comStar Firewall alert - PhaseThrough

what it sounds like: two or more hackers combining their skills and
resources to infiltrate a given node. It has to be a slow hack unless
you want to just bust in, but it’s pretty effective. The problem with
mass attacks is that once you’re inside the node, alliances tend to
fall apart quickly—different hackers want different things, and they
sometimes end up fighting each other and node security at the same
time. Hey, you know what they say about trusting criminals …
pHiSHing
While hacking your way into a system is one way to gain access,
it’s often loud and noisy—the Matrix equivalent of breaking
the glass and reaching through the hole to unlock the door while
hoping you haven’t set off any alarms. A quieter, stealthier way is
to look under the mat for a key first—or in Matrix parlance, get
a passcode and access a legitimate account. Getting passcodes or
other personal data off of a mark is called phishing.
When you go phishing you need a lure or bait—something to
entice the mark or open up a line of dialogue with them. Common
phishing lures include an online store or e-mailed offer. A false online
store (also called a phishing trap) often acts just like a real one, displaying
goods and then taking customer information—including their
identities, contact numbers, and shipping addresses—so that you can
deliver the product. Phishing lures can also include viruses and other
malware that infect customers as they come in, a good way to snag
passcodes. Trojans are particularly easy to use if you can disguise them
as a “free trial offer” of a new AR software or something like that.
> If you don’t mind the cost, the site can even be functional—I know
one hacker that started out making an online organic jams distributor
and made so much honest cred from passing traffic that she got
out of hacking altogether. Of course, she had to apply for business
licenses and the like.
> Mr. Bonds
E-mail phishing attempts (line casting) are often caught by
spam filters or discarded out of hand because they don’t interest the
mark. Personally, I like to combine the phishing lure and line casting
by setting up a fake site geared toward the mark’s interests and
then sending a coupon or introductory offer to them. Naturally, this
requires some knowledge of the mark and their interests.
> A phishing lure can also be used to set up a botnet; you just load a hidden
bot on every “customer” that enters the node to browse or shop.
> Glitch
Once you have their personal and financial data (which pretty
much means their SIN number and authorization on their online
bank accounts), you can clean them out—which is where a lot of
phishers get caught. It’s one thing to duplicate a charge for a meal and
make it look like the restaurant deducted the cost twice, but it’s something
else again to blow somebody’s life savings on a piece of gear and
then have it mailed to you. Keep in mind that any online purchases
you make can be tracked back to you. Smart phishers will siphon off
some cred to a certified credstick and then disappear with it.
More sophisticated phishers target megacorps and financial
institutions, often using a lot of social engineering to masquerade
as someone who would legitimately have access to the (usually very
well protected) personal or financial data. Theoretically you could
Unwired
set up a bank or other financial institution as a big phishing lure,
but I’ve never heard of anyone that managed it.
> It’s difficult to pull off because banks, credit unions, and non-bank
financial service institutions have a lot of regulations, even in the most
unregulated parts of the world (I’m looking at you, Carib League). Still,
more than a few venerable financial institutions began as phishing
lures until the owners and operators realized they could milk ten or a
hundred times more nuyen out of a steady clientele than they could
ever take from a single megacorp. And then there’s the handful of
orgs that were bought out by the Mafia and the Yakuza.
> Mr. Bonds
deniaL of Service
Denial of Service (DOS) attacks are proof that ancient hacker
philosophy never goes out of style (though it may fall behind the
tech curve). DOS attacks are about locking a user out of their commlink
or terminal, or more often preventing a node or commlink
from accessing the rest of the Matrix by flooding it with incoming
connections. The how and the why might change each time, but
the basic goal is the same—denying someone Matrix service.
The key to most DOS attacks is overloading the target with
traffic, with botnets being the weapon of choice. A hacker with
a big enough botnet can inundate the target with data requests,
connection requests, and other forged signals, locking out other
incoming traffic. Spiders and IC can try to filter out the bot traffic
or spoof their node’s access ID, but sheer numbers usually swing
things in the botnet’s favor.
A DOS attack on a commlink is a little more difficult, because
you first have to perform a successful trace on the target icon; you
can also lock someone out of their commlink or node with a little
judicious editing of the connection filters, cutting them off from
practically the entire Matrix. If you have the time and skill to mess
with the accounts, you could even change all of the passcodes to
keep the legitimate information technology personnel from fixing
the problem right away.
Of course, anything else that prevents people from accessing
the target works too—crashing the operating system on a
node, physical damage to a key server or optical trunk that supports
traffic in and out of the node, switching the node to hidden
mode—anything your dirty, clever little minds can think of.
> I had a job a couple months back where my group was hired to do a
24-hour DOS attack against the node of a corp that was going to release
a new product online that day, but our hacker gal got sick and couldn’t
perform. Ended up having to cut the optical trunk and aim a HERF rifle
at it all day. Then the punks tried to switch to a satlink, and I ended up
blowing that up with a missile! So much for a nice, quiet Matrix job.
> Beaker
ranSoMware
By itself, a DOS attack is normally a means to an end, not an end
in and of itself. Script kiddies may get their jollies locking some poor
bastard out of his home terminal so he can’t turn in his homework
or show up in his virtual classroom, but more often than not a DOS
attack is part of the growing Matrix-based extortion phenomena.
The idea behind Matrix extortion is simple: individuals, corporations,
even governments need access to the Matrix and certain files.
Simon Wentworth (order #1132857) 9
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hacker’s handbook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .