Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

Product Information

The Air Force has launched promising organizational and technological initiatives including an "integration imperative" recognizing the interdisciplinary, techno-sociological character of information warfare. Though panning the film overall, Janet Maslin of The New York Times noted the "nice worm-fight at the end of the story. Greenberg sketches the evolution of a wholly new discipline in the surprisingly lively real-life police procedural [that] deftly teases out technical detail without slowing the narrative. Digital espionage has ColdWar origins, but states are still determining how to respond when they are found to be its latest victims. Kynes determines that these "sandtrout" block off water "into fertile pockets within the porous lower strata below the 280° ( absolute) line", [16] and Alia Atreides notes in Children of Dune that the "sandtrout, when linked edge to edge against the planet's bedrock, formed living cisterns".

During his first close encounter with a sandworm in Dune, Paul notes, "Its mouth was some eighty meters in diameter .How different is Russia from other cyber powers, and how do we know for sure if the Kremlin is behind certain cyberattacks that have been attributed to it? The team is believed to be behind the December 2015 Ukraine power grid cyberattack, [4] [5] [6] the 2017 cyberattacks on Ukraine using the NotPetya malware, [7] various interference efforts in the 2017 French presidential election, [2] and the cyberattack on the 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony. Melange deposits are found in the sand seas of Arrakis, where the sandworms live and hunt, and harvesting the spice from the sand is a dangerous activity because sandworms are aggressive and territorial.

Cyber and information warfare in the Ukrainian conflict shows a new hotspot on the cyber dimension of the conflict. Cyber-attacks against our critical infrastructure, including the power grid, can create large-scale societal and economic damages. Worm-riding is used as a coming-of-age ritual among the Fremen, and Paul's riding and controlling a giant sandworm cements him as a Fremen leader. Thirteen days after Trend Micro had released its findings on Sandworm’s connection to industrial control system attacks, the division of the Department of Homeland Security known as the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, or ICS-CERT, released its own report. Another seemed to be designed as bait for visitors attending a Ukraine-focused summit in Wales and a NATO-related event in Slovakia that focused in part on Russian espionage.

Finally, it outlines the work conducted by expert groups and dedicated committees to find policy responses to the vulnerabilities exposed by alleged Russian interference, focusing in particular on information operations conducted through social media and hacking-and-dumping operations. High voltage electrical shock applied separately to each ring segment is the only known way of killing and preserving an entire worm," Kynes said. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers.

As the night wore on and the bar emptied out, Wilhoit and Gogolinski began to check those IP addresses against Trend Micro’s own archive of malware and VirusTotal, to see if they could find any new matches.

One common piece of ICS software sold by General Electric is Cimplicity, which includes a kind of application known as a human-machine interface, essentially the control panel for those digital-to-physical command systems. We argue that this view is too narrow and risks limiting the discussion to only a few aspects of what cybersecurity entails. Sandworms are attracted to rhythmic vibrations in the sand, which they mistake for prey (smaller sandworms). And for the BlackEnergy sample dropped by their Ukrainian PowerPoint, that campaign code was one that he immediately recognized, not from his career as a malware analyst, but from his private life as a science fiction nerd: “arrakis02.