Hemphill: It’s the Wild West in cyberland

There are charges that Russians tapped into the Democratic National Committee computers for more than a year and have now released some e-mails through Wikileaks that have so far caused the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, with more e-mail grenades yet to come.

And you think the Russians didn’t hack Hillary’s home-brew computer? Just because there is no evidence? International computer exploits are really, really good!

Russia, the U.S., China, North Korea, Britain, Germany and a dozen nations have both nation-state programs and pirate operators, all spying, developing spyware, committing espionage and developing espionage programs. Sometimes the pirates of a nation cooperate with their governments, sometimes not. In Russia, pirates are more likely to cooperate, or they tend to die.

The (probable) NSA program, designated “Flame,” was an all-purpose and enormous program (650,000 lines of code) and it collected information from computers around the globe, primarily Iranian, but also the Palestinian territory for five years before it was discovered and taken down. (It was discovered thousands of miles from its intended targets, in a computer “sinkhole” located in Indonesia, purely by accident.)

The follow-on data collection program, called DuQu, was launched before Flame was detected.

The first kinetic software was “Wiper,” a (likely) Israeli program that erased the hard drives of hundreds of Iranian computers in the oil industry.

Russia (likely) over-pressurized a pipeline owned by British Petroleum in 2008 and put the pipeline out of commission for months. They left no trace.

Iran retaliated to Wiper with Shamoon, which destroyed the hard drives of the Saudi-based Aramco oil conglomerate in 2012.

Meanwhile, an absolutely vicious worm had been destroying portions of the Iranian Nuclear Program. STUXNET had begun under George Bush as an alternative to Israel bombing the Iranian facilities. After much consternation that the STUXNET electronic bullet might be considered an act of war, it was deemed less dangerous than bombing.

STUXNET was a joint American (NSA) and Israeli operation. It attacked the Siemens Corporation centrifuge controllers used in Iran. When the Russian (Kaspersky) and American (Symantec) major manufacturers of anti-spyware saw the code they couldn’t believe the sophistication and elegance of STUXNET. A small three-person German firm actually broke most (but not all) of STUXNET.

What we know is that all nations have an arsenal of various small and huge electronic weapons. Privateers both develop and sell all and portions of spyware and kinetic software in an open market, and both private and nation-state actors are constantly involved with each other.

It’s the Wild West in electronic spying and in actual destructive warfare. As secretary of state, Hillary knew of all of this (and more).

What was she thinking?

Hemphill can be reached at ahemphill@cox.net.