEF CON,
I will try to explain to the people
what is a mirror archive,
the reason of existing of such thing,
and the efforts which are behind.
But not today.
First of all, the credits.
I have to give two credits.
The first credit goes to the MIT Technology Magazine.
I was on vacation the last year.
I was reading a very good article
on the MIT Technology Magazine.
And this article brought to my attention
the problem that the American army
had during the Second Gulf War.
We will see what kind of problems.
And the second credit,
I want to credit globalsecurity.org.
It is a very nice website.
You can get any kind of possible information
about military system.
You can spend years downloading material
and watching stuff.
Of course, most of the things
are traditionally military weapons.
But due to the fact that the FCS,
Future Combat System,
it is a known program under development,
you can find also references
on globalsecurity.org.
Another thing I want to say before starting,
it is all the material you will find here,
and on the slide which you have on your CD, I guess.
It's public.
We didn't hack anything.
So you can get it by yourself.
If Johnny Lang is around,
he can teach you how to use Google
in the proper way to download such material
and to find it.
First of all,
there are several good reasons
to download Zone H comic
beside the fact that it is necessary
to understand our speech.
We have the Dark Tangent,
DEFCON's mastermind,
himself playing as a guest star
in the comic.
And the second reason,
you can see my ass,
basically.
Which, I don't want to tell you
it's even better than the first reason,
but up to you.
Actually, I don't have it so flat,
it's a little bit more rounded.
My friend here is Fabio Ghioni,
and he is one of the best experts
in asymmetric warfare,
anti-terrorism.
If you read his CV,
it's very long.
You can get it actually
from the DEFCON website.
Actually, it's your turn.
We will talk a little bit me,
a little bit him.
Now it's a little bit me.
So, asymmetric warfare.
I don't want to bore anybody
with conventional things,
but some things must be said before.
And there are a lot of things
which are misunderstood.
For example,
the definition of asymmetric warfare
and the definition of unconventional.
For unconventional,
so you understand the rest of the speech, of course.
For unconventional weapons,
or unconventional means,
I give you an example.
You have a fork.
A fork you use it to eat, of course,
a steak or whatever.
Then an unconventional use of this fork
is to stick it in the eye of this guy over here.
So, that's a thing.
Then there is another thing,
an image, a very good drawing
that I saw in a newspaper
a few years back, where there was
a big marine soldier
and a small, I would say, Iraqi guy.
You know, these drawers on newspapers.
And the small Iraqi guy
said, you know,
huge marine soldier with
full of weapons everywhere
and millions of dollars of research.
And the small Iraqi guy
with some sand in his hand,
threw the sand in the eyes of the big soldier.
And he said, ah, that's not fair, that's unconventional.
So, that's unconventional.
And then asymmetric.
For asymmetric, there is a thing very interesting.
When I was in Cuba
about a year ago
to see Ramiro Valdez.
Ramiro Valdez is one of the heroes of the revolution
in Cuba.
Hero in Cuba.
Not everywhere else, of course.
And I remember that he said
among other things, he said,
ah, Americans, they invented the term
asymmetric because they want to
invade us and they say that we are preparing
for asymmetric warfare. Actually, they are not
because they don't have even lines, phone lines
to get connection
on the internet. But
that's one thing.
And what does that mean?
That a country,
it means that a country that doesn't have the means
to combat the war, which is
systemic, which is a huge
expensive war, uses
whatever it has
unconventional means. That is one
of the meanings of asymmetric. The other thing is
for example, Islam
and a nation, like for example
the USA or another nation.
So if you have France against Germany,
it's symmetric. You have territory,
you have people, you have whatever, a nation
against another nation. If you have
Islam, Islam is scattered everywhere.
You can have people working
in your country.
You can have people
everywhere. That's asymmetric.
Religious matters and everything
like that.
So...
when it is
used, this is...
I just basically explained it.
When you are invading a
country or you are combating
an enemy which has means
which are too big to be
compared to, like for example, the
United States right now is the only country
which can fight a systemic war, which is a war
where you have like bombs, intelligent
bombs. Hit the third window
on the left on the 20th floor and
kill the man who is taking
a pee in that moment. But don't kill the cat
that is in the room. So that's
intelligent
bomb. Then if you kill the cat,
it says, shit, it didn't work, so we didn't spend that
much money. And
the country where
this man is and he is taking a pee and the cat
was killed but he didn't have to be killed, etc,
etc, they don't have the money to
fight this war, so they use whatever they have.
So it's called
asymmetric. It's also called dirty war.
It's called it in many ways.
So,
for example, did
everybody see the Black Hawk Down movie?
So whoever didn't see it, I mean
that's a very famous
or very important
example of
asymmetry in a war.
Okay? And the use
of unconventional means. So you have this
big
Sikorsky
helicopter, which is very
expensive and it costs a lot of money
in research and development.
You have soldiers, you have weapons,
you have maintenance.
I mean, you would never believe how much
it costs to maintain
an helicopter after 100 hours of
flight. It must be maintained for
a lot of million dollars again.
So you have all this thing and then you had
a little boy
with, you know,
a watch and a cell phone.
Actually it was a satellite phone.
And he saw the helicopters coming
and he called the guys on the base and he said,
they are coming. And the
whole thing went, you know,
went like that.
The Black Hawk went down and
that battle was lost.
So the big expense, the
Delta Force and all the millions of dollars
spent on satellite recognition
and everything, all was spent
for nothing because this little guy, which
I mean, how much does it cost, this little guy?
You only have to feed him something
and a satellite
phone, so you have to pay the phone bill and that's it.
And he destroyed everything.
This is, you know, I mean,
everybody nowadays does the example of the
Twin Towers. So you have the 19 men,
19 cutters and then you have the 11th
September thing.
All the intelligence expenses that have been done
in the years before
didn't prevent this episode
like many other episodes. Of course, there are
a lot of things that have been prevented, but we
will never know what they are.
So, why are we saying
this? Because in this
years, the electronic
warfare, the electronic
men is the best way to hit
the countries which are
technologically developed.
So we have, for example, all the
western bloc countries.
These countries depend
almost totally on digital
systems, on telematic systems,
on electronic systems.
So the critical infrastructures,
telecommunication infrastructures,
food supply, banking systems,
military systems, even
for example in the United States, missiles,
I think they have IP addresses.
So everything depends on
electronic and telematic systems.
So, what do you need to
do to hit such a country?
You might use electronic means
if you know where to hit, of course.
So you need to do some research before, some intelligence.
But
both the intelligence and the
fighting, you do it using
a computer like this one.
You connect to the network and if you
are good to search
or to find things and you are good also
on exploiting them,
then you might hit a critical
infrastructure and create a blackout.
You know that in the past
years there have been several blackouts around
the western countries. For example in Italy, where
I come from, there was a huge blackout
about two years ago where all the country went black.
Totally.
The government said that it was
a tree, some tree that fell over
some type of wire. It was a totally impossible
explanation. So who will ever
know what happened? Nobody.
And the same thing happened also in the United
States.
Three years ago, I think. Or a couple of years
ago too. And in other countries.
So they said it was Switzerland.
In Italy they said it was Switzerland.
The tree fell over some kind of wire
and then everything went blackout. The whole country
was incredible. I was there
at night. I was out
tapping at night actually. I never saw
this type of darkness.
It was totally scary.
So you can hit
these critical infrastructures
and the thing is that
you can create more damage doing this
than doing a lot of other things.
So for example, the bombings that were
in London last week
or two weeks ago. What did they do?
They killed people. Fifty people died.
But
after these fifty people died
the country
what did it suffer? Okay, there was
a human life.
Nobody can contest the fact
that it is valuable.
But nothing changed.
The structures were totally
there. It was psychological.
It was mediatic. It was
public opinion. It was all these kind of things.
So that's what terrorists want to hit
at that moment. But if they
really wanted to create damage,
they didn't have to kill those fifty people.
They could just stop a nuclear
power reactor or
damage it somehow. You don't need to do
very sophisticated things to
exploit critical infrastructures.
You just need to do a little
thing that just creates havoc.
Okay?
So this is the thing. Then I will go on
later and I give the microphone back
to this guy.
It might
sound strange, but the main difference
between the first and the second
Gulf War was a bandwidth
difference.
In the next ten years
the US has developed
a way to
distribute
information, to collect information.
And
basically, in the second
Gulf War, the US troops were enjoying
forty-two times more bandwidth
than in the first Gulf
War. How
this bandwidth was actually used?
Well, the picture on the center is
a typical
command center,
command and control center,
which collects
a lot of data,
which could be
data and voice interception
or data coming from spies
deployed on the territory. They are going
to be fed, actually, into the system.
From
stealth planes,
which are actually flying over the
territory and watching the situation,
taking pictures,
spy drones, unmanned
vehicles, from
satellites, and also
from the Blue Force Tracker, which is a very important
system for
the American Army. It is the
system, if you see in the movie, when they
are, I don't know, on the enemy
territory, and they open the laptop,
and the laptop is showing
some red triangles
on the map, which is, this is the
enemy, and some blue triangles,
this is us. Actually, this system
is not science fiction. It is
existing, and they are already using it
successfully.
Well, I want to tell
you one thing.
If you open Google Maps, or
if you ever used
downloading the trial version, not
cracked, of course, of
Keyhole, the software which
was used by CNN to
show you, basically, the
toilet in which the guy was pissing,
and beside it was the cat from the
satellite. Do you have any
idea how many
megabytes, gigs,
it's actually taking a picture
taken
from a satellite? Huge
amount. Now, if you have a satellite
which is taking picture on the territory,
on the enemy territory, and you have to
download to give this picture
to the troops, then you need
bandwidth. You can't do the
800 x 600 JPEG picture.
This is good for browsing Britney
Spears' website, but not
to go at
war. This is the reason why
U.S. Army developed such a large
bandwidth network.
Was it working?
No.
When U.S. troops
entered into
the territory, they started to
experience a lot
of troubles. Now,
focus your attention.
Do you remember exactly the day
when they started to
invade Iraq?
The guy was sitting, the CNN
guy, was sitting on the top
of a U.S. tank which was
running 120
kilometers per hour. I don't know
it in miles. You can do calculations by yourself.
And it was
75. And it was running
and running and running. And the
journalist was saying, there is nobody
nobody is facing us.
We don't see the enemy. And that
was the problem. Because
they were running
too fast. And they were losing
connectivity. Try to
hook yourself into a
Wi-Fi network while you are
on your car and you are driving fast.
You can't.
And basically the
Humvees which were in front of the U.S.
troops, they had to stop
even for 12
hours to download the
tactical data. Now,
do you know the difference between
strategical and tactical
data? Tactical data are the data
which are necessary to survive in the next 5
minutes. Because it's telling
you where the enemy is.
From which point you should
expect to be attacked.
Where should you go not to be
attacked. What you should do.
Because the command and control center is
telling you to do this, this and that.
And if you rely on
connectivity
for having such service, it's good
as long as you have connectivity.
But if you don't have any more connectivity, what is
happening? You don't know where your enemy is
while your enemy knows very well where you
are. Because you are stopped in the
middle of the desert.
And
how was organized the system
for the second Gulf War?
Basically we had
two command and control centers.
One was located in Qatar. The second
was located in Kuwait.
And all
the data
gathered by the probes
was actually fed into a system
which was producing too much
of intelligence.
It is like if you
enable all of your
IDS messaging
or if you are using zone alarm and
you tell to zone alarm
to pop up the window each time you
are receiving a
strange packet. It will pop up
every five seconds. And
what will be the end? You will switch
off the pop up thing.
Too much of information equals
no information.
And this was a problem.
The second problem was that the information
was fed into a satellite system.
The satellite system was downloading
sending, sorry,
through a traditional
radio streaming
to a
vehicle which was located
back of the US troops and from
the vehicle which was
actually supposed to act as a router
to distribute the information
the data
were sent using
an eye
of sight
microwave beam.
I guess for security
reason they didn't want to
have the high technology
enemy which is the
Iraqi troops
intercepting
the data of the US troops
but this system is working
as long as you can see
the vehicle which is on your
back. But if you are running
75 miles per hour because you don't
face the enemy, then you are
losing this link and you are not
capable to get any data. This was the reason
why they had to stop and wait 12 hours
to get the data.
And they were killed, actually.
Sorry.
US soldiers lost life
also due to this.
Because they didn't have the backup of the
intelligence telling them where the enemy
is. They were facing the enemy
in the same moment they realized it was existing.
And at the same time
the bullets, they were
flying over their head.
Now,
the blue force tracking
system, it's the system
who tells you where the enemy is.
Luckily,
when they developed it,
they assigned
a certain amount of bandwidth
to the BFT, which is
actually working using
the satellites. It doesn't work using
direct microwave
beams.
It means you can always receive it
actually the same system you are using on your
car for your GPS system.
Very similar.
Luckily,
the amount of bandwidth developed
from the very beginning to supply
information through the BFT
system was more
than it was actually needed.
So, the developers
having such extra bandwidth,
they were thinking,
what are we going to do? Are we going to use
this bandwidth or not? Yes.
What do we do? Let's build
an email system.
You never know. It might come
in handy. It actually came in handy
because the whole Iraqi invasion
having
the first system not working
was actually organized through emails.
USA
was at war
in the sense that through the email
coming from the BFT system,
they were capable to finally coordinate
their own action.
This was the past.
Now, a question for you.
To the one who is going to answer to me,
I'm going to give a T-shirt.
What is this?
Can you tell me what is this?
Excuse me?
What is it?
A trigger. No, no, no, no, no, no.
Not a landmine. No, no, no, no, no.
No?
No, diesel pump? No, no, no, no?
You have it in your kitchen.
You have diesel pumps in your kitchen. What are you doing?
What, what?
Microwave?
Magnetron.
Please, it's a magnetron.
And you have it in your
microwave oven.
And it's a system that can be used
actually to disrupt
direct
microwave beams as it
was used in the
Iraq invasion. We will see later
some other examples
how to use such thing.
Anyway, this was the
past. And US Army
actually didn't want to
experience anymore such problem.
No bandwidth, no connectivity,
no tactical data, equal
death. So
they decided to
develop a new system which is called
FCS, which stands
for Future Combat System.
And it is a
21 billion dollar program
but it is going to be upgraded
already. It's exactly in the middle
of its own development.
It's not science fiction.
Some prototypes have been already developed.
And this is the system which is
meant to totally
substitute
the way the US
is doing the war in the future.
In which way?
We will come to the hacking part
later, don't worry.
The old war
concept was that you should have
heavy war equipment.
The big Abram tank
with having massive
fire powers. I want to shoot once
and I want to kill them all.
Large
battlefronts. Full
division deployed on the territory.
Let's occupy, hit,
destroy.
Having low tech
infantry because
high tech infantry cost
a lot. And of
course having vehicles
which were
driven by real people.
Now, under the FCS program
things are going to be changed.
Not anymore
heavy war equipment, but light
war equipment. Instead of the big
Abram tank, they are going to develop
small, lighter tank.
Faster than
the Abram one.
Having not a massive fire power,
but having a minimal fire power.
But they are so fast
that they can shoot you and then move
and shoot you again and then move and shoot
again and again and again. Like if you
are surrounded by a
lot of bees. Basically you don't know.
You are going to
get hit from a lot of different
directions.
Instead of a large
division of soldiers
deployed on the territory, they are going
to deploy small
families, called families of
soldiers. Typically in
12
12
people unit.
So I put 12 people here,
12 people there, 12 people there.
If you know where they are, they
are very much vulnerable.
You can kill them very easily.
But there is a trick. We have a
large use of intelligence.
What does it mean?
It means that I must be capable
to supply through the FCS system
information, immediate information, to the
people, to the troops deployed on the
battlefield, so that even if
they are small families of soldiers,
they will be constantly
aware about what is going on.
And the trick is that
when the enemy thinks
that they
identified our troops,
we are already capable to understand
it, we move the troops somewhere else,
and we hit the enemy. And then we are going to move them
and again and again and again.
And finally, having a
large use of automatic vehicles.
We have some examples here.
Public data from globalsecurity.org.
Some of them, especially
the one in the box, you already
saw the drones, the spy drones,
they are already
in force. Some other
are prototypes. You can see also
the size of the vehicle compared
to the human being. They are much
smaller than what we were used to see
a long time ago.
And these are the working prototypes
of combat drones.
In our comic,
our heroes, they have
to actually get
rid of one of these combat drones
which gets hijacked by
an enemy's hacker,
and it's used against
its own troops.
Now,
always from public data,
we can see that this is the
timing, the
Gantt diagram, basically,
on how the FCS is meant
to be deployed in the following
years, when they
developed this in 2001.
And one thing you can note, it is that
it's saying
that the problem,
actual problem, is that
there is a lack of artificial intelligence.
So they are drones,
but they have limited capability of
understanding the surroundings.
Which means
they can drive around by themselves,
but in combat situations,
if you have the risk
to kill one of your own
soldiers, better not to take such risk.
Such vehicles will be taken over
by a U.S. Army
soldier,
and they will be remotely
controlled by him,
which will actually tell to the drone
where to shoot and how to shoot.
Now, the question is,
from the hacker point of view,
to receive the
signal, the control signal,
it must be hooked to a network,
and there is a network, we will see later.
If there is a network,
it means such thing is
permanently connected and authenticated to the network.
Good.
But it can get, for example,
it can get stuck into a hole
or the wheels
can blow up and the thing,
the whole thing will be stopped
in the middle of somewhere.
So what if the enemy is going to put its own hands
over it? It is dangerous to have
a thing which is permanently connected to your network.
Because the enemy can put
the hands over the network.
So I guess, I didn't find any reference,
but I expect there are some,
there might be some
system to protect
in such situation,
like self-destroying system.
Self-destroying, it doesn't mean it is going to be blown up.
Because it might be dangerous.
Because it might be close to your own soldiers.
Self-destroying means
that you will destroy
the digital contents of the drones,
leaving just basically a piece of art.
You remember this, the American spy plane,
which was landing on the Chinese island
a few years ago?
The American soldiers,
before landing on the Chinese island,
it was a spy plane.
Basically, it was connected to the US Army network.
They destroyed, not physically, but logically,
all the content in the airplane.
The Chinese authorities, they were capable
to put their hands over
a piece of hardware without the software.
And you know better than me that if you have
the hardware without the software,
it's basically a little bit more than nothing.
Now, then,
if it has really such
auto-destruction system,
the smart hacker
employed by the enemy
might think
ways to trigger the system
of the self-destruction.
Not doing it today,
but doing it the day you need it
and this thing is deployed on the battlefield.
You are relying
on its usage,
but the hacker will actually
destroy the content,
triggering the self-destruction mechanism.
Now,
how this thing works?
The FCS system,
it is managed
by a huge network,
the largest network after
Internet, actually, if I think,
which is called Mosaic.
Mosaic network, it is meant
to manage the whole
war infrastructure
of US Army.
Ships, submarines,
airplanes,
infantry, drones, everything
will be connected somehow
to this network.
The network, the Mosaic network,
it is meant to have a kind of quality of service
feature
based on
the importance of
the packet. If the packet
is coming from the command and control
center,
this packet has priority
in the mesh network
because it is a mesh network.
It means
even if the network is
congested, blocked
somehow, overloaded,
the packets coming
from the high priority centers
will be routed
correctly to the end,
having the other packets waiting for
that. And in our comic,
we can't say it here, but we can say it
on the comic because the comic is
science fiction.
We actually imagine the way to
exploit such
a system just
flooding it by high priority
packets, by replicating
them and saturating the network.
Now,
the FCS system, it is a system,
a daring system.
They already tried some
of the pieces, some of the equipment
and the network, it is
TCP IP based
and it's basically using
traditional network
equipment and
several of the
drones are actually Linux based.
A miniaturized version of Linux
of course, with
harder
stacks,
maybe less holes, you never know.
But it's still something which is public
and based on
public networking system.
And
now comes the problem.
What I call the
Apollo 13 effect.
Do you actually know what was the
real reason why
the Apollo 13
had the problem?
You remember that the oxygen tank
exploded.
If you know the reason, you can get a second
T-shirt. Which was the real reason
why the oxygen tank
of the Apollo 13 exploded.
Not
communication problems.
Wiring? Almost.
Excuse me?
A short in the oxygen center, but why?
Electrical? Yes, almost.
We are close.
No, no, no, no.
Well, if nobody is...
You?
No?
No?
Voltage.
Voltage.
The Apollo 13
project was a huge project.
A lot of suppliers
Rockwell,
Boeing, and so on.
They were helping NASA to develop
the systems.
From Apollo 12
to Apollo 13, the difference
is that they decided
to increase the voltage
which was used
to run the systems
in the Apollo 13.
So
all the developers,
all the subcontractors, they were informed, of course,
except one.
Rockwell.
And, which is
by the way, one of the subcontractors
of the SCS system, but anyway.
Not being informed about
such increase in the voltage,
they were supplying the oxygen tank
and it blown up.
Because it was overloaded by voltage.
You can get the T-shirt
anyway.
Now, why it happened?
It's actually normal. In my
experience, when I work
besides Zone H, I do penetration tests
with my own company.
And one of the things
I noticed is when you have complex systems
made up, for example, by different
subcontractors,
the implementation of such systems
it is introducing more vulnerabilities.
Rockwell was one of
a new vulnerability for the Apollo
13 program.
Now, I expect
given the fact that we have
FCS
being a consortium
much bigger than the Apollo 13
one of company,
mostly American company.
The leader of the consortium is Boeing.
You can see actually advertising on CNN
in these days, not
specifically related to the FCS
system, but the images they are showing
are belonging to the FCS system.
So the general
public start to be aware
about such system.
The Apollo 13
sorry, the FCS
system, it is led by Boeing, having
also a large consortium
of company
to be
actually managed as a project manager.
We can say actually Boeing
is the FCS project manager
on behalf
of the Department of Defense.
Now,
how does it work?
The U.S. Congress tell
to U.S. Army, yes, you have to develop
a new system. They assign a budget
and then they name
a project leader, Boeing.
Then the system are
divided in subsystems
and in consortium. There is the consortium
of companies which
are developing robotics, artificial
intelligence. Then there is a consortium
of companies which is developing
unmanned vehicles.
Another consortium of companies which is
developing weaponry, and so on.
Each company has to
report to Boeing how things are going
on. And
of course, each consortium
itself has a consortium leader.
The consortium leader has to
act as a sub project manager
to the rest of the companies
belonging to the same consortium.
Each consortium
and each company
in the consortium has its own
project manager, internal
company project manager, who has to lead
the activity of the programmers,
for example,
which are developing within the company
a particular piece of the SES system.
Now, you can imagine,
if you add all the programmers,
each programmer
developing the system,
by the way, FCS system,
it is 31 millions of code,
the software, 31 millions
of lines of code. You can imagine
how many conceptual and practical
vulnerabilities there might be introduced
by people who never developed, for
example, such software, because nobody
did it before. It is a totally
new thing. And when
a lot of programmers belonging to
a company, which is put together
with a lot of other different companies
which are belonging to a consortium,
which are put together with several
other consortiums, are going, finally,
to integrate what they produced,
the software, you can imagine
the huge amount of shit
that can come out.
Now,
as a personal
experience, and also analyzing
the data coming from Zone H,
we have
one million of cyber crimes
web defacement,
let's call it web defacement,
filed in our archives. For each,
we know how it happened
and the reason of the attacks.
We can say, today,
most of the hacks which we
see every day,
two and a half thousand servers hacked
per day. This is the amount of data
we are receiving at zoneh.org.
80% of
the time, the system is
hacked through the application layer.
And FCS system is mostly application.
Now,
I want to say they are better
than the average.
It will be vulnerable, maybe
40%
on the application level,
but still there are
possible vulnerabilities to be introduced
by the system integration, for example,
the protocol might be
bugged, the transmission protocol might be
bugged, the hardware
integration might introduce vulnerabilities
and also, of course,
information leakage.
Hackers are
actively looking
to get information about the
FCS. I met, personally,
a guy in Rome
which was representing
US Navi
and he was investigating on
leaks. He didn't
name to me the FCS system
itself. He told me
we are looking for information
about
hackers coming from the
East Europe, stealing a piece of
information about military
software or military
programs under development.
Well, the only military program
under development so far, big, is the
FCS system. And
no need to name it, actually.
It was clear to me that they are having
such problem already. There are spies
who are actually using
hacker
means to get information
about this new system.
Now,
if
there are software
problems, that might be software
problems, again, read the comic
and you will get a very good hint on how
to hack the mosaic network.
There are also other problems. First of all,
the FCS system is organized
following the lobbying
standard procedure
in the American way.
So, the president got
a lot of money for his
campaign from Boeing.
Therefore, Boeing, for example,
doing some science fiction.
Boeing is named as a project leader,
but then also other people, they were
sustaining the campaign, then
they also have to have a little
piece. So, it is
not always distributed as it
should be, the work.
Lobbyism
has a big part in the decision
to which company assign a project
or not. Then,
the military software is not open
sourced, of course. You know,
Linux is the most audited
code ever. Still, we are finding
vulnerabilities. Still.
Firefox.
Everybody
using Firefox because it was open sourced
two years ago.
I don't know
anybody who was actually reading the
source, but they were saying, oh, it's open
sourced, so I can use it. It's safe.
But still, are coming
out new vulnerabilities.
Because it's open sourced. A closed
source platform, basically
it is a never audited platform.
Because who is going to audit
the FCS system? The same people
who are developing it. And you know better
than me that you can't audit
your own job.
The job should be outsourced by somebody
else, but because it's
military, you can't do it.
Therefore, I expect, by my
experience, to find a lot
of vulnerability in the application level
and within the lines.
Then, if the FCS
system is leading your
troops on the battlefield,
losing somehow
connectivity, or being
hacked,
leads to a lot of trouble.
Because you don't have anymore a large battlefront
which is capable to defend itself.
Now you have small families of soldiers,
12 soldiers, dispersed in the territory.
They don't get shit from the satellite
or information. They don't know where they are.
They don't know where the enemy is. They don't get
the command from
the command and control center. They don't know what
to do. They are blind, basically. They are
slow, because they are
without heavy equipment.
And they are a very vulnerable
target.
Now, if I am
an enemy of the United
States today, definitely
I would start
a program for
collecting as much
information as I can about
such FCS system.
Because nobody can
fight against
the United States using the same
system, because you need
a lot of money. There is no
symmetric power
as an enemy for the United States.
The only way you can fight
the United States, if the United States
is adopting such a system, is
to use asymmetric ways.
And one of the ways is to hack
the servers of the companies
which today are going to
develop such
a system, and to try to
steal information. And one of the things
which we did,
we were imagining
to be
I don't know, hackers
coming from North Korea,
or hackers coming from Iran,
and to see how much of information
we could find
on the Internet
to hack the system.
It's not done.
So...
This is a question
I put there, just
a little forward to the question.
The most
vulnerable system, as everybody knows,
is our brain,
right? So it's the human being.
The human being with all its vulnerabilities
and its ways to be bought
or exploited.
So, that's why I put
this question there.
Who are the best security-aware managers
or people in the world's history?
The Pharaohs.
They got a lot
of people to build the pyramids
and then at the end they killed them all.
I didn't find any slide with the people being killed
afterwards, so I didn't put it, but
that's the thing.
So, we cannot do it now.
The right way would be
we build a future combat system
and then we kill everybody that build it.
Then we wouldn't have anybody to maintain it,
but that's not a problem.
It's illegal, but what the hell.
So,
this is just to explode
what I was saying before.
This slide,
I borrowed it from a Swedish
study from a university there.
That's actually pretty...
I liked it very much because it explains
all the phases of the conflict.
You have the
mechanical war at the center, which is
big armies facing each other
with the guns and going forward and shooting
and everybody falls down.
At the end, only one soldier remains
and that army won.
There was the old way to fight.
Then you have the dirty war,
which is terrorism or resistance war.
Depends from the viewpoint.
If you win, it's resistance. If you lose,
it's terrorism.
Then you have
peace war, which is
the war that was fought between the Eastern
Bloc and the Western Bloc when there was
the Soviet Union.
And the systemic war, which is
the war that can be fought
only by the United States right now, which has the money.
It's the big difference between
all the other types of war and
systemic war is money
and the other wars are people. More people,
more money.
And, you know, little windows
that you can hit with the intelligent bombs.
And then you have the ICT war. ICT war
is a type of dirty war which can be fought
only by
subjects
which have the capability or which
are linked, which have a high technological
situation
in their countries and can be fought only
against another country which
has the same situation. For example, you cannot
fight an ICT war against Iran
because they have only two servers, I think.
Last time I checked,
it was a couple of mail servers
in the mines and whatever
ministry, etc.
They don't have anything on the nuclear side, so
that's unfortunate for the intelligent people here.
And
but you can fight an ICT
war between, I don't know,
I'm just doing fiction, Japan and
whatever, Korea. They are not at war, but
if they would, that would be
the thing. So
if you want to, this is taken from
a book which is called Unrestricted Warfare.
I think everybody
that has some interest
in this has read it. It was
first translated by the CIA
and then it was retranslated again because there were
some points which were not totally
clear. And they were the first
that unrestricted because
they
hypothesized that any kind of
means to fight a war,
there are no rules in fighting a war,
which means that you can do just about anything.
The important thing is the result,
to win.
And they were the first to
say that one of the
best means to fight a war would be
through electronic means,
exploiting the electronics
and the telematics.
So, future
combat system. This is all
the material you will see from here
on up to the last
slide, which is
done by some, I think, Accenture.
They are all being
taken from open source.
Nothing has been hacked.
Right?
Okay.
So, this is
the distribution of the consortiums
that work on the future combat
system. So, if you want to do
research from an intelligence point of
view, you start from here.
You see who is working for
whom and on what.
And then, you get...
Wow!
You get all the companies
that work on what project
and where they are located.
One,
two, three, four pages.
Wow!
Wow! What's that?
You get all the...
What is this?
So, this is
the specific project
that has been
assigned, the description
of the project, the company
and other little information about that.
And then, you have one, two
and here you go.
So, this is all you
need, actually, to do what
you need to do if you want to start
fighting this future combat
system. You have
the companies, you have the projects,
you have the
project managers,
the people, the ICs, their
email address, their email service and their
phone number. So,
what else do you want? We have
two pages of that as an example because we didn't want
to make the presentation too long.
So,
you know, of course, that if you have
already an email address of a person,
you can do a lot of things from remote
because you can use modern
Trojan horses technologies or
things like that. And I assure
you that in the industrial espionage
business, which is a business right now,
this type of
methods and exploiting is
being used constantly. And
it is very well paid.
Very well paid.
In the other hand, if you don't have the technical
capability, you can just send a person with
a bag full of money and
you just find out how much one of these
people costs. Maybe he's not happy.
How people are bought
in companies. Maybe you didn't get your
promotion. Maybe your boss was too harsh
on you. Maybe, I don't know,
your wife left you and then you are not
happy. And then this person comes
near to you at the bar and says,
you are better than
that. I think you should do
something for a better cause.
Here is $10,000.
$10,000 is not too much. Here is $20,000.
At the end, somebody says,
okay, let's do it.
So, another
thing, which you can see here,
is a system like the future combat system.
What can exploit it? We said before,
I mean, you just need to jam it. You don't need to
hack it, actually. Because hackers
are perfect. They want to
do things.
It's the act of hacking, which must be.
It's not always the result.
You want to do that thing
and then you say, okay, it's easy to do it.
The easy thing is
for
no good shit,
you say in America.
I want to do it in a very artistic way.
Maybe you take six months and you never get
the result because it's too old by the time you get
the result. So you just
sometimes need to jam something.
The communication, for example.
In this case, you have an EMP
shock generator, which is an electromagnetic
pulse shock generator.
It's a bomb, basically.
You can rent it for research
and discovery or research and development
purposes, if you can prove you are a researcher.
And a lot of people can prove it
for $1,500 a month.
And then you can
have the option to buy it for $11,000
afterwards.
So this is
public. I mean, if you want to buy it, I
thought about it, actually.
You put it in the middle
of a square
somewhere and then you activate it.
You run very fast because you need to
get about three miles far.
And then everything
in three miles
just burns out. Every circuit
and all the people that are around the bomb
also get suntanned
a little bit.
So
this I put
because in the company
where I work for, there are a lot of
consultants which are being paid a lot of money
to do things like that.
This is a security management
learning model. And it's supposed
to tell you how to do security
in a company or whatever.
And
from my experience,
all the things that we just said
and all the things that we saw
in the past, I can tell you that this is just
if you work for a company, just
don't pay people to do things like that. They are very
good if you want to make a big
picture. We say in Italy,
if you want to wrap fish, you go and buy fish
and you need paper to wrap it.
That's the thing.
So sorry if there is any big consultant in here.
And if you have any questions, we don't
have enough time. So just write us
an email.
Okay?
You can come here.
We have the CD with the comic. You can get it.
And by the way, it was supposed to
be signed by the Dark Tangent
but you know the little Cisco problem
he had in the Black Hat
was keeping
him busy. So basically he will
sign it just
if you show up yourself with a CD
he will sign it. We'll be happy to sign it.
CDs are there. And we have a few
keystraps here.