#CyberPotential

[doncasterwebservices]

Tapping into Your Cyber Potential: Leveraging the Expertise of Local Web Designers

Leveraging the Expertise of Local Web Designers

In the contemporary age of digitization the online representation of businesses carries unparalleled significance. Choosing the right web designer is crucial, and local designers offer unique benefits that can elevate your online strategy. Discover why local website designers are the optimal choice for unlocking your business's success.

Understanding Your Unique Needs

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Conclusion

In today's competitive digital landscape, leveraging the expertise of local website designers is paramount for business success. Their industry knowledge, personalized approach, and cost-effective solutions position them as indispensable partners in unlocking your online potential.

Frequently Asked Questions:

How do I choose the right local web designer?

Research multiple candidates, seek recommendations, and review portfolios to ensure compatibility with your business needs.

What advantages do local designers offer over international agencies?

Local designers provide enhanced communication, accountability, and understanding of local markets, leading to more tailored solutions and efficient collaboration.

Can local web designers assist with digital marketing?

Yes, local designers offer comprehensive digital marketing services, including SEO optimization, content creation, and social media management, to elevate your online presence and drive business growth.

How Can You Reach Our Team?

Email: web@doncasterwebservices.co.uk

Phone No: 01302-490-222

Website Url: https://doncasterwebservices.co.uk

[newstfionline]

The World Once Laughed at North Korean Cyberpower. No More.

By David E. Sanger, David D. Kirkpatrick and Nicole Perlroth, NY Times, Oct. 15, 2017

When North Korean hackers tried to steal $1 billion from the New York Federal Reserve last year, only a spelling error stopped them. They were digitally looting an account of the Bangladesh Central Bank, when bankers grew suspicious about a withdrawal request that had misspelled “foundation” as “fandation.”

Even so, Kim Jong-un’s minions still got away with $81 million in that heist.

Then only sheer luck enabled a 22-year-old British hacker to defuse the biggest North Korean cyberattack to date, a ransomware attack last May that failed to generate much cash but brought down hundreds of thousands of computers across dozens of countries--and briefly crippled Britain’s National Health Service.

Their track record is mixed, but North Korea’s army of more than 6,000 hackers is undeniably persistent, and undeniably improving, according to American and British security officials who have traced these attacks and others back to the North.

Amid all the attention on Pyongyang’s progress in developing a nuclear weapon capable of striking the continental United States, the North Koreans have also quietly developed a cyberprogram that is stealing hundreds of millions of dollars and proving capable of unleashing global havoc.

Unlike its weapons tests, which have led to international sanctions, the North’s cyberstrikes have faced almost no pushback or punishment, even as the regime is already using its hacking capabilities for actual attacks against its adversaries in the West.

And just as Western analysts once scoffed at the potential of the North’s nuclear program, so did experts dismiss its cyberpotential--only to now acknowledge that hacking is an almost perfect weapon for a Pyongyang that is isolated and has little to lose.

The country’s primitive infrastructure is far less vulnerable to cyberretaliation, and North Korean hackers operate outside the country, anyway. Sanctions offer no useful response, since a raft of sanctions are already imposed. And Mr. Kim’s advisers are betting that no one will respond to a cyberattack with a military attack, for fear of a catastrophic escalation between North and South Korea.

“Cyber is a tailor-made instrument of power for them,” said Chris Inglis, a former deputy director of the National Security Agency, who now teaches about security at the United States Naval Academy. “There’s a low cost of entry, it’s largely asymmetrical, there’s some degree of anonymity and stealth in its use. It can hold large swaths of nation state infrastructure and private-sector infrastructure at risk. It’s a source of income.”

Mr. Inglis, speaking at the Cambridge Cyber Summit this month, added: “You could argue that they have one of the most successful cyberprograms on the planet, not because it’s technically sophisticated, but because it has achieved all of their aims at very low cost.”

It is hardly a one-way conflict: By some measures the United States and North Korea have been engaged in an active cyberconflict for years.

Both the United States and South Korea have also placed digital “implants” in the Reconnaissance General Bureau, the North Korean equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents that Edward J. Snowden released several years ago. American-created cyber- and electronic warfare weapons were deployed to disable North Korean missiles, an attack that was, at best, only partially successful.

Indeed, both sides see cyber as the way to gain tactical advantage in their nuclear and missile standoff.

A South Korean lawmaker last week revealed that the North had successfully broken into the South’s military networks to steal war plans, including for the “decapitation” of the North Korean leadership in the opening hours of a new Korean war.

There is evidence Pyongyang has planted so-called digital sleeper cells in the South’s critical infrastructure, and its Defense Ministry, that could be activated to paralyze power supplies and military command and control networks.

But the North is not motivated solely by politics: Its most famous cyberattack came in 2014, against Sony Pictures Entertainment, in a largely successful effort to block the release of a movie that satirized Mr. Kim.

What has not been disclosed, until now, is that North Korea had also hacked into a British television network a few weeks earlier to stop it from broadcasting a drama about a nuclear scientist kidnapped in Pyongyang.

Once North Korea counterfeited crude $100 bills to try to generate hard cash. Now intelligence officials estimate that North Korea reaps hundreds of millions of dollars a year from ransomware, digital bank heists, online video game cracking, and more recently, hacks of South Korean Bitcoin exchanges.

One former British intelligence chief estimates the take from its cyberheists may bring the North as much as $1 billion a year, or a third of the value of the nation’s exports.

The North Korean cyberthreat “crept up on us,” said Robert Hannigan, the former director of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, which handles electronic surveillance and cybersecurity.

“Because they are such a mix of the weird and absurd and medieval and highly sophisticated, people didn’t take it seriously,” he said. “How can such an isolated, backward country have this capability? Well, how can such an isolated backward country have this nuclear ability?”

Kim Jong-il, the father of the current dictator and the initiator of North Korea’s cyberoperations, was a movie lover who became an internet enthusiast, a luxury reserved for the country’s elite. When Mr. Kim died in 2011, the country was estimated to have 1,024 IP addresses, fewer than on most New York City blocks.

Mr. Kim, like the Chinese, initially saw the internet as a threat to his regime’s ironclad control over information. But his attitude began to change in the early 1990s, after a group of North Korean computer scientists returned from travel abroad proposing to use the web to spy on and attack enemies like the United States and South Korea, according to defectors.

North Korea began identifying promising students at an early age for special training, sending many to China’s top computer science programs. In the late 1990s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterintelligence division noticed that North Koreans assigned to work at the United Nations were also quietly enrolling in university computer programming courses in New York.

“The F.B.I. called me and said, ‘What should we do?’” recalled James A. Lewis, at the time in charge of cybersecurity at the Commerce Department. “I told them, ‘Don’t do anything. Follow them and see what they are up to.’”

The North’s cyberwarfare unit gained priority after the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States. After watching the American “shock and awe” campaign on CNN, Kim Jong-il issued a warning to his military: “If warfare was about bullets and oil until now,” he told top commanders, according to a prominent defector, Kim Heung-kwang, “warfare in the 21st century is about information.”

The unit was marked initially by mishaps and bluster.

“There was an enormous growth in capability from 2009 or so, when they were a joke,” said Ben Buchanan, the author of “The Cybersecurity Dilemma” and a fellow at the Cyber Security Project at Harvard. “They would execute a very basic attack against a minor web page put up by the White House or an American intelligence agency, and then their sympathizers would claim they’d hacked the U.S. government. But since then, their hackers have gotten a lot better.”

A National Intelligence Estimate in 2009 wrote off the North’s hacking prowess, much as it underestimated its long-range missile program. It would be years before it could mount a meaningful threat, it claimed.

But the regime was building that threat.

When Kim Jong-un succeeded his father, in 2011, he expanded the cybermission beyond serving as just a weapon of war, focusing also on theft, harassment and political-score settling.

“Cyberwarfare, along with nuclear weapons and missiles, is an ‘all-purpose sword’ that guarantees our military’s capability to strike relentlessly,” Kim Jong-un reportedly declared, according to the testimony of a South Korean intelligence chief.

And the array of United Nations sanctions against Pyongyang only incentivized Mr. Kim’s embrace.

“We’re already sanctioning anything and everything we can,” said Robert P. Silvers, the former assistant secretary for cyberpolicy at the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration. “They’re already the most isolated nation in the world.”

By 2012, government officials and private researchers say North Korea had dispersed its hacking teams abroad, relying principally on China’s internet infrastructure. This allowed the North to exploit largely nonsecure internet connections and maintain a degree of plausible deniability.

A recent analysis by the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future found heavy North Korean internet activity in India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nepal, Kenya, Mozambique, and Indonesia. In some cases, like that of New Zealand, North Korean hackers were simply routing their attacks through the country’s computers from abroad. In others, researchers believe they are now physically stationed in countries like India, where nearly one-fifth of Pyongyang’s cyberattacks now originate.

Intelligence agencies are now trying to track the North Korean hackers in these countries the way they have previously tracked terrorist sleeper cells or nuclear proliferators: looking for their favorite hotels, lurking in online forums they may inhabit, attempting to feed them bad computer code and counterattacking their own servers.

Recently, North Koreans seem to have changed tack once again. North Korean hackers’ fingerprints showed up in a series of attempted attacks on so-called cryptocurrency exchanges in South Korea, and were successful in at least one case, according to researchers at FireEye.

The attacks on Bitcoin exchanges, which see hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin exchanged a day, offered Pyongyang a potentially very lucrative source of new funds. And, researchers say, there is evidence they have been exchanging Bitcoin gathered from their heists for Monero, a highly anonymous version of cryptocurrency that is far harder for global authorities to trace.

The most widespread hack was WannaCry, a global ransomware attack that used a program that cripples a computer and demands a ransom payment in exchange for unlocking the computer, or its data. In a twist the North Koreans surely enjoyed, their hackers based the attack on a secret tool, called “Eternal Blue,” stolen from the National Security Agency.

British officials privately acknowledge that they know North Korea perpetrated the attack, but the government has taken no retaliatory action, uncertain what they can do.

While American and South Korean officials often express outrage about North Korea’s cyberactivities, they rarely talk about their own--and whether that helps fuel the cyber arms race.

Yet both Seoul and Washington target the North’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, its nuclear program and its missile program. Hundreds, if not thousands, of American cyberwarriors spend each day mapping the North’s few networks, looking for vulnerabilities that could be activated in time of crisis.

At a recent meeting of American strategists to evaluate North Korea’s capabilities, some participants expressed concerns that the escalating cyberwar could actually tempt the North to use its weapons--both nuclear and cyber--very quickly in any conflict, for fear that the United States has secret ways to shut the country down.

[posthumanwanderings]

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[ficklefeminist]

Not just Charlotte's Web

Given the recent awareness campaigns about cyber-bullying it seems the connection between virtual acts and real-world effects is a source of widespread paranoia. Even as I’m typing this I have to pause and question the forced distinction between the digital realm of the internet and the physical world. Do you think that we want to emphasize the virtualness of the internet in order to downplay its effects, or are we just acknowledging the nature of the beast?

When the group asked “Do you feel that the internet constrains and victimizes women or is it liberating?” I started thinking about the format of the internet. Of course the internet is a medium for any message, and without getting into any conspiracy theories about who owns and manages the digital frontier, it is important to recognize how the internet functions to open up and facilitate the flow of communication. It’s not just emails and social media—it’s the spreading of ideas, discursive practices, rituals, and various modes of resistance. Whether it’s a call to arms or the latest cat meme, it’s all out there…floating and waiting.

I’m not about to say whether the internet is a good thing or bad thing because, first of all, who am I to determine the use-value of the digital titan? No matter how complex my relationship is with the internet, I firmly believe this is only the beginning. (There’s that cryptic cliché I know you hate! Cue the Terminator soundtrack!) There’s always going to be the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to any medium. It’s the lingering shadow of potential and perhaps this is the root of our fear when we contemplate the future of the internet.

Although it is useful to apply gender theories to the concept of cyberbullying in order to understand its existence as a set of gender performances, I do think that trying to categorize the problem seems a bit counterproductive. There are several “types” of bullies and I don’t think we can generalize the action based solely on gender because it then constrains our understanding of the issue. Jessie Daniels makes a similar claim about the observation about cyberfeminism in her article “Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment” (2009) by saying “While it is true that many affluent women in the global North have "depressingly familiar" practices when it comes to the Internet, this sort of sweeping generalization suggests a lack of awareness about the innovative ways women are using digital technologies to re-engineer their lives” (p. 103). The internet reflects the good and the bad precisely because it is a medium, so “digital technologies embedded in everyday life allow for the transformation of corporeal and material lives in ways that both resist and reinforce structures of gender and race” (Daniels, 2009, p. 117).

A considerable amount of research has investigated the effects of online social media and our addictions to the web. Although our online profiles and identities offer explorative means to understanding ourselves and other concepts, many critics claim our online lives mean that, in comparison, our physical realities and our “true” lives feel empty or devoid of something. "But you’re profile picture looks soooo different…"

Personally, I am divided about the totality of internet effects, but I do know that I only have one picture on Facebook and it’s my profile picture. It’s been the same picture ever since I created the profile. It’s been the same picture for four years. Interestingly enough, I could care less about changing it, but my friends, well, they care so much that they’re tempted to hack my account and put up a new picture.

“But, guys, you know what I look like. You see me every day. I’m right here. Hello? Here’s my face. Here’s your yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, minutely profile picture update.”