Chapter 141: A slight test

Hei Tian was reading information in the office and received a call from Shi Octopus to ask about the "rebirth" of the hacker organization. Although everyone belongs to the category of national cybersecurity, the intelligence integration between various departments is not completely satisfactory, and it is difficult to achieve synchronous sharing.

"I don't have much information about the Rebirth Organization in my hand!" Hei Tian did not give Shi Octopus high expectations, "I'll pass it over now!"

"Thank you, Black Boss!" The department in charge of Shi Octopus is mainly responsible for analyzing all potential insecurity factors in the network and formulating defense strategies. His position is somewhat equivalent to being the British cybersecurity chief. Shi Octopus asked more, "Black Boss, please help me analyze whether this hacker war between Britain and the United States will be affected and expanded?"

Hei Tian smiled, "I think this is not a hacker war between Britain and the United States, but a war between the rebirth and Britain and the United States. So it will be calmed down soon unless there is new external force entering and disrupting the situation!"

Shi Octopus said "Oh", and everyone was an expert. He immediately understood what Hei Tian meant, "Okay, I'll analyze the information about rebirth first!"

"You can't relax your attention to zm. I think they are showing signs of moving recently!" Hei Tian reminded him.

"Okay, I will continue to pay attention!" Shi Octopus was about to hang up the phone.

"If you have any more needs, just look for me!" Hei Tian hung up the phone with a smile, sitting there thinking about the hacking storm caused by extradition. Every time Gary lost the case before, it would trigger some small-scale hacking incidents. As time goes by, the scale of such hacking incidents has become smaller and smaller, and there is almost no impact. In advance, everyone expected that a hacking incident would occur once it was actually extraditioned, but they did not expect it to be so serious.

Hei Tian felt that this was abnormal. Conventional hacking organizations could not generate such huge energy at all. It was impossible for Britain and the United States to start a cyber war. We can only speculate that someone was behind the rebirth of the organization, but who was it?

"zm? Mysterious Hacker? Or..." Hei Tian felt that he was a little inaccurate. In addition to the organized power, there were zm and the mysterious hacker. However, there was no reason for these two parties to get involved, otherwise zm would have helped Gary back then.

Just as he was thinking, the assistant knocked in and said, "Boss, zm has issued a new announcement, pointing out that the Rebirth Organization attacked the British and American networks, exploiting the vulnerability of Microsoft's own browser!"

"I'll take a look!"

Heitian immediately opened zm's server, and sure enough, there was an additional announcement.

zm pointed out that Microsoft's own browser has a serious operational vulnerability, which poses the risk of being hijacked. Hackers can use this vulnerability to control users to use Microsoft's own browser to access their designated targets. Everyone knows how huge the browser market share Microsoft occupies, so hackers can easily destroy their targets even with reasonable access traffic.

Of course, zm's words are not casual. They not only pointed out the specific files that caused the vulnerability, but also explained the principle of the vulnerability formation, and even explained clearly where the vulnerability came from.

The vulnerability was discovered by a hacker called "eye". He latched the vulnerability information on the carrot trading platform. After that, the Rebirth Organization spent $100,000 to buy it.zm even provided screenshots of its transaction, which happened half a month ago.

Below the announcement, zm provided a temporary patch file and issued a risk warning, believing that the vulnerability hazards will spread in the short term, posing a threat to the data security of Internet users. At the same time, zm also believes that the hacker storm between the United Kingdom and the United States also has a tendency to expand.

Unfortunately, zm's huge influence is limited to the industry. Ordinary Internet users' understanding of her is probably just a mess. This warning has little impact on most people.

After reading it, Hei Tian quickly called Shi Octopus, "Did you see the new announcement of zm?"

Shi Octopus smiled bitterly on the phone, "Just saw it, I was arranging people to reversely analyze the patches they provided!"

"It seems that this storm is likely to expand, you have to prepare early!"

"As soon as there is a result of the reverse analysis, we will issue an early warning through the Computer Virus Center!" Shi Octopus is very experienced in this and does not need to inform Hei Tian again.

Hei Tian nodded, "I will help you keep an eye on the movements on zm!"

After hanging up the phone, Hei Tian pinched his forehead and thought to himself that there was a good show now. ZM's announcement seemed to be a bit pointing at Microsoft!

First, it is a vulnerability exploited by the rebirth organization, involving all versions of Microsoft's own browser. Now it causes such a great harm, and it is inseparable from Microsoft's domineering behavior of bundling sales; second, zm is putting pressure on Microsoft to wait for Microsoft to watch jokes.

It is well known that since 2003, Microsoft has set Tuesday of the second week of each month as a patch release date, with praise and criticism, but this convention has been implemented for seven years. Now, as a third party, ZM has exposed such a serious loophole, probably because she wants to see if Microsoft's big ass can still sit!

The assistant also said at this time: "Boss, zm's recent movement is a bit strange!"

Hei Tian nodded, anyone could see that the key was what made zm so active? They have always been unknown, but why are they now suddenly looking like they are about to jump to the front desk? And for the first time they showed their sign, they pointed at the giant Microsoft with a clear sword?

"What's going on in Dongyang's network recently?" Hei Tian asked, wanting to find some clues elsewhere.

"Nothing happens! After the mysterious virus incident, Dongyang City restarted the standard information security system project. Cobra is recruiting troops recently!" The assistant thought for a while, "By the way, the intern named Hu Yifei resigned from Weilan. The reason for his resignation seemed to be because he got too close to the previous deputy director of the layman and was afraid of Cobra."

Hei Tian frowned. It seemed that he hadn't guessed correctly this time, and there was no contact between the two sides. "Continue to pay attention to the movements of zm, they will show their trump card sooner or later!"

The assistant saw that Hei Tian didn't understand this time, so he had to leave Hei Tian's office and continue working.

The day after zm released the patch, many people analyzed the specific exploitation methods of vulnerabilities through reverse engineering.

The most active ones are various underground hacking groups. They acted wildly and used this vulnerability to quickly spread the Trojan virus, expand their territory, and make profits. For a moment, the computers that were hit on the Internet increased in a geometric multiple.

Then, the external force that disrupted the situation came from Hei Tian's mouth. The US-UK network, which had just been ravaged by the "Rebirth" organization, was subjected to more malicious attacks. The computer controlled by hackers launched link requests for websites from all over the world to more than 100 extremely influential countries in the United States and Britain. Although these visits were scattered, they had the advantage of the large number, which also led to large-scale network blockage and paralysis of the website.

According to the analysis of US and UK security engineers, the computers under control have reached tens of millions, which is no less than the previous zm mysterious virus.

Cybersecurity officials of the US and British governments issued a statement saying that there is evidence that the hackers who launched the attack are likely to be from Russia, Iran...

After that, the attack showed a trend of blooming from all sides, and it was not only the United States and Britain that were attacked.

In another day, Microsoft finally couldn't sit still, broke the convention, released official patches in advance, and stated that it would formulate a more flexible vulnerability release mechanism based on the level of the vulnerability. Major antivirus software manufacturers followed closely and made emergency upgrades, and began to strangle these virus Trojans that exploit vulnerabilities to maliciously attack.

However, it seems a bit too late. The EU suddenly announced the restart of its antitrust investigation against Microsoft. It has been less than a year since the EU and Microsoft reached a settlement agreement, and even Microsoft has not had time to implement the settlement agreement. This time, the EU proposed a more stringent anti-bundle clause and asked Microsoft to implement it immediately instead of the small concessions before.

Subsequently, more countries and regions followed the EU and joined the ranks. More and more people realized that Microsoft's bundled sales policy is a security taboo.

After a week of continuous attacks, the attack trend finally began to fade and the Internet stabilized again. The call for Microsoft to change its bundling strategy began to become less and everyone knew that this was not an easy task, and at least no one could guarantee that its software would not have loopholes.

An unsurprising hacker attack caused unexpected destructive power and had a huge impact. Among them, several companies were happy and some were worried. Whoever took advantage of the benefits was the one who suffered the loss.

Carrot Alliance is probably the happiest. This vulnerability was traded from their platform. The facts proved how wise the internal closed trading strategy of their vulnerability was. If all software vendors join their platform, they can prevent such incidents from happening to the greatest extent. Carrot had contacted Microsoft before, hoping that Microsoft would support its trading platform, but it was rejected by Microsoft because Microsoft would not hold its weaknesses in their hands. Moreover, Microsoft also has its own 0day incentive project and does not need such an intermediate trader.

Now that Carrot contacts Microsoft again, Microsoft finally agreed to reach a verbal agreement with Carrot, and the two parties will cooperate within a limited scope.

What worries the industry the most is the transformation of zm. They no longer simply raise the stick when they are upset. They now know how to take advantage of the situation. This time, zm tried it out without using any cutting-edge technology, which also caused chaos in the industry. I believe that they will have more actions in the future.

Hu Yifei was not interested in these killings. He has now figured out a way to make money and is busy!
Chapter completed!