DARKMARKET

its team seeks to dissemble, recruit or confuse. This phantom-like behaviour is part of the spook's DNA, but it is also explained by the intelligence service's fascination with, and even admiration for, its primary opponent in cyber: the hacker.

Until recently, network defenders were confident that when an attack was under way there was a hacker masterminding it. This has changed in the last five years with the emergence of 'off-the-shelf' malware. Many criminal hackers now make their money not by compromising credit cards, bank accounts or similar cunning scams, but simply by selling trojans, viruses and worms that they have developed. They are user-friendly programs that do not require specialist knowledge to deploy them. The most common form is the botnet. Hackers will hire out botnets to be used in DDoS attacks for purposes such as extortion or revenge for a day or two, or maybe for a week or a month. Naturally, hackers selling a botnet or virus have the technical ability to control the length of hire because they can simply programme in its obsolescence, about which their clients - presumably petty jobbing criminals - can do nothing.

Yet the emergence of a secondary market on the Net for 'off-the-shelf' malware will not alter the fundamental truth that behind any cyber attack - whether it is criminal, corporate espionage or warfare - lies a gifted hacker. Mounting cyber attacks that are genuinely damaging, rather than merely inconvenient, invariably requires highly specialised and technical skills. This means that even if a hacker is working on behalf of a boss (be it a capo, a CEO or a Commander), he will still need to know a great deal about the intended target if he is to design the right product. Whichever team of hackers designed Stuxnet, for example, had to know not just about the Iranian nuclear facilities that were the presumed targets; they also needed to understand the Siemens PLC network that ran it and the very specific compressor designed by Vachon, a Finnish company (although manufactured in China), as well as the Taiwanese company whose RealTek digital certificate was spoofed to fool the Iranian system's anti-virus program. Anyone smart enough to work on Stuxnet would have been smart enough to work out its intended victim.

In this respect, hackers are the key to cyber security as they hold the solution to the conundrum. Find the hackers and you will have made serious strides towards uncovering the truth.