Operation n

As I stood up I felt as if I was going to be sick. This was attributed to the sinking feeling in my stomach and my raging curiosity. The man began walking towards the door at the far end of the room. I followed a few steps then paused, “So what’s your name?” I hoped to ask a few more questions to try and figure out what the hell was going on before proceeding any further. “Sorry, where are my manners. I am known to friends as Cole.” “Is this a prison?” Cole began chuckling. “No Michael, you will find this hard to believe but you are in a top secret government facility.”

The butterflies in my stomach began to settle. I felt a lot more at ease due to Cole’s friendly nature. I also sighed with relief after his reassurance that I wasn’t in some holding cell. I was no stranger to secret agencies. In my field I had consulted with all types. I continued walking with Cole.

As we walked my mind was drawn to recent email correspondence between myself and a government contact named Bill Steely. He requested my presence at the MI5 building in London to discuss my whitepaper. I felt confident that all this was related somehow.

I had read a news article that a terrorist organisation called, “ANT” had used Cross Site Scripting attacks to gain access to military intelligence installations. It seemed clear to me now that my services were obviously required and that Cole would discuss this with me at dinner.

ANT knew a number of their websites were being monitored by intelligence agencies around the world. However, it was a risk they had to take, the Internet had become their largest recruitment facility.

News had always shown terrorists pushing when pushed. This time they had planned to pull when pushed.

Specialist security groups around the world had been using honeypots for years to track hacker, worm and virus activity. Honeypots were basically networked systems that were purposely and strategically designed to be vulnerable. These systems were also carefully setup to log all hacker type activity.

Terrorists had found a way to track government intelligence agencies and gain access to highly protected computers using Cross Site Scripting attacks.

Firstly, additional websites posing as terrorist recruitment sites were setup as honeypots. Logs were correlated and put through a statistical reporting system. This system provided information such as, number of visits, the web browser, location and operating system of the visitor.

This operation proved that most visitors were using Internet Explorer. A web browser-fuzzing tool named AxMan – which was designed to automatically find open holes in Internet Explorer, was used to locate Zero Day browser vulnerabilities. Zero Day exploits were those that were not yet known or made public. Therefore, no security fix was available.

References:

• http://metasploit.com/users/hdm/tools/axman/
• http://www.newshounds.us/2006/07/09/kasich_leaks_national_security_secrets_is_this_treason.php
• http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/xssing-the-lan