The Dark Web is infested by spooks, fbi dragnet and hardened criminals.

○ Is the Government Destroying ‘the Wild West of the Internet?’ | Rolling Stones |

Where is the evidence, where is the proof? Matt Tait, a former hacker, a former informant for GCHQ does not provide any analytical evidence but vents his own observations and expresses confidence in the statements from U.S. intelligence. This UK resident is another spook who involved himself in the U.S. election campaign of Trump en Clinton. After the British dodgy dossier on Trump and Louise Mensch as a Murdoch propagandist, I’m not falling for this guy.

Obituary Peter Smith

Peter W. Smith, 81, of Lake Forest, Ill,, passed away on May 14, 2017. He is survived by his wife Janet, three children, Linda (Ransom), William and David Smith, and three grandchildren Tommy, Sara, and Ryan Ransom. For more than 40 years, Peter directed private equity firms in corporate acquisitions and venture investments. As Managing Member of DigaComm, LLC, from 1997 to 2014, he led or co-led 15 early-stage venture investments, including iPIX and L-90, Inc.

Peter W. Smith – Atlantic Council

The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with *** [?] | Lawfare | by Matthew Tait on June 30, 2017, 10:50 PM

My role in these events began last spring, when I spent a great deal of time studying the series of Freedom of Information disclosures by the State Department of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and posting the parts I found most interesting–especially those relevant to computer security–on my public Twitter account.

A while later, on June 14, the Washington Post reported on a hack of the DNC ostensibly by Russian intelligence. When material from this hack began appearing online, courtesy of the “Guccifer 2” [FAQ] online persona, I turned my attention to looking at these stolen documents. This time, my purpose was to try and understand who broke into the DNC, and why.

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Yet Smith had not contacted me about the DNC hack, but rather about his conviction that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked–in his view almost certainly both by the Russian government and likely by multiple other hackers too–and his desire to ensure that the fruits of those hacks were exposed prior to the election. Over the course of a long phone call, he mentioned that he had been contacted by someone on the “Dark Web” who claimed to have a copy of emails from Secretary Clinton’s private server, and this was why he had contacted me; he wanted me to help validate whether or not the emails were genuine.

I never found out who Smith’s contact on the “Dark Web” was. It was never clear to me whether this person was merely someone trying to dupe Smith out of his money, or a Russian front, and it was never clear to me how they represented their own credentials to Smith.

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Then, a few weeks into my interactions with Smith, he sent me a document, ostensibly a cover page for a dossier of opposition research to be compiled by Smith’s group, and which purported to clear up who was involved. The document was entitled “A Demonstrative Pedagogical Summary to be Developed and Released Prior to November 8, 2016,” and dated September 7. It detailed a company Smith and his colleagues had set up as a vehicle to conduct the research: “KLS Research“, set up as a Delaware LLC “to avoid campaign reporting,” and listing four groups who were involved in one way or another.

    KLS Research, LLC is a Delaware Limited-Liability Company filed on September 2, 2016 . The company’s File Number is listed as 6140091. The Registered Agent on file for this company is The Company Corporation and is located at 2711 Centerville Rd Ste 400, Wilmington, DE 19808.

The first group, entitled “Trump Campaign (in coordination to the extent permitted as an independent expenditure)” listed a number of senior campaign officials: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, Lt. Gen. Flynn and Lisa Nelson.

By the middle of September, all contact between us ended.

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The story just didn’t make much sense–that is, until the Journal yesterday published the critical fact that U.S. intelligence has reported that Russian hackers were looking to get emails to Flynn through a cut-out during the Summer of 2016, and this was no idle speculation on my part.

Suddenly, my story seemed important–and ominous.

○ ‘I was recruited to collude with the Russians’: A security researcher just added a new layer to the Trump campaign’s Russia ties | Business Insider |

That Time The FBI Phished A Cop With Poisoned Microsoft Docs | Forbes – May 30, 2017 |

In an investigation into a Irondequoit, New York cop accused of stalking and harassing an ex-girlfriend, the FBI used techniques it often sees deployed by cybercriminals it investigates. It sent emails to the suspect containing Microsoft Word and Excel documents that, once clicked, would help them unmask the identity of the officer, William Rosica.

A warrant detailing the hacking methods – known amongst law enforcement as Network Investigative Techniques – provided rare insight into the FBI’s digital techniques. While previous reporting of Rosica’s case has focused on the disturbing nature of the alleged crimes of the now-former policeman, it ignored the technical and ethical questions around such methods. In this case, though, security experts and privacy activists agree: the use of targeted phishing with the right warrants showed law enforcement could hack responsibly.

Cyber stalking

The FBI sent the phishing emails after agents learned of allegations that Rosica had used multiple email accounts and phone numbers to harass an unnamed former partner. Amongst the stronger allegations were that he attempted to hack into her medical records held by the University of Rochester’s MyChart, as well as her personal and work emails. His communications became increasingly aggressive, according to prosecutors, who claimed Rosica sent the ex-girlfriend messages about how to commit suicide.

Throughout, the ex-cop used the Tor network to mask his original IP address, whilst setting up a range of email addresses to further hide his identity, the government alleged. And he used the Text’em service, which allows users to send free texts without needing a phone number, prosecutors said.

With all the attempts at dissimulation, the government opted for tools in its digital arsenal to find out who was behind the emails. On January 31st, the FBI was granted a warrant to send phishing mails to email addresses hosted by hotdak.net, Yandex and mail2actor.com.

○ Law Enforcement and the Dark Web: A Never-Ending Battle

Ooops … Matt Tait wrote an article about the DNC hack while in contact with Peter Smith and John Szobocsan! One can count the number of contradictions with yesterday’s story. Interesting to say the least …

Continued below the fold …

On the Need for Official Attribution of Russia’s DNC Hack | Lawfare | by Matthew Tait on July 28, 2016, 10:57 AM

Yesterday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff—Vice Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, respectively—called on the Obama administration to consider declassifying and releasing any intelligence community assessments on the attribution and motives of the DNC hackers.

I wholeheartedly agree.

The intelligence community has powers and capabilities that far exceed that of the private sector for attribution, and do not suffer from the same conflicts of interest. Whereas private sector attribution tends to rely on technical forensics of the malware and infrastructure used by the hackers, the IC is able to draw upon a much more diverse set of capabilities—such as financial intelligence, human intelligence, and counter-intelligence—to bring together a wider set of facts with narrower bands of uncertainty than the private sector would normally have at its disposal.

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About six weeks ago, on Tuesday June 14, the Washington Post ran a story on the DNC becoming the latest victim of state sponsored hacking.

The story didn’t strike me as particularly interesting at first. Shocking news: foreign intelligence agencies collect intelligence on politicians, and in the 21st Century they sometimes do so by hacking.

It was, to be sure, a vindication of something various intelligence and ex-intelligence officials had been saying for a while. Just a few weeks earlier, DNI Director Clapper had openly warned that foreign intelligence agencies were targeting and hacking the US political campaigns.

The claim that the groups were “after Trump opposition research” felt a lot like a clever political deflection at first: sure, the group probably stole the Trump opposition research, but that doesn’t mean it was the objective of the breach. Casting the hack as being about Trump’s affiliation to Putin rather being about the DNC being hacked for a year without noticing felt like good, old fashioned political deflection. As did the attribution to Russia.

A couple of years ago every breach was China. Hacked because your website was misconfigured? China. Forgot to install Windows Updates for two years and someone ran off with your customers’ data? Definitely Chinese nation state hackers. Oops, ran some malware that came in as an email attachment? Those clever PLA hackers have done it again!

The industry-standard attribution in the past to China, then briefly to Iran, then to NSA, and then to the “Cyber Caliphate”, and most recently with Russia’s APT28 is often ill-founded and self-serving. For victims, knowing that you were hacked because the attackers were sophisticated rather than because your defences are woefully inadequate helps you sleep at night (and defend against lawsuits).

Prof. Matt Tait, Cybersecurity fellow at Univ. of Texas at Austin Robert Strauss Center

Today, Lawfare is far from a three-man operation. The masthead now features over 60 names, including a who’s who of top national security media analysts and law professors. Several of them are, like Chesney, members of The University of Texas at Austin community. Fellow Texas Law Prof. Steve Vladeck, who co-founded the other best-known national security law blog, Just Security, is a regular Lawfare contributor (and the blog also provides a home for the “National Security Law Podcast” that Chesney and Vladeck co-host). So, too, are Prof. Steve Slick, Director of UT’s Intelligence Studies Project, and Prof. Matt Tait, a British hacker who formerly worked for GCHQ (the British NSA) and Google Project Zero, and who will arrive in Austin this fall to teach cybersecurity courses at Texas Law.

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