The Mykonos Vase, discovered in 1961 in the Cyclades, is one of the earliest accounts of the Trojan Horse, used as a subterfuge by the Greeks to enter the city of Troy during the Trojan War. Odysseus and a platoon of 30 soldiers hid in a wooden horse that was presented to Troy, and thus were able to gain access to the heavily defended city.
Thousands of years later, it remains a thoroughly modern concept that can increasingly be found at the heart of modern warfare strategies. Find your way into the computers and networks of your enemy?s weapons and military and you can render them useless in the face of an attack.
Modern Trojan horses are computer code or vulnerabilities hidden in software or hardware that would allow a spy or an attacker to gain access to an adversaries? computers and networks.
Thus it was striking that the word ?Trojan? was not mentioned in a 52-page report issued Monday by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence focusing on the activities of two giant Chinese telecommunications firms, Huawei and ZTE, which have long been suspected of having links to the Chinese government.
Recently, for example, Stuxnet, a surreptitious program that was reportedly designed by United States and Israeli intelligence agencies to target the Iranian nuclear program, had many of the properties of a highly sophisticated Trojan. The program was at the heart of a concerted effort to delay or destroy the Iranian Natanz nuclear fuel facility. The attack damaged centrifuges and may have provided a surveillance window into Iranian nuclear activities by giving Western intelligence agencies unfettered access to the desktop computers of Iranian project managers.
A striking map of the paths followed by Stuxnet infection created by researchers at Symantec, the Silicon Valley computer security firm, indicates that Stuxnet actually broke out of Natanz, rather than breaking in. The program acted as a Trojan horse, perhaps delivered first on a USB memory stick, that then spread through computer networks inside the secret facility before spreading to the outside world.
Possibly that is why the term Trojan ? if it exists in the House report on Huawei and ZTE ? is found only in what is reportedly a classified annex that has not been made openly available.
The report consists of a series of allegations about the activities of the companies, including bribery and surveillance, but little hard evidence. Reports of ?suspicious? incidents including a supposed case of ?beaconing? from Cricket, a Texas wireless operator that uses Huawei equipment, have been heatedly denied by Huawei.
?This is the problem with the issue for the last two or three years,? said Richard A. Clarke, who served at the nation?s counterterrorism czar in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. ?There is a government-sponsored whispering campaign against Huawei, which we are all being asked to take on faith because the government alleges it has information but it can?t find a way of revealing that.?
If this issue is important enough, he said, there should be ways of declassifying the information. ?They?re making important accusations,? he said. ?Important accusations require important proof.?
According to several former government officials, the real issue may not be what has happened in the past but rather what might happen if Huawei gear were widely used in American telecommunications networks. Wide use of its equipment would mean that the company would have to service and fix the network, requiring extensive access for its technical personnel to telecommunications networks in the United States.
The potential consequences of such an arrangement have already demonstrated according to Mr. Clarke, who wrote in ?CyberWar: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It,? that in 2007 Syrian anti-aircraft radar was rendered useless in the face of a remarkably sophisticated cyberattack by Israel. Israeli aircraft were able to destroy a Syrian nuclear reactor without any response from the country?s military.
He disputes a recent New Yorker article that asserted that the bombing attack was supported by conventional electronic warfare, which involves jamming or deceiving an enemies? radar with high-powered radio waves.
?Regular electronic warfare fills the frequencies with static and overpowers the frequencies,? he said. ?That wakes people up. That didn?t happen. The Syrians didn?t notice the jamming of their radars.?
In 2009, The New York Times reported that an American semiconductor industry executive who claimed to have direct knowledge of the operation said that technology for disabling the radars was supplied by Americans to the Israeli electronic intelligence agency, Unit 8200.
The disabling technology was given informally but with the knowledge of the American government, said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. His claim could not be independently verified, and American military, intelligence and contractors with classified clearance declined to discuss the attack.
If his account is true, it may be the real reason that the United States government has worked so hard to make sure that American computer networks are not made in China.
Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/wheres-the-discussion-of-trojan-horses/
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