Three types of online attack | Mikko H. Hypponen | TEDxBrussels

Cybercrime expert Mikko Hypponen talks us through three types of online attack on our privacy and data -- and only two are considered crimes. "Do we blindly trust any future government? Because any right we give away, we give away for good."

In the 1980s

in the communist Eastern Germany,

if you owned a typewriter,

you had to register it
with the government.

You had to register

a sample sheet of text

out of the typewriter.

And this was done

so the government could track
where text was coming from.

If they found a paper

which had the wrong kind of thought,

they could track down

who created that thought.

And we in the West

couldn't understand
how anybody could do this,

how much this would restrict
freedom of speech.

We would never do that

in our own countries.

But today in 2011,

if you go and buy a color laser printer

from any major laser printer manufacturer

and print a page,

that page will end up

having slight yellow dots

printed on every single page

in a pattern which makes the page unique

to you and to your printer.

This is happening

to us today.

And nobody seems to be
making a fuss about it.

And this is an example

of the ways

that our own governments

are using technology

against us, the citizens.

And this is one of the main three sources

of online problems today.

If we take a look at what's
really happening in the online world,

we can group the attacks
based on the attackers.

We have three main groups.

We have online criminals.

Like here, we have Mr. Dimitry Golubov

from the city of Kiev in Ukraine.

And the motives of online criminals

are very easy to understand.

These guys make money.

They use online attacks

to make lots of money,

and lots and lots of it.

We actually have several cases

of millionaires online, multimillionaires,

who made money with their attacks.

Here's Vladimir Tsastsin
form Tartu in Estonia.

This is Alfred Gonzalez.

This is Stephen Watt.

This is Bjorn Sundin.

This is Matthew Anderson, Tariq Al-Daour

and so on and so on.

These guys

make their fortunes online,

but they make it through the illegal means

of using things like banking trojans

to steal money from our bank accounts

while we do online banking,

or with keyloggers

to collect our credit card information

while we are doing online shopping
from an infected computer.

The U.S. Secret Service,

two months ago,

froze the Swiss bank account

of Mr. Sam Jain right here,

and that bank account had
14.9 million U.S. dollars on it

when it was frozen.

Mr. Jain himself is on the loose;

nobody knows where he is.

And I claim it's already today

that it's more likely for any of us

to become the victim of a crime online

than here in the real world.

And it's very obvious

that this is only going to get worse.

In the future, the majority of crime

will be happening online.

The second major group of attackers

that we are watching today

are not motivated by money.

They're motivated by something else -

motivated by protests,

motivated by an opinion,

motivated by the laughs.

Groups like Anonymous

have risen up over the last 12 months

and have become a major player

in the field of online attacks.

So those are the three main attackers:

criminals who do it for the money,

hacktivists like Anonymous

doing it for the protest,

but then the last group are nation states,

governments doing the attacks.

And then we look at cases

like what happened in DigiNotar.

This is a prime example of what happens

when governments attack

against their own citizens.

DigiNotar is a Certificate Authority

from The Netherlands -

or actually, it was.

It was run into bankruptcy

last fall

because they were hacked into.

Somebody broke in

and they hacked it thoroughly.

And I asked last week

in a meeting with Dutch
government representatives,

I asked one of the leaders of the team

whether he found plausible

that people died

because of the DigiNotar hack.

And his answer was yes.

So how do people die

as the result of a hack like this?

Well DigiNotar is a C.A.

They sell certificates.

What do you do with certificates?

Well you need a certificate

if you have a website that has https,

SSL encrypted services,

services like Gmail.

Now we all, or a big part of us,

use Gmail or one of their competitors,

but these services are especially popular

in totalitarian states

like Iran,

where dissidents

use foreign services like Gmail

because they know they are
more trustworthy than the local services

and they are encrypted
over SSL connections,

so the local government can't snoop

on their discussions.

Except they can if they hack
into a foreign C.A.

and issue rogue certificates.

And this is exactly what happened

with the case of DigiNotar.

What about Arab Spring

and things that have been happening,
for example, in Egypt?

Well in Egypt,

the rioters looted the headquarters

of the Egyptian secret police

in April 2011,

and when they were looting the building
they found lots of papers.

Among those papers,

was this binder entitled "FINFISHER."

And within that binder were notes

from a company based in Germany

which had sold the Egyptian government

a set of tools

for intercepting -

and in very large scale -

all the communication
of the citizens of the country.

They had sold this tool

for 280,000 Euros
to the Egyptian government.

The company headquarters are right here.

So Western governments

are providing totalitarian governments
with tools

to do this against their own citizens.

But Western governments
are doing it to themselves as well.

For example, in Germany,

just a couple of weeks ago

the so-called State Trojan was found,

which was a trojan

used by German government officials

to investigate their own citizens.

If you are a suspect in a criminal case,

well it's pretty obvious,
your phone will be tapped.

But today, it goes beyond that.

They will tap your Internet connection.

They will even use tools like State Trojan

to infect your computer with a trojan,

which enables them

to watch all your communication,

to listen to your online discussions,

to collect your passwords.

Now when we think deeper

about things like these,

the obvious response from people should be

that, "Okay, that sounds bad,

but that doesn't really affect me
because I'm a legal citizen.

Why should I worry?

Because I have nothing to hide."

And this is an argument,

which doesn't make sense.

Privacy is implied.

Privacy is not up for discussion.

This is not a question

between privacy

against security.

It's a question of freedom

against control.

And while we might trust our governments

right now, right here in 2011,

any right we give away
will be given away for good.

And do we trust, do we blindly trust,

any future government,

a government we might have

50 years from now?

And these are the questions

that we have to worry about
for the next 50 years.

Thank you very much.
(Applause)