Dawn of the Code War by John P. Carlin

Author:John P. Carlin
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

The first destructive cyberattack to hit the US mainland targeted a place almost as unexpected as a fancy Georgetown Italian restaurant: the Sands Casino company, a name for decades all but synonymous with gambling and glitz, but hardly at the top of the list of the nation’s critical infrastructure.

The original Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas had once been home to Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack, and after Sheldon Adelson bought the original property in 1988—razing it to build the luxurious Venetian resort and casino—he transformed it into a global gambling empire, stretching from Macao to Singapore to the Las Vegas Strip. The effort made Adelson fabulously wealthy, turning him into a powerhouse in both American business and politics; by the 2010s, he was the 11th-wealthiest person in the country and the top contributor to political action committees during the 2012 election, handing out more than $50 million to conservative causes. Adelson, an outspoken voice on Israeli issues, was close friends with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, and during an October 2013 panel at Yeshiva University he argued that the United States needed to take a stronger stand against Iran’s nascent nuclear weapons program—including a military strike designed to demonstrate to Iran that the United States meant business. As he told the audience, “You pick up your cell phone and you call somewhere in Nebraska and you say ‘OK, let it go’ and so there’s an atomic weapon goes over, ballistic missiles in the middle of the desert that doesn’t hurt a soul, maybe a couple of rattlesnakes and scorpions or whatever.”

At the time, the comment passed largely unnoticed; Israeli outlets covered his remarks and an Adelson spokesperson quickly backed down, explaining the gambling magnate had been “using hyperbole to make a point.” Iran didn’t see it that way; in early November, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei responded, saying Adelson “should receive a slap in the mouth,” and that America, if it was serious about peace with Iran, “should slap these prating people in the mouth and crush their mouths.”38

Soon after, Iranian hackers began digging around, probing the Sands Casino’s digital infrastructure. In January, they launched three separate brute-force attacks on the company’s Bethlehem casino—running automated programs that tried thousands of possible passwords in an attempt to log in to the computer network. The Sands Casino security staff noticed, but such attempts were common, and they moved to provide additional security on the targeted accounts—requiring what is known as two-factor authentication so that cracking a password alone wouldn’t have been enough. At the time, though, the Sands Casino staff didn’t realize how badly outgunned they were against the resources of a persistent and patient foreign adversary. The company, like the vast majority of companies around the globe at that point, did not have adequate resources to fight the cyberthreat. As late as 2012, just five computer security engineers protected the network’s 25,000 computers—an impossible task.39

The Iranian hackers kept at it—trying new avenues and new attack vectors—and by February 1, they

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