Top 7 Most Elite Nation State Hackers

Key Takeaways

without a doubt the most capable and advanced hackers in the world are nation-state actors otherwise known as state-sponsored or advanced persistent threats governments simply have more resources than anyone else to carry out hacking campaigns they have more people willing to work for them they have more money to develop hacking tools they have bigger motives to collect intelligence a longer history of collecting secret data and can be very patient sometimes spending years on a campaign combine all these and it's far more advanced than any independent group of hackers can accomplish here's a list of the top 7 most advanced governments with cyber capabilities oh before we get on the list there aren't any ads in this video but i want you to know that if you like this kind of stuff i create a podcast called darknet diaries and it goes in depth in a lot of these topics so check that out if you like this okay on with the list number seven north korea in the north korean government is the reconnaissance general bureau this is their intelligence agency inside that is bureau 121 which is where the north korean hackers are north korea recruits students from the school of automation each year to come work in bureau 121. here they're taught programming operating systems networking and hacking what makes north korea so dangerous is their willingness to commit criminal acts they are also known as the lazarus group according to a recent article titled the lazarus constellation north korean hackers have been actively attacking countries and businesses for the past decade their objectives seem to be in the middle of cyber crime hacktivism and intelligence gathering their cyber crime consists of hacking from monetary gain in 2016 north korea hacked into the bangladesh bank which they tried to steal one billion dollars but ended up with around 80 million dollars which is still the largest bank robbery in history they also hacked into a bitcoin exchange called coin check and were able to steal 534 million dollars worth of cryptocurrency and in 2017 they launched a worldwide ransomware attack called wannacry just to make money and they've also been known to hack just to try to stop people from saying things they don't like hearing such as the hack on sony pictures this was done because north korea didn't like that a comedy was being produced which made fun of the leader of north korea you want us to kill the leader of north korea yes we know one of the hackers behind all this too park jin hyuk he was indicted by the us department of justice as the person who carried out the bangladesh bank heist hack on sony pictures and the wannacry ransomware campaign north korea seems to be the only country hacking for financial gains number six iran the intelligence unit in iran's military is the irgc the islamic revolutionary guard corps we believe this unit is where the iranian government carries out hacks from there is another group called the iranian cyber army but it's unknown how they're connected to the iranian government some reports say they take orders from the irgc and work closely with them to carry out tasks it makes sense that the iranian government would have a secret unit outside the government so they can claim they didn't have any involvement in certain cyber attacks ever since the green movement started and the cyber attack known as stuxnet against one of iran's nuclear enrichment facilities iran has been building its cyber capabilities at an alarming rate since then iranian hackers have carried out attacks with increasing sophistication in 2012 iran was behind a series of hacks against u.s banking websites they are also believed to be the ones who carried out the attacks against saudi aramco which is a massive oil and drilling company in saudi arabia the attack on saudi aramco wiped 30 000 computers and rendered them all unusable iranian hackers were also behind the hack on the sands hotel in las vegas after its ceo made some rude comments about iran recently the us department of justice indicted nine iranian hackers and it's believed these hackers worked for or on behalf of the iranian government these people have allegedly hacked into the united nations 176 different universities in 21 different countries and dozens of foreign and u.s based companies which includes healthcare companies law firms and banking institutions number five uk the intelligence agencies of the uk are mi5 mi6 the defense intelligence and gchq my guess is that each of these have their own group of sophisticated hackers but i know for a fact that gchq has some pretty advanced cyber capabilities gchq stands for government communication headquarters and this is the group that was responsible for breaking the enigma code and world war ii well since then they've been keeping up with making codes and breaking codes this includes gaining intelligence by hacking into foreign targets like most intelligence gathering agencies the actions that go on in gchq are secret and guarded but there are a few things we do know about them first look at this this is viewed and it's out there in cornwall it's a satellite ground station and it intercepts satellite communications and cable communications edward snowden revealed a gchq project called tempora which says they have the capability to tap into data flowing through undersea cables and store it 200 different internet connections flow through you in fact some reports say that 25 percent of the entire internet flows through viewed sure much of that traffic is encrypted but it still contains metadata that you can see such as origin and destination of the traffic but again this is the organization that cracked the enigma code so you know they have a lot of resources and a rich history to try to crack https gchq has also been known to work with telecoms in order to peek inside some of the traffic going through them snowden documents also revealed that gchq was behind a massive hack into belgiacom one of the largest telecom providers in belgium besides that there's been allegations that gchq conducts eave dropping on charities german government buildings and the israeli prime minister gchq also works in collaboration with the nsa to carry out joint attacks sometimes too see there's this alliance called the five eyes which consists of us uk australia canada and new zealand this alliance was built for these countries to share intelligence information and capabilities which also means they sometimes collaborate to collect intelligence together number four israel israel's prime minister himself claims israel is in the top five i set the goal for israel of becoming one of the top five cyber security powers in the world it's a goal we have met an intelligence unit called mossad which is kind of like the cia but they also have a hacking group called unit 8200 which is similar to the nsa see in israel it's mandatory for everyone to serve in the military and when you go in to take the aptitude test unit 8200 chooses the top one percent most intelligent and recruits them from there they train each new soldier to code do system administration work networking and hacking they ramp up these new soldiers to be capable hackers in just a few months then put them to work since israel sits in a fairly hostile part of the world with a fairly large amount of adversaries all around them they have to be capable of doing battle in the cyber domain it's believed israel helped create the stuxnet attack which attacked a nuclear enrichment facility in iran there's also reports that unit 8200 has jammed radar systems in nearby countries allowing them to fly jets over and bomb targets but one of my favorite stories is from abishai abrahami he's a former unit 8200 member he told forbes in an interview once that one day he was given an assignment that seemed impossible it was to break into the computers of a hostile nation but the task contained several hurdles first figure out how to get into those computers second how to crack the encryption there and finally the monumental challenge on how to decrypt the enormous amount of data that was stolen so here's what he did once he thought he could breach the target computers he then broke into computers of two other hostile nations and hijacked their processing power to suck out the data held by the first target and to decrypt the data yeah this guy avishai is quite a capable hacker but guess what he's gone on to create a company called wix which designs websites for people the ceo of wix is a wicked talented hacker trained by the israeli military crazy number three china if you haven't heard about chinese hackers yet i don't know where you've been chinese hackers have been behind some of the most high profile hacks against the us government and private companies let's talk about operation aurora this was an attack where chinese hackers hacked into many companies on the list is google adobe akamai juniper rackspace yahoo symantec northrop grumman morgan stanley dow chemical and blackberry a lot of the time chinese hackers will hack into companies like this to steal their ip intellectual property the secret sauce that companies use to make stuff and then they make knockoff versions of it that way they don't have to import equipment and technologies from the us they can just make it themselves in fact at this point chinese hackers have stolen all the parts to create a comax c919 that means they've hacked into the us and foreign companies to steal blueprints for the engine airframe flight control systems radar wings digital flight equipment even the tires on top of that the chinese government was behind the equifax breach opm breach marriott breach and tick tock breach stole credit histories and personal information of 147 million americans pretty much anyone with a credit report got a ton of sensitive information stolen and what really bothers me is none of us can send into equifax having all this data on us yet they did and got hacked and now my private data is in the hands of the chinese that's a story for another time the opm breach this is the office of personnel management this is the government department which handles all the information on government employees well chinese hackers broke in and took the personal records of 22 million government employees the marriott breach resulted in personal details of 500 million guests being stolen and this is thought to be the work of chinese hackers too and yeah i did say tick-tock this isn't a hack in the traditional sense but in my opinion it's in the same area tiktok is a chinese company which collects tons and tons and tons and tons of user data from everyone who installs the app i'm talking everything from where you are in the world to who your contacts are all the photos on your phone what's on your clipboard what other apps you have installed browser history you name it if it's on your phone tiktok is going to try to collect it not only that they're collecting in-app data too like the photos you post and what you like and what you comment on in all your private messages so the question is what's worse chinese hackers stealing private data from us companies or u.s citizens sending their private data directly to china because i'm pretty sure the owners of tick tock are sending this data to the chinese government which to me is just as bad as a data breach and you might wonder how is this different from facebook it's not really facebook collects just as much data on youtube and shares that with the us government so you just have to be careful on what apps you're installing and what permissions you're giving them it should be clear at this point that china is obsessed with getting information on as many americans as it can and will go to great lengths to get this information now whether the chinese government is behind these hacks or not is a little bit of a mystery there are a few branches of the people's liberation army the chinese military that are known to have cyber capabilities specifically pla unit 61398 and pla unit 61486 some of these attacks can be attributed to these two branches but not all a few come from schools or factories within china which is odd but don't forget china has a major firewall restricting most chinese people from getting to a lot of these websites that are getting hacked so it's pretty clear that if a company gets hacked from china which is being blocked by the firewall of china then some kind of special permission was given or they found a way to bypass it so it's possible the chinese government condones or sponsors or gives special permission to hackers that carry out attacks which helps the homeland number two russia you know what i'm gonna say right russia hacks elections well it's true to start with russia hacked the state board of elections in arizona and illinois they didn't change anything but they saw 200 000 personal voter records and they also hacked the dnc in 2015. they've been messing with the u.s elections for decades that part isn't new what's new is their ability to do it all digitally over the internet i think the most damaging hack the russians have ever done though is against ukraine called not petya the russian hackers got into the tax software that many people and businesses used to file taxes in ukraine they infected this software with a virus and worm which spread rapidly through the country ripping the country's digital infrastructure to shreds critical systems all over the country were infected rendering the machines unusable atms were down banks were down government facilities were down hospitals were down libraries were down schools were down and so much more this attack spread outside ukraine too hitting maersk one of the largest shipping companies in the world knocking them offline meant they had millions of pieces of cargo with no idea where it was supposed to go on top of that u.s companies were hit such as merck a major pharmaceutical company and some people believe this was the first true attack to be considered an act of cyber war because of how badly it crippled ukraine another hack that can be attributed to russia was the 2018 winter olympics in south korea right as the opening ceremony was about to begin russian hackers set off a logic bomb wiping out the olympics data centers taking down all methods for authentication and wi-fi throughout the olympic arenas this caused major confusion the russian hackers are also referred to as fancy bear and sand worm which is part of russia's gru their intelligence agency and specifically they're operating in unit 74455 and unit 26165 the ones who hacked the u.s elections have been indicted and appear on fbi's cyber's most wanted the fbi has quite a lot of evidence that linked these guys to be interfering with the us elections and to learn more about sand worm the other hacking group check out the book called sand warm by andy greenberg it's amazing and there's an affiliate link in the show notes for the book number one [Applause] usa okay so in my opinion the u.s has the best hacking capabilities compared to all other governments call me biased since i lived there but here's why i think that first of all arpanet was created by the us department of defense which is where the internet sprang out of so they've been in this game since day one next you have tons of departments with advanced cyber capabilities nsa for sure us cyber command of course but then each branch of the military has their own cyber teams there's the army cyber command the marine forces cyber command air force cyber command and the navy has the u.s fleet cyber command each of these units have their own offensive capabilities meaning they are trained to hack into enemy networks and strike this might be something simple like just getting the exact location of a target's phone or it might be going into the enemy's network and blowing it all up let me give you an example operation glowing symphony was a mission carried out by nsa u.s cyber command and marine forces cyber command to disrupt degrade and destroy the computers that isis uses they spent months prepping for this attack gaining as much access and intelligence that they could on their targets and when they got the cleared hot they quickly moved into the target network and started destroying it locking the users out erasing data finding where backups were erasing them too and they just kept going down the line destroying one objective after another and accomplishing their mission yes isis was able to rebuild their network but u.s cyber command continued to attack them and they took out their network over and over and over this resulted in a significant decrease in isis propaganda getting out and ultimately resulted in them abandoning some of their media channels like magazines and videos the us has interests in countries all over the world and the us has over 38 foreign military bases 38 foreign bases because of this worldwide reach and interest they invest heavily on getting intelligence from all parts of the world too someone like israel might just be focused primarily on the middle east but the us focuses on everything everywhere there's also a level of sophistication that the us has which is hard to beat let's take a look at stuxnet as an example the goal of stuxnet was to sabotage the nuclear enrichment facility in iran but that's like impossible this enrichment facility is heavily fortified and not connected to the internet at all so how do you get in and sabotage the place well this was likely a joint collaboration between nsa cia and the us department of energy department of energy they aren't hackers well they aren't but they understand nuclear centrifuges very well so if you put a skilled hacker in the room with someone who knows centrifuges inside and out together they can make something pretty damaging but not too damaging though just enough to make it look like a malfunction and not a sabotage and so that's what they did they found numerous vulnerabilities in the exact centrifuges that iran was using and created a virus then we believe the cia likely got that virus into the facility possibly by planting it on some engineer who worked there and got them to carry it into the building and infect the facility this was such an advanced and secret attack and it was very successful iran didn't suspect it was the u.s and just thought things were falling apart all on their own until the virus spread outside of iran and got out of hand that's when we learned about the incredible sophistication and stealthiness that went into stuxnet something that no malware has been able to outdo since listen if you like hearing stories like this well you're in luck i create a podcast called darknet diaries which goes super deep into the exact same things you heard here so grab your phone open your podcast player or spotify and type in 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