Research examines 'white hat' hackers in cyber warfare

From the Heartbleed bug that infected many popular websites and services, to the Target security breach that compromised 40 million credit cards, malicious hackers have proved to be detrimental to companies' financial assets and reputations.

To combat these malevolent attackers, or "black hats," a community of benign hackers, i.e., "white hats," has been making significant contributions to cybersecurity by detecting vulnerabilities in companies' software systems and websites and communicating their findings. Researchers at Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) are studying white hat behaviors and how the talents of the white hat community can be most effectively used.

According to the researchers, undisclosed vulnerabilities in publicly and privately deployed software systems are a significant contributing factor to potentially damaging security incidents. Black hat hackers search for unknown software vulnerabilities and attempt to derive benefit by either exploiting such vulnerabilities to steal data and damage service availability or by selling information about such vulnerabilities on black markets.

A recent example is the Heartbleed security bug that was discovered in April and dubbed one of the biggest security threats the Internet has ever seen. Heartbleed's target is the open-source software called OpenSSL that's widely used to encrypt Web communications. Heartbleed can reveal the contents of a server's memory, where sensitive data such as usernames, passwords and credit card numbers are stored. A further complication is the interconnected nature of the Internet—an attack on an individual website or server has the potential to affect numerous websites.

For example, in August 2013, a group claiming to be the Syrian Electronic Army was able to take down the New York Times by hacking into a website in Australia. According to media reports, the group gained control of the Times' domain name registrar, Melbourne IT. A domain name registrar is a site that sells domain names and controls a domain name server (DNS). By hacking into the DNS server, the group could redirect the traffic going to nytimes.com. The Syrian Electronic Army also said it hacked Twitter, which also reportedly uses Melbourne IT.

http://cyberwar.einnews.com/article/245756848/EXuY3KwTy6b32O1Z