Sources : Times News Network

Date of Publishing:3/8/2010

Location:Kolkata

Once hunted, hackers wooed now to fight terror

Las Vegas: An elite US cyber team that has stealthily tracked internet villains for more than a decade pulled back its cloak of secrecy to recruit hackers at a DefCon gathering.

Vigilant was described by its chief Chet Uber as a sort of cyber "A-Team" taking on terrorists, drug cartels, mobsters and other enemies on the internet. "We do things the government can't," Uber said on Sunday. "This was never supposed to have been a public thing."

Vigilant is an alliance of slightly more than 600 volunteers and its secret ranks reportedly include chiefs of technology at top firms and former high-ranking US cyber spies. The group scours web traffic for clues about online attacks, terrorists, cartels and other targets rated as priorities by members of the democratically run private organization. Vigilant also have "collection officers" in 22 countries that gather intelligence or coordinate networks in person.

Vigilant shares seemingly significant findings with US spy agencies, and is so respected by leading members of the hacker community that Uber was invited to Def-Con to recruit new talent.

Uber said that Vigilant came up from underground after 14 years of operation in a drive to be at "full capacity" by adding 1,750 "vetted volunteers" by the year 2012. "We are good people not out to hurt anybody," Uber said. "Our one oath is to defend the US constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic."

The holy grail for Vigilant is finding out who is behind cyber attacks. Inability to figure out who launches online assaults leaves firms or governments without targets to fire back at. Vigilant has developed its own "obfuscation" network to view "bad actors" without being noticed. AP ‘Invasion of US defences to take 2yrs, $100m'

Las Vegas: A computer espionage specialist has laid out blueprints for building a cyber army capable of crashing through US defenses.

Readying an unstoppable internet invasion would take two years and a total of $100 million, according to Charlie Miller, who spent five years with the US National Security Agency under then-director Michael Hayden. Now a researcher with Baltimore-based Independent Security Evaluators, Miller shared his plan with hackers at a DefCon gathering in Las Vegas.

Miller explained that he had actually been asked by the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Estonia to play general in the theoretical attack scenario. He crafted a broad strategy to target smart grids, banks, communications and all other aspects of a nation's technology infrastructure.

A key to success was stealthily breaching networks and establishing beachheads in computer systems during the two years before the main cyber invasion. AFP

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