Black-Ops Mercenaries On the Internet

Using tools denied by Western adversaries … Russia, China, India and Korea trying to level the playing field.

Black Cube Targets Cyber-Security NGO at Behest of Leading Israeli Malware Maker | Tikun Olam |

The Israeli TV news magazine, Uvdah and the NY Times have collaborated on, and amplified a major story originally published by AP. It documents an elaborate, and ultimately unsuccessful sting operation on the Canadian cyber-security NGO, Citizen Lab (CL). The latter is the key organization which has exposed a series of malware attacks by various hacking outfits whose government, police, and intelligence clients, use the surveillance products to spy on citizen activists. Citizen Lab has documented the use of the Israeli dirty ops company, NSO Group’s Pegasus malware by Mexican and Gulf (and many other) government agents to spy on, and even kill dissidents who seek to expose official corruption and who seek the reform their political systems.

Continued below the fold …

However, more recently NSO felt compelled to escalate its response to such attacks against its hacking activities. That’s because Saudi intelligence agents used Pegasus to track the communications between two dissidents working against the regime abroad. One of them, the Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, was later murdered by Saudi assassins dispatched by the Crown Prince, Mohammed ibn Salman, and his underlings. It is exceedingly possible that Pegasus had infected either sets of cell phones used by both activists and permitted the killers to track the victim up to the very moment he set foot in the Saudi embassy, where he was ultimately murdered.

In this case, two operatives identified by Uvdah as working on behalf of another Israeli commercial investigations company, Black Cube, approached Citizen Lab staff posing as business clients interested in donating to the NGO’s work …

I’ve written a number of diaries on this topic throughout the years …

○ Saudi Murder Suspect Trained in Offensive Spying

The New York Times broke a story about an unreported August 3, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower attended by Erik Prince, George Nader, Donald Trump Jr., Stephen Miller, and Joel Zamel, who had presented a multimillion-dollar proposal for his company Psy-Group to implement a social media manipulation campaign to help elect Trump.

A mercenary (Erik Prince), a Middle East power broker (George Nader), and the head of an Israeli version of #CambridgeAnalytica (Joel Zamel) walk into a bar….

‎"We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world." #egypt #jan25

— Fawaz Rashed (@FawazRashed) March 18, 2011

○ Egypt five years on: was it ever a ‘social media revolution’? | The Guardian |

RAMNIFICATIONS!!

Cambridge Analytica-linked businessman helped start Black Cube, lawsuit claims | Times of Israel – Aug. 28, 2018 |

Vincent Tchenguiz, an Iranian-born British entrepreneur and property tycoon who until 2015 was the largest shareholder in the parent company of the scandal-hit data firm Cambridge Analytica, also played a prominent role in the founding stages of the controversial Israeli business intelligence company Black Cube, and provided it with vital funding, according to a 2013 Israeli lawsuit filed by lawyers for Tchenguiz.

Tchenguiz, whose family is of Iraqi-Jewish origin, fell out with the secretive Israeli company and its founders and sued it for fraud and other alleged offenses, seeking almost a million pounds in damages. The case, which received very little media coverage at the time, was ultimately settled out of court.

DEATH OF DEMOCRACY – A LOST CAUSE IN THE INTERNET AGE

Ohh?

Project Raven

Inside the UAE’s secret hacking team of American NSA educated mercenaries (Reuters)

Monitoring the Arab Uprising

IDF’s New Media – war propaganda through social media (Nov. 2012)

Boeing/Narus helps Egyptian dictatorship fight pro-democracy movement (Nov. 2012)

[Update-1] : linked article expanded …

Project Raven: Secret hacking team of American mercenaries

Two weeks after leaving her position as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. National Security Agency in 2014, Lori Stroud was in the Middle East working as a hacker for an Arab monarchy.

She had joined Project Raven, a clandestine team that included more than a dozen former U.S. intelligence operatives recruited to help the United Arab Emirates engage in surveillance of other governments, militants and human rights activists critical of the monarchy.

Stroud and her team, working from a converted mansion in Abu Dhabi known internally as “the Villa,” would use methods learned from a decade in the U.S intelligence community to help the UAE hack into the phones and computers of its enemies.

Stroud had been recruited by a Maryland cybersecurity contractor to help the Emiratis launch hacking operations, and for three years, she thrived in the job. But in 2016, the Emiratis moved Project Raven to a UAE cybersecurity firm named DarkMatter. Before long, Stroud and other Americans involved in the effort say they saw the mission cross a red line: targeting fellow Americans for surveillance.

[…]

Purple Briefing, Black Brieving

Stroud is the only former Raven operative willing to be named in this story; eight others who described their experiences would do so only on condition of anonymity. She spent a decade at the NSA, first as a military service member from 2003 to 2009 and later as a contractor in the agency for the giant technology consultant Booz Allen Hamilton from 2009 to 2014. Her specialty was hunting for vulnerabilities in the computer systems of foreign governments, such as China, and analyzing what data should be stolen.

In 2013, her world changed. While stationed at NSA Hawaii, Stroud says, she made the fateful recommendation to bring a Dell technician already working in the building onto her team. That contractor was Edward Snowden.

The Citizen Lab: Mapping Hacking Team’s “Untraceable” Spyware

Hacking Team advertises that their RCS spyware is “untraceable” to a specific government operator. However, we claim to identify a number of current or former government users of the spyware by pinpointing endpoints, and studying instances of RCS that we have observed. We suspect that agencies of these twenty-one governments are current or former users of RCS: Azerbaijan, Colombia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Panama, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, and Uzbekistan. Nine of these countries receive the lowest ranking, “authoritarian,” in The Economist’s 2012 Democracy Index.5 Additionally, two current users (Egypt and Turkey) have brutally repressed recent protest movements.

Towards resilient cyber security as a Vision 2030 enabler – BAe

Fire Mueller by BooMan
Mon Jan 18th, 2010 at 11:47:19 PM EST

From my diary – Sliding Ethics – 3 Years Ago: Fire Mueller

Same day another blogger @BooMan opinioned – Hero or FRAUD by sjct

More …

○ British MOD Issued DA-notice on Snowden (Aug. 2013)
○ NSA-GCHQ Espionage – Deceiving the Nation and the World

My six diaries since July 2018 where Black Cube, led by former Mossad spooks, is mentioned here @EuroTrib – archive.

INTELLIGENCE TIES BETWEEN AGENCIES ARE STRONGER THAN POLITICAL TIES BETWEEN NATIONS OR DIVISION BY BREXIT

[Update-1] : Earlier writings about the US military involvement with the Emirates, in particular Abu Dhabi.

○ US Elite Military Taking Mercenary Jobs In Abu Dhabi [Dec. 2012]

○ Erik Prince’s XE, now Frontier Services, and Halliburton HQ moved to Emirates

○ Cambridge Analytica 2.0 (EmerData Ltd) Linked to Mercers and Prince

Linked in my diary – Geheimdienste Amyntor – Victor In Chains …

○ Trump White House Weighing Plans for Private Spies to Counter “Deep State” Enemies

[Update-2] : < despicable >

○ Blackwater Founder Erik Prince’s Business Ties With Netanyahu’s Disgraced Chief of Staff | Haaretz – Dec. 6, 2017 |

○ Vincent Tchenguiz’s Consensus Business Group Invests $6 million in Israeli Venture Fund

My opinion last two years, beware of tunnel vision by focusing solely on Russia and Putin .. thinking of Israel’s Netanyahu and the alliance Aby Dhabi / KSA with Salman.

Archive

○ International Coalition to Defeat Democrats and Hillary in 2016

[Update-3] ::

Every single piece of this story is appalling. (_link)

— Rebecca Ingber (@becingber) January 31, 2019

This story was reported in Dec 2017 & that the firm, DarkMatter, was under investigation by the FBI ….

This story has really been years in the making, and it's just the surface. I spent months tracking former US spies, cops, and military who have built the UAE's intelligence structures from the ground up. (_link)

— Jenna McLaughlin (@JennaMC_Laugh) December 21, 2017

Deep Pockets, Deep Cover| FT |

Former CIA and government officials were drawn to the Gulf nation by the promise of interesting work and, perhaps even more importantly, lucrative careers.

“The money was fantastic,” one former employee told FP. “It was $1,000 a day — you could live in a villa or in a five-star hotel in Abu Dhabi.”

The key figure behind this growing intelligence training operation, according to multiple sources, is Lawrence Sanchez, a former intelligence officer who helped kickstart a controversial partnership between the CIA and the New York Police Department that tried to pre-empt the radicalization of potential terrorists by tracking people — many of them Muslims — in mosques, bookstores, and other places around New York.

But Sanchez is just one of many former Western security professionals who has made his way to the Gulf nation to provide security training. Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, famously moved to the UAE to create a battalion of foreign troops serving the crown prince, details of which were first revealed by the New York Times in 2011. And Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism czar, is also a longtime top advisor to the crown prince of Abu Dhabi as the CEO of Good Harbor Security Risk Management.

The UAE’s reliance on foreigners to build its security institutions is not new, but the Gulf state has usually tried to keep the details of that help out of public view, and when it comes to training its nascent intelligence operations, details have been kept particularly quiet.

[..]

While Sanchez was at the NYPD, the department also had an expanding — and unusual — relationship with the UAE. In 2008, the NYPD and the UAE’s government struck an intelligence-sharing deal, and New York police set up a satellite office in Abu Dhabi. The UAE also gave the New York City Police Foundation a million dollars for its intelligence division in 2012, providing funds to enable “the NYPD to station detectives throughout the world to work with local law enforcement on terrorism related incidents,” per a public tax filing.

During his tenure at NYPD, Sanchez developed “an ongoing relationship” with high-level Emirati officials, including Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, according to a former law enforcement source.

C.I.A. Report Finds Concerns With Ties to New York Police) | NY Times – June 2013 |