April 9, 2015

The terrorist organization Islamic State (ISIS or IS) hacked into France’s television network TV5Monde, beginning last night at about 10 pm (all times given are Paris time). The hackers (people who “break into” computers or systems by defeating electronic security measures) were able to black out all 11 of the broadcaster’s television channels, its websites, and its Facebook page.  TV5Monde is a public-service network founded by the French government in 1984. The French government called the hacking an act of terrorism.

This screenshot, provided by TV5Monde on Thursday, April 9, 2015, shows it’s Facebook page after hackers claiming allegiance to the Islamic State group accessed the site. (Credit: TV5Monde)

Once the illegal access to the network began, viewers saw a black screen with the phrases “Cybercaliphate” and  “Je suis IS” (the latter meaning I am IS). To explain these phrases, in 2014, the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, after gaining control of land in Syria and Iraq, proclaimed himself caliph over those lands. A caliph is a leader with political and religious authority whom Muslims recognize as a successor of the Prophet Muhammad, and his government is a caliphate. “Je suis ISIS” refers to the phrase “Je suis Charlie,” which was used worldwide as a reaction of solidarity with the staff of the magazine Charlie Hebdo. Eleven people were killed when the magazine’s staff was attacked by Islamic terrorists in January 2015. The hackers also posted messages warning French soldiers to “stay away from the Islamic State.” France is part of a United States-led coalition carrying out air strikes against Islamic State targets.

By 10 am today, TV5Monde had regained control over its networks, although initially, only to broadcast pre-recorded material. The network was able to broadcast live programming by around 6 pm today. The hacking represents a much more sophisticated cyber crime than ISIS has been capable of in the past. The French minister of culture, Fleur Pellerin, called a meeting of all major newspapers, television networks, and the news service Agence France-Presse to discuss security measures.

Other World Book articles:

• Islam (a Back in time article-2014)
• Middle East (a Back in time article-2014)
• Paris terrorist attacks of 2015

Feb. 17, 2012

A small number of secure online communications–including private e-mails, credit card purchases, and bank transfers–rely on a fundamentally flawed method of encryption (encoding), according to a team of American and European mathematicians and cryptographers. Encryption ensures that a message cannot be read by anyone except the sender and the recipient. In doing so, encryption prevents wrongdoers from intercepting bank account numbers, credit card numbers, medical records, or other personal data during transactions. The flaw may only affect a small number of communications and few, if any, popular websites. However, the researchers’ findings could shake confidence in Web security.

A properly encrypted message looks–to an outside observer–like random gibberish. Decrypting the message changes the gibberish back to the original message. The challenge of cryptography involves generating a code that actually looks like random gibberish–or to put it another way, a code that has no recognizable patterns that a computer could easily find. Modern computers are extremely good at finding patterns in numbers–and thus, at decoding secret messages.

Encryption prevents wrongdoers from intercepting information during electronic credit transactions. © David Young Wolff, Stone/Getty Images

Websites typically encrypt communications with a mathematical formula that uses very large prime numbers. A prime number is a whole number that cannot be divided without a remainder by any whole number except itself and 1. Examples of prime numbers include 2, 3, and 5. Such numbers are useful in encryption because they are randomly distributed among other numbers and because it takes a huge amount of computing power to find large prime numbers in the first place. Websites use a formula involving prime numbers to generate random-looking “public keys.” The public keys allow the recipients of secret messages to decode them. Just as a house key is useless unless you know the address of the door it opens, a public key is useless unless you know the specific message it “unlocks.”

The researchers discovered that the calculations involving prime numbers for a small number of public keys “overlapped.” That is, computers were able to tease out patterns in communications that were supposed to be random. These patterns enabled them to decode a small percentage of supposedly encrypted communications.

Additional World Book articles:

• Computer (Computer security)
• Codes and cyphers
• Hackers, Criminals, and Terrorists (A Special Report)
• Information theory