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:
Pic
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 😉 …
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.
- ○ US Prepared Huge Cyber-Attack on Iran, In Case Israel Bombed Iran and a War Started
○ NSA anlong with Israel’s Unit 8200 built the Stuxnet worm in attack on Iran’s nuclear plant
○ Stuxnet: US-Israel cooperation Cyber Warfare on Iran using Siemens controllers by Oui @BooMan on May 31th, 2011
○ Dagan, Ofer and Israel’s Growing Iran Credibility Gap
Thx … much appreciated!
Looks like the Vermont grid story is being debunked. Expect to see more hysteria.
Indeed Fake News published by Jeff Bezos’ propaganda rag, the Washington Post …
○ Anonymous “officials” claimed Russia hacked into the U.S. electricity grid through a utility company in Vermont | MoA |
○ Russia Hysteria Infects WashPost Again: False Story About Hacking U.S. Electric Grid | The Intercept | by Glenn Greenwald
Jeebus. The ignorant leading the stupid.
Wonder if they will stop talking about hacking long enough to consider those 39 gubernatorial contests coming up?
Folks whined about the DNC and HRC’s shortcomings as a politician non-stop ahead of a terribly important Presidential election.
Let them get it out of their system. Perhaps the left is doomed to these ineffectual bleatings. Seems typical.
That IS what THEY get the big bucks for, no?
Legitimate or valid critiques isn’t whining. The DNC and HRC had hardwired the nomination for HER. Eight years after the majority of Democratic primary voters rejected her. And in that eight year interim, her resume for warmongering and incompetence in international relations got worse.
Who is whining right now is HRC and those that were with HER, including President Obama who made himself look even smaller with his “Putin/Russia” stunt this week.
But you would say that, wouldn’t you? The aggrieve and defeated always have excuses and justifications for why they lost – it was stolen from them.
A corrupt DNC, Obama, exit polls, the media is just a different version of the Comey letter, Russian election influencing, HRC’s flaws, etc.
You have more in common with the Hillary partisans than you think. It’s all whining. Some justified, some not. No one enjoys being called out on it.
Your comment on the Russia/Putin stunt is revealing.
You think it’s a stunt because you reject the premise on which Obama is operating – that Russia acted to influence the election with selective leaks to a media outlet opposed to the current US government.
Now for those who believe this premise – Obama’s actions are merely the long-promised diplomatic response to a foreign government’s meddling. That type of “whining” will stop once Trump takes office. The whining from Hillary partisans and Hillary haters will, of course, continue. That’s what the left does best.
Who needs Hillary to sink us? Dems could not elect a dog catcher in waaaaay too many states.
That’s true.
This would be amusing if ginning up conflict with Putin/Russia weren’t such a dangerous matter and there were so many Eric Boeh type Democratic flunkies approving of the FakeNews, helping to spread it, and/or trashing the rational skeptics on the left:
WaPo tweet:
Eric Boehlert response tweet
Not even a pause in his Emily Litella routine — Russia/Putin did it and anyone that asks for evidence is both a Putin and Breitbart stooge — while he has egg all over his face and doesn’t have the decency to say, “Nevermind.”
Seems to be sloppy journalism. Nothing new there.
No one here (or sane) wants war with Russia. Stop fear-mongering.
Leahy did not follow up on the Amerithrax attack on him with any aggressiveness during the early part of the Obama administration when there was a putative Democratic majority.
At that point we entered the period in which there was no interest in the truth being known. And Congress turning down Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness created the psychotic break in the intelligence community and the Bush-Cheney administration that allowed runaway disregard for the Constitution. Having turned every person in the world into a putative possible enemy, the US running a war of disinformation on its own citizens was considered fair game and think that the US was still the sole superpower that it ceased being when the world realized it was bogged down it both of its conventional wars, other powers began to to sort out how to gain power while the US was still preoccupied.
US public discussion about cyberwarfare scenarios allowed other nations not so open about doctrine to game cyberwarfare scenarios. Stuxnet gave other powers the incentive to move quickly to build up their own capabilities, capabilities that Republican education policy and Democratic acceptance of the same frame of reference means that the US is now at a disadvantage. And the US regime change success in Ukraine and NATO pressure on Russia’s border caused Russia to work harder on its cyberwarfare capabilities.
But what was so devastating to the US was the fact that it wanted to keep open backdoors and could not create a secure defense against cyberattack that used those backdoors. And it used private contractors with no allegiance but to the buck for developing its malware, which soon escaped to the wild and after Stuxnet had the possibility of corrupting SCADA systems that could be infected. That upped the ante for other nations (and not just big powers) that it created a cyberattack arms race.
Meanwhile social media caused everyone and his brother’s political group to get into the creation of botnets and disinformation campaigns as well as into serious efforts through citizen journalism to find out the truth about what was going on.
I don’t when it started, but likely sometime around the time that the US became more interested in Ukraine than in stabilization in Syria. It seems that the US and Russia started escalating a disinformation war, and there were no journalists of record who could break through with consistently accurate information on the fact level. Complicating this in the US is the continuing conservative disinformation war of the past 30 years. And the US national security state had decided to pursue a propaganda stance with the American people in order to keep its money flowing. You might notice three, four, five different points of view on an event, and each of them has a little wrinkle that prevents reconciling the views into a coherent picture.
I think we are now self-conscious enough of what is going on to say we are standing in the midst of the first cyber-atttack disinformation war.
For example, attacking Snowden as a Russian stooge has become popular as the possibility that Obama might pardon him becomes a window rapidly closing. Obviously, the US national security establishment has an interest in seeing Snowden rot in Russia. But the latest shrill voice is Edward Jay Epstein, who has a reputation built from his view of the JFK assassination. And then he shows up as a regular Breitbart writer just as his book on Snowden goes to publication. What gives? What is his new role in the Bannon information war?
There is a huge realignment going on, masked by disinformation campaigns and deceptions. A lot of the chaos seems to be strategic in freeing up establishment rigidities to allow more easy elite control by certain elites against other elites. There is a complicated transnational corporation-national government element to this dance as well.
In the midst of this is the collapse of the Democratic establishment at the federal and state levels except for a bunch of rump actors AND the fracturing of the Republican conservative consensus that was put together for the Reagan campaign. And the fracturing of the European Union, which puts stresses on a superannuated NATO organization and European economic institutions and central banks.
We are at a point of a huge change in paradigm of global politics, probably equivalent to 1917, and we in the US are burdened with Trump and a Democratic rump that still has not faced up to the reality in front of it. Some establishment (likely that of the US) is about to take one huge beating by reality for getting exactly what they wanted for 30 years.
Curious, can we expect Tim Kaine to lead the Democratic “Resistance”? Is that what all the centrist Dems expect?
So far any resistance is totally outside the institutions– in movements like the Moral Monday movement of Dr. William Barber. We someone uses cap-R Resistance, start from that knowledge.
It occurs to me that snarkiness is suddenly dead in this new information environment. Clarity has more value to the future and snarkiness cannot tear down either someone like Trump or enlighten Democratic politiicans.
I haven’t a clue what centrist Dems expect; I’ve not seen them come out from under their desks yet (violating my snark insight). They are the ones who have to come to terms with the failure of their strategy above all. But that failure is bigger than US Dems alone. European Social Democrats and Socialists are in the same pickle after collaborating in austerity.
But all of that is outside and at this point mostly oblivious to the information war raging around global politics.
Tim Kaine can lead to the extent that he adapts successfully to the new political realities domestically and internationally. And part of that is recognizing that winning the information war in a way that helps people requires winning with a real grasp of the issues in a way that allows freedom of action. His record so far has not been impressive, but even lackluster politicians have been known to step up and move things forward in historically important circumstances.
Yes, “Resistance” seems to be the new fundraiser tool for DNC.
I’ve not gotten that email.
But dKos seems to be arguing about what the word means in terms of strategy and tactics. Who knows, they might come up with something.
Excellent, Tarheel.
Thank you once again.
Yes, we are now engaged in a virtual war.
I do not have a clue who is really winning, who is losing and who is simply sitting this one out, waiting for the climax.
I do know one thing, however.
Eventually this war is going to stop being virtual.
Either someone’s power grid will go down, someone’s economic system will collapse or some non-virtual actors like ISIS will push it right into the blood-and-guts real world in a climactic fashion.
And then all hell will break loose.
Will it be nuclear hell?
I dunno. If evolution is through with our sorry asses, yes.
Let us pray not.
AG
That’s very good, AG. There are more alternatives in your spare sentences than in the US military’s public reports on the dangers over the next 20 years in national security (the JOE-35 document I diaried on here earlier).
My estimate is that ISIS as a organization is likely done before Trump takes office; I think the backers of chaos in the Middle East all know the danger of ISIS continuing into a Trump presidency, even Erdogan and the Saudis. Politically, they are dickering about the end-game and spouting public propaganda while Russia, Syria, Iraq, and Iran are pulling together a joint view of what to approach Turkey, the Gulf States, and Saudi Arabia with. The US has not been invited (no doubt because the Obama administration and Kerry don’t want their fingerprints on it, which is a plus for its actual practical success. No participation, no need for continuity.)
The great advantage of the fact that Smart-Grids have not been rolled out is that the older technology is more fragmented and the SCADA systems more isolated from each other. The Stuxnet attack was very specific, did not rely on networks but on a Microsoft upgrade to install the malware. There are not good narratives about how the Stuxnet virus escaped Iran and into the wild where it could be analyzed by security analysts. A government anonymously reporting an attack through international information security bodies would be an inexpensive way to crowdsource attribution so long as folks were not aware of a government source of the malware but treated it as a non-state actor. That’s where the US’s shooting from the hip about the attribution of the hacks on the DNC and Podesta emails seem so short-sighted in their political motivation.
So cyber causing real world damage has to do with miscalculation of the political responses and diplomacy.
The danger of nuclear war once again is from an escalation and miscalculation solely of the nuclear powers. And an ideology that sees nuclear weapons as usable instead of primarily as deterrents to bad actors. We survived with a minimal amount of trust that led both the Soviet Union and the US to check their work before they responded with nuclear weapons. In many ways, we were lucky that there was enough trust established through communications after 1962 and enough of a fresh memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to result in moderately rational actions.
At the moment everyone, especially looking at US national security, is approaching the exercise from worst-case assumptions. Will Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping, Modi, Nawaz Sharif, Theresa May, Hollande, Kim Jung Un, and Netanyahoo conform to these worst-case assumptions or can they all find some way to walk back what clearly are not advantageous weapons to hold without immense ambiguity about your holdings and your sanity. Thus Trump’s quoting Nixon about the President needing to be a madman. Figuring out what that means for Trump is what is giving most Americans pause.
Ironically, deaths from warfare are lower now this year than most recent history. There certainly are no general world wars of the WWI or WWII variety. There are in fact only small conventional wars (troops, tanks, artillery, tactical aircraft) in only a few places. Most warfare has been reduced to asymmetric warfare, but that can occur almost anywhere on a incident-by-incident basis. And most of those require better politics, more effective and less corrupt police work, and a working justice system in order to solve.
Evolution doesn’t do it to us; the environment or the organism itself does it through stupid persistence.
You write:
Thank you, Tarheel, but of course…that’s only to be expected.
After all…my words are meant to inform and theirs are meant to confuse and obfuscate.
Like dat.
AG
Didn’t you know that Epstein was “turned” by Angleton?
Hey Martin, admittedly, you’ve done the study and are the expert!
At the time of the Church Commission, I was in Europe working on raising a family, so I missed most of it except the summerized report.
○ “Cunning Passages, Contrived Corridors”: Wandering in the Angletonian Wilderness
○ Ukraine sees Russian hand in cyber attacks on power grid | Reuters – Feb. 2016 |
○ Ukraine’s Power Grid Gets Hacked Again, a Worrying Sign for Infrastructure Attacks | MIT – Dec. 22, 2016 |
○ Istanbul hit by rolling power cuts after snow storm | Gulf News – Dec. 30, 2016
○ Major cyber attack on Turkish Energy Ministry reported | Hürriyet Daily News – Dec. 31, 2016 | |
From Washington’s blog by George Eliason …
○ Why Crowdstrike’s Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart- Say Hello to Fancy Bear