Cyber Vulnerability: Contour of Next Global War

You ain’t seen nuthing yet … 😉

Vulnerability of the Internet is by design under tutorship of the US in order for it’s intelligence agencies (NSA) to spy on every citizen through back-doors. Trojan horses are decades old en designed into large IBM main frame computers for global espionage. One of the targets was the European Union HQ in Brussels.

Trump’s Cybersecurity Policy by John McAfee

The most difficult fact for any Nation to accept, is the fact that that nation may be totally outmatched, in some critical field, by some foreign agency or organization.

Under the administration of Harry Truman, “Operation Paperclip” was instituted. This controversial program – designed to bring thousands of Nazi scientists into the U.S. after WWII – was the result of Truman’s recognition of U.S inferiority in the realm of the then critical rocket and space sciences. The developer of Germany’s V2 rocket, and later, our Saturn V rocket, and even later, head of our National Aeronautics and Space Administration – Werner Von Braun – was one of those scientists. Without Truman’s recognition and acceptance of U.S. inferiority in this critical science, the world today would be radically different. Our current domination of space – our manifest satellites – is the cornerstone of our military dominance and us based on the science brought to the U.S. by Nazi scientists.

My hope is that President Elect Trump is both smart enough and strong enough to ignore the U.S. internal propaganda and accept our extreme vulnerability in the current critical science of Cybersecurity, that, today, is far more critical than rocket science was at the end of WWII.

Are the constant pronouncements from within the U.S. Government that the U.S. leads the world in cybersecurity in fact propaganda? Let’s look at the facts:

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We live in a world where teenagers hack the Pentagon and NASA, or even shutdown government networks, around the world. The full personnel records of every employee of the U.S. Government, including every Top Secret cleared employee, for the past 50 years, were scooped up by an unknown agent in 2015, and virtually every covert agency and even Homeland Security are routinely hacked.

It is absurd to believe that our government can keep any secrets at all from nation states or organized hacking groups. Yet we have no coherent plans, policies or practices to counter this growing threat.

Which brings me to one of the most frightening aspects of Trump’s published Cybersecurity platform:

Of all the Agencies of the DOJ, such as the Asset Forfeiture Division, the Environment and Natural Resources Division, the Office of Juvenile Justice, etc, it is clearly the Federal Bureau of Investigation to which this obligation will fall.

And how competent in cybersecurity is the FBI? Judge for yourself:

Not only are computing devices owned by individual agents hacked, but critical files have been taken, with regularity, from central FBI databases by the Chinese, by the hacking group Anonymous, by hackers as yet unnamed, and by numerous others.

But perhaps the most telling is a hack of the FBI by a 15 year old boy early in 2016 in which the personnel records of 75% of all FBI employees, including undercover agents, we’re published on the Dark Web.

If the above is insufficient for an indictment of cybersecurity incompetence, then consider that the FBI’s had to turn to a hacking organization in order to hack into the,San Bernardino iPhone that was in FBI possession.

McCain in Ukraine: Russian cyberattacks ‘an act of war’ | Reuters |

Republican U.S. Senator John McCain said on Friday that Russia must be made to pay the price for cyber attacks on the United States and that it was possible to impose many sanctions, including on financial institutions.

McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has scheduled a hearing in the New Year on foreign cyber threats.

“When you attack a country, it’s an act of war,” McCain said in an interview with the Ukrainian TV channel “1+1” while on a visit to Kiev.

“And so we have to make sure that there is a price to pay, so that we can perhaps persuade the Russians to stop these kind of attacks on our very fundamentals of democracy.”

Headline is for consumption of RT viewers only 😉 …

“Not the Russians” interview Larry King | RT |

Article on RT

Russian Cyber-Espionage Group Tracked Ukrainian Military Using Android Malware

A cyber-espionage group linked to the Russian military has developed Android malware which it used to infect the smartphones of Ukrainian soldiers and track Ukrainian field artillery units, according to a report released today by Crowdstrike.

The report comes from the same security firm that discovered the “alleged” Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers in April 2016.

According to CrowdStrike, the group behind the Android malware that targeted Ukrainian military forces is named Fancy Bear, one of the two groups involved in the DNC hack, albeit the other group, named Cozy Bear, was far more active.

In 2013, a Ukrainian soldier named Yaroslav Sherstuk, with the 55th Artillery brigade developed a mobile phone application to help aim its long guns. The Android app was intended “to more rapidly process targeting data for the Soviet-era D-30 Howitzer employed by Ukrainian artillery forces.”

It was a math app for real time combat. Ukrainian soldiers using Soviet-era Howitzers had to figure out the elevation of the target and the curvature of the earth, etc., using pen and paper, which took too much time. Sherstuk’s app did the same job quickly and easily: plug in the coordinates of the targets and the app would tell you settings that you needed to set for the Howitzer. Targeting time went from minutes to 15 seconds.

When fighting began in Ukraine, the app spread among users on VK (the Russian-language Facebook knock off) and the like, eventually reaching more than 9,000 downloads.

The Russian military realized that they could simply infect the app with X-Agent and the malware would spread as quickly as the app. “On 21 December 2014 the malicious variant of the Android application was first observed in limited public distribution on a Russian language, Ukrainian military forum. A late 2014 public release would place the development timeframe for this implant sometime between late-April 2013 and early December 2014,” Crowdstrike writes in their report.

Based on multiple reports from several security firms across the globe, the Fancy Bear group appears to have ties to the Russian military intelligence service GRU.

The Fancy Bear group is also identified under several other names in different cyber-espionage reports. Across time, the group has been referenced to as Strontium, APT28, Sednit, Pawn Storm, but most of the time has been named Sofacy.

Sofacy is also the name of its primary espionage tool, a remote access toolkit (RAT), also known as X-Agent.

The Sofacy (X-Agent) malware is unique because it was developed by the Fancy Bear group, and only deployed in its cyber-espionage operations, and nowhere else.