Iran Using Same ‘Active Measure’ Tactics Against the U.S.

Posted on August 24, 2018August 24, 2018 by Denise Simon

When traveling internet sites, social media accounts and various news aggregator services, one needs to be even more suspect of what information is out there. Russia has been applying propaganda ‘active measure’ tactics for decades and due to the global internet system, the volume has gone beyond measure.

With all things Russia going on in Washington DC and in media, the success of active measures has been noticed by both China and Iran. Both have launched robust propaganda operations forcing the West and citizens to question authenticity of sites, articles and posts of all forms.

Watch out for those hashtags….influencing voters and fake/false news goes back to at least 2016. The operations are so effective that even big media has been duped and corrections are printed or made often when recognized. Some items are never corrected.

Iran’s Anti-US Propaganda Reflects regime’s instability photo

(Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google said on Thursday it had identified and terminated 39 YouTube channels linked to state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.

Google has also removed 39 YouTube channels and six blogs on Blogger and 13 Google+ accounts.

“Our investigations on these topics are ongoing and we will continue to share our findings with law enforcement and other relevant government entities in the U.S. and elsewhere,” Google said in a blog post here

On Tuesday, Facebook Inc (FB.O), Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) and Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) collectively removed hundreds of accounts tied to an alleged Iranian propaganda operation.

Google, which had engaged cyber-security firm FireEye Inc (FEYE.O) to provide the company with intelligence, said it has detected and blocked attempts by “state-sponsored actors” in recent months.

FireEye said here it has suspected “influence operation” that appears to originate from Iran, aimed at audiences in the United States, the U.K., Latin America, and the Middle East.

Shares of FireEye rose as much as 10 percent to $16.38 after Google identified the company as a consultant.

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The Daily Beast went for a deeper dive on the tactics by Iran and explained a few cases.

An Iranian propaganda campaign created fake Bernie Sanders supporters online, Facebook disclosed Tuesday.

In a press release, the social-media giant said it had removed 652 pages associated with political-influence campaigns traced to Iran, including coordinated inauthentic behavior that originated in Iran and targeted people across multiple internet services in the Middle East, Latin America, U.K., and U.S.”

The cybersecurity company FireEye, which first alerted Facebook to the influence campaign months ago, wrote in a separate posting on its site that it had traced the campaign—including posts from supposed “American liberals supportive of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders”—to Iran through email addresses and phone numbers associated with the “inauthentic” accounts.

The investigation began with FireEye’s discovery of a fake U.S. news outlet called Liberty Front Press, which Facebook says was created in 2013. The actors behind that site over time branched out into different personas intended to appeal to different audiences including “anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes.” Examples included accounts like The British Left, which published content in support of U.K. Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the pro-Palestinian Patriotic Palestinian Front. FireEye also says it “identified multiple Arabic-language, Middle East-focused sites” as part of the effort.

Unlike the Russian cyberinfluence campaign in 2016, FireEye didn’t find a complementary hacking campaign attached to the propaganda activity. Iran has spent big on developing its offensive online capabilities, but FireEye said it found no links to APT35—a hacking group that has targeted U.S. defense companies and Saudi energy firms. Instead, the security firm found links between the campaign and Iran’s state-run TV propaganda channel, PressTV.

The Iranian actors behind the campaign expanded beyond Facebook and Instagram and onto Twitter, according to FireEye. In a separate statement late Tuesday, Twitter announced it had suspended 284 accounts for what it said was “coordinated manipulation” and that “it appears many of these accounts originated from Iran.”

The Daily Beast recovered tweets from what appears to be an account associated with the campaign. @libertyfrontpr has since been deleted, but Google cache results show it linked back to the LibertyFrontPress.com website FireEye attributed to be part of the propaganda effort. The account was active as of at least Tuesday and is not listed as suspended on the platform.

The account used hashtags like “#Resist” and #NotMyPresident when tweeting out anti-Trump sentiments. It also weighed in against the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh. “The #Senate has a responsibility to reject any nominee who would fail to be a fair-minded constitutionalist. That is #BrettKavanaugh. We must #StopKavanaugh.”

In a rare move for Holocaust-denying Iranian propaganda, @libertypr slammed the Republican Party for allowing anti-Semite and Holocaust denier John Fitzgerald to run for a seat in the California legislature.

In addition to the U.S. themes, Liberty’s Twitter account also targeted opponents of the Iranian government, including the Mujahedeen Khalq exile group, or MEK, which advocates the overthrow of Iran’s clerical government, with hashtags like “#BanTerrorOrg.”

The takedown marks the second time since the 2016 election that Facebook has appeared to act without U.S. government pressure to stop an alleged political-influence campaign. In late July, Facebook took down a handful of sock-puppet accounts purporting to be black, Hispanic, and #Resistance activists. Facebook didn’t attribute that campaign to a specific country or group, but it did note that some of the accounts had links to the infamous Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm.

Facebook said Tuesday that it had taken down the new batch of pages only after waiting “many months” after being alerted to the campaign by FireEye. The delay allowed the company to further investigate the campaign and improve its defenses against future efforts.

That Deported Nazi was One of Many in the U.S.

Posted on August 22, 2018August 22, 2018 by Denise Simon

by Fred Lucas

Amid a politically-charged debate over its existence, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has removed war criminal Jakiw Palij, marking the 68th deportation of a Nazi from the United States.

On Monday, ICE arrested Palij, 95, a former labor camp guard, enforcing a 2004 court order the same day President Donald Trump praised ICE and Customs and Border Protection officials at a White House ceremony.

Specifically for ICE, created in 2003, this marks at least the fourth Nazi arrest, deporting Nazi concentration camp guards John Demjanjuk and Josias Kumpf in 2009, and soldier John (Ivan) Kalymon in 2011.

“Despite a court ordering his deportation in 2004, past administrations were unsuccessful in removing Palij,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.

“To protect the promise of freedom for Holocaust survivors and their families, President Trump prioritized the removal of Palij. Through extensive negotiations, President Trump and his team secured Palij’s deportation to Germany and advanced the United States’ collaborative efforts with a key European ally,” Sanders added.

For months, some Democrats have demanded the government “abolish ICE,” which is charged with enforcing immigration law in the interior of the country. Last month, three House Democrats introduced legislation to shut down ICE. Meanwhile, other politicians and commentators have compared ICE with Nazis or the Gestapo for arresting illegal immigrants.

ICE is often associated with arresting illegal immigrants that cross the border, but the agency also regularly investigates naturalization fraud, passport fraud, illegal immigrants in possession of firearms, as well as the smuggling of drugs, money, counterfeit merchandise, and weapons into the United States. This includes confronting sexual trafficking, and in some cases, fighting child pornography.

Three ICE offices—Enforcement and Removal Operations, the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center—were all involved in the removal of Palij, according to ICE.

The ICE Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center, established in 2009, locates and prosecutes human rights abusers in the United States, which includes those known or suspected to have participated in persecution, war crimes, genocide, torture, extrajudicial killings, female genital mutilation, and the use or recruitment of child soldiers.

War criminals won’t find a safe haven in the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a statement.

“The arrest and removal of Jakiw Palij to Germany is a testament to the dedication and commitment of the men and women of ICE, who faithfully enforce our immigration laws to protect the American people,” Nielsen said.

Palij, the former Nazi officer arrested Monday in the Queens borough of New York City, was born in a part of Poland that is present day Ukraine.

Palij came to the United States in 1949, and lied to immigration officials, claiming to have spent World War II working on a farm and in a factory. He gained citizenship in 1957.

He trained with the Nazis in 1943 in German-occupied Poland. Court documents show those who trained him at the SS training camp in Trawniki participated in executing “Operation Reinhard,” a code name for the Third Reich’s plan to murder Jews in Poland. Palij served as an armed guard at the adjacent Trawniki labor camp.

“By helping to prevent the escape of these prisoners during his service at Trawniki, Palij played an indispensable role in ensuring that they later met their tragic fate at the hands of the Nazis,” Sanders said.

On Nov. 3, 1943, about 6,000 Jewish people held at the Trawniki labor camp were shot to death in one of the single largest massacres of the Holocaust.

In 2001, after an investigation, Palij admitted his past with the Nazis to the Justice Department. In May 2002, the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of New York filed a four-count complaint in U.S. District Court to revoke his citizenship based on his wartime activities.

A judge revoked his U.S. citizenship in 2003. U.S. Immigration Judge Robert Owens ordered his deportation in 2004 to Ukraine, Poland, Germany, or any country that would admit him, and a panel denied his 2005 appeal.

The Justice Department began targeting Nazis in the United States in 1979, won cases against 108 individuals, and prevented 180 individuals with ties to the Axis powers from World War II from entering the United States, according to ICE. But 68 were deported.

Similar to Palij, previous Nazi deportation orders took years to act on.

In May 2009, ICE deported John Demjanjuk, 89, a former Nazi death camp guard and a resident of Seven Hills, Ohio, to Germany to face criminal charges for 28,060 counts of accessory to murder. He was a retired auto worker in Ohio, and was born in what is today Ukraine. He came to the United States in 1952, concealing his Nazi past. It was one of the most storied cases that worked its way through the legal process for almost three decades.

Demjanjuk was first tried on allegations of participation in Nazi persecution in a civil denaturalization (citizenship revocation) case decided in 1981, and it was unearthed that he was a gas chamber operator at the Sobibor concentration camp where Nazis killed 250,000 Jews. In 1986, the U.S. extradited him to Israel, where the country’s Supreme Court found reasonable doubt. After his release, he returned to the United States.

In 1999, the U.S. initiated a new denaturalization case against Demjanjuk, relying in large part on captured Nazi documents that came to light following the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, according to ICE. This evidence found he not only served at Sobibor, but also worked as a guard at the Majdanek camp, where Nazis killed 170,000 Jews.

A U.S. District Court in Cleveland revoked his citizenship in 2002. But it wasn’t until December 2005 that Chief Immigration Judge Michael J. Creppy ordered Demjanjuk removed from the United States to Ukraine, Germany, or Poland. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Demjanjuk’s petition for review.

That same year, in March 2009, ICE removed Josias Kumpf, 83, to Austria. He was living in Racine, Wisconsin. He came to the United States after World War II.

According to ICE, Kumpf was a former Waffen SS Death’s Head Battalion guard at the Nazi-run Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany and at the Trawniki SS training camp in Poland, the same camp as Palij served, where Nazis murdered thousands of Jews on Nov. 3, 1943.

In September 2011, ICE announced that the Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed an appeal by John (Ivan) Kalymon, 90, of Troy, Michigan, affirming his deportation because of his Nazi activities during World War II. Kalymon, who came to the United States in 1949, shot Jews while voluntarily serving as a member of the Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian Auxiliary Police from 1941 to 1944 in German-occupied Lviv, Ukraine, according to ICE.

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There were upwards of a thousand Nazis who were used by U.S. intelligence after the war by the CIA, the FBI, the military and other U.S. intelligence agencies — both in Europe as well as inside the United States, in Latin America, in the Middle East, even a few in Australia. And these were seen as basically cold warriors who served as spies, informants and in other intelligence roles. More here.

Trends in Chinese Military Worrying the U.S.

Posted on August 21, 2018August 21, 2018 by Denise Simon

WASHINGTON —

China is not an enemy, but it is certainly an adversary of the United States, and the Defense Department’s 2018 report to Congress examines the trends in Chinese military developments.

Congress mandates the report, titled “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China.” While the report highlights military developments, it also addresses China’s whole-of-government approach to competition.

China’s economic development is fueling extraordinary changes in relationships it maintains around the world, according to the report. On the face of it, China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative sounds benign – it looks to build infrastructure for developing countries and Chinese neighbors.

Chinese leaders have funded serious projects as far away as Africa under the initiative. They have built roads in Pakistan and made major inroads in Malaysia. China has a major stake in Sri Lanka. Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Laos and Djibouti also are involved.

The Chinese government seeks to overturn the established international order that has kept the peace in the region since World War II and allowed Asian countries to develop.

But “One Belt, One Road” money and projects come with strings. The “one road” leads to China, and nations are susceptible to Chinese influence on many levels – political, military, and especially, economic.

Economic Clout

In 2017, China used its economic clout in South Korea as a bludgeon to get Seoul to not allow the United States to deploy the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense system in the country as a counterweight to North Korea’s nuclear missile program. The Chinese government informally lowered the boom on South Korea economically to influence the THAAD decision.

South Korean cars and other exports were embargoed. About a quarter of all goods South Korea exports goes to China, so this had an immediate effect on the economy. In addition, tourism suffered, as nearly half of all entries to South Korea are from China, and South Korean retail stores in China were crippled.

The South Korean government decided to allow the THAAD to deploy, but China’s economic muscle movement had to be noted in other global capitals.

South China Sea

“In its regional territorial and maritime disputes, China continued construction of outposts in the Spratly Islands, but also continued outreach to South China Sea claimants to further its goal of effectively controlling disputed areas,” the DoD reports says in its executive summary. In other words, China is using military power and diplomatic efforts in tandem to claim the South China Sea.

The People’s Liberation Army has come a long way from the human-wave attacks of the Korean War, and Chinese leaders want to build a military worthy of a global power. “Chinese military strategy documents highlight the requirement for a People’s Liberation Army able to secure Chinese national interests overseas, including a growing emphasis on the importance of the maritime and information domains, offensive air operations, long-distance mobility operations, and space and cyber operations,” the report says.

Chinese military planners looked at what the United States accomplished in Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991 and charted their way forward. The PLA is fundamentally restructuring to challenge and beat any military in the world.

The PLA – still the largest force in the world – actually cut people to streamline command and control and modernize forces. The Chinese seek to win at all levels of conflict, from regional conflicts to wars with peer competitors. “Reforms seek to streamline command and control structures and improve jointness at all levels,” the report said. The PLA is using realistic training scenarios and exercising troops and equipment regularly.

New Capabilities

China is investing billions in new capabilities including artificial intelligence, hypersonic technology, offensive cyber capabilities and more. China also has launched an aircraft carrier and added many new ships to the PLA Navy. The Chinese Navy is more active and making more port calls than in years past. Further, the PLA Marine Corps is expanding from 10,000 personnel to 30,000.

The PLA Air Force has been reassigned a nuclear mission, giving China a nuclear triad — along with missile and subs — for the first time.

Cyber operations play a significant role in the Chinese military. The PLA has a large corps of trained and ready personnel. Cyber espionage is common, and there are those who believe China was able to get plans of the F-35 Thunderbolt II joint strike fighter, which they incorporated into its J-20 stealth fighter.

The U.S. National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy recognize that China and Russia are strategic competitors of the United States. Still, the United States must engage with China, and maintenance of cordial military-to-military relations is in both nations’ best interests.

“While the Department of Defense engages substantively with the People’s Liberation Army, DoD will also continue to monitor and adapt to China’s evolving military strategy, doctrine and force development, and encourage China to be more transparent about its military modernization,” the report says.

The United States military will adapt to counter and get ahead of moves by any competitor, DoD officials said.

Securing the Elections, FBI Investigating Hacks

Posted on August 21, 2018August 21, 2018 by Denise Simon

Securing the vote.

The states, which under the US system are responsible for conducting elections, remain concerned about the integrity of the ballot. Thirty-six states have now deployed Albert sensors on their voting infrastructure to allow the Department of Homeland Security to observe state systems that manage either voter information or voting devices (Reuters).

The states also want the Feds to share more threat intelligence. Forty-four states and the District of Columbia took part in a Department of Homeland Security exercise this week (US Department of Homeland Security). The states appear to have gained enough insight into the value of threat intelligence to decide that they want more of it (Reuters). Some advocate Federal standards for the conduct of elections, perhaps even mandatory standards (Atlantic Council). More here.

Meanwhile:

Then there is the matter the FBI is investigating in California.

The FBI launched investigations after two Southern California Democratic U.S. House candidates were targeted by computer hackers, though it’s unclear whether politics had anything to do with the attacks.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press the FBI looked into hacks involving David Min in the 45th Congressional District and Hans Keirstead in the adjacent 48th District. Both districts are in Orange County and are seen as potential pickups as the Democratic Party seeks to win control of the Congress in November.

A person with knowledge of the Min investigation told the AP on Monday that two laptops used by senior staffers for the candidate were found infected with malware in March. It’s not clear what, if any, data was stolen, and there is no evidence the breach influenced the contest.

The CEO of a biomedical research company, Keirstead last summer was the victim of a broad “spear-phishing” attack, in which emails that appear to come from a friend or familiar source are designed to help hackers snatch sensitive or confidential information, the law enforcement official said. There is no evidence Keirstead lost valuable information.

The investigations so far have not turned up evidence the two candidates in Orange County were political targets.

The official and the knowledgeable person were not authorized to discuss the cases publicly and spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Keirstead was narrowly defeated in the June primary for the seat held by Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher. Min came in third in the contest to unseat Republican Rep. Mimi Walters.

Min’s staff was alerted to a potential cyberattack by a facility manager in the software incubator where his campaign rented space. It was later found the computers were infected with software that records and sends keystrokes, with additional software that concealed it from conventional anti-virus tools used by the campaign.

Hackers also used a broad spear-phishing attack in an attempt to gain access, and FBI investigators are still piecing together additional details, the official said.

The two laptops were replaced, and Min’s computer was not infected. The attack on the computers was first reported by Reuters.

Keirstead campaign officials detected repeated attempts to access the campaign’s website.

Rolling Stone magazine, which first reported that cyberattack, said hackers or bots tried different username-password combinations in a rapid-fire sequence over a two-and-a-half-month period to get inside the campaign’s WordPress-hosted website.

According to the campaign, there were also more than 130,000 so-called brute force attempts over a monthlong period to gain access to the campaign’s server through the cloud-server company that hosted the Keirstead campaign’s website, Rolling Stone said.

Computer security experts say that many attempts to gain access to a site hosted with the popular and free WordPress software is not unusual.

“Every WordPress hosted website sees 130,000 brute force attempts over a monthlong period, regardless whether it’s Bohemian basket weaving, a blog about furry costume construction, or a politician website,” said Robert Graham, a cybersecurity expert who created the BlackICE personal firewall.

“Hackers don’t know or care who you are: they only care that you use WordPress,” Graham said in a text message.

Min finished third behind fellow Democrat Katie Porter, who faces Walters in November. In the 48th District, Rohrabacher will face Democrat Harley Rouda, who snagged the second runoff spot by defeating Keirstead by 125 votes.

Is that Russian Submarine Threat Still out There?

Posted on August 21, 2018August 21, 2018 by Denise Simon

It is not just the U.S. Navy that is on alert. Europe’s top Navy Commander:

NAPLES, Italy — Russia is deploying more submarines to the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and North Atlantic than at any time since the Cold War as part of a growing power game driving the U.S. to revive a decommissioned fleet and NATO to strengthen its naval defenses, the Navy’s top commander in the theater said.

Russia is upgrading its submarine forces and improving their missile capabilities, all while relations between Moscow and NATO remain tense over Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, Adm. James Foggo, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa, said in an interview earlier this month.

“The illegal annexation of Crimea … that certainly has put a strain on our relationship,” Foggo told Stars and Stripes. “It’s their bad behavior, not ours. It’s the things they are doing.”

The Navy is reviving 2nd Fleet, though on a smaller scale than the one deactivated in 2011, to supply more ships in what Foggo described as growing competition between Russia and NATO in the Atlantic Ocean.

The renewed 2nd Fleet will be a Norfolk, Va.-based joint forces command, with many details yet to be worked out, Foggo said, adding that Navy leaders will know more after NATO’s July summit in Brussels. More here.

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This is not really a new condition, it has been going on for a few years without any real U.S. response that is until the Omnibus was passed where monies were allocated for air-dropped sonobuoys that can detect submarines and transmit data back to motherships. The warnings began with Russia, operating in the Mediterranean where missiles were fired into Syria on several occasions.

The United States and Britain have been playing cat and mouse with Russia in several locations. Under Exercise Dynamic Mongoose, 10 NATO countries have been practicing hunting tactics of stealth submarines off Norway’s coast.

This past April, Lockheed Martin was awarded a $1 billion contract for a hypersonic cruise missile.

The Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon program is one of two hypersonic weapon prototyping efforts being pursued by the Air Force, and comes in addition to the Tactical Boost Glide program, which the Air Force is working on with DARPA and Raytheon. The service plans to have a prototype ready by 2023.

The Tactical Boost Glide is designed to operate at 5 times the speed of sound to enhance current military systems.

The United States has 70 nuclear powered submarines and 52 attack submarines along with 4 cruise missile armed submarines and 14 ballistic missile submarines. They all patrol bodies of water across the globe.

Russian Subs Are Reheating a Cold War Chokepoint - Defense One photo

Adm. John Richardson, Chief of Naval Operations has confirmed increased foreign submarine operations.

According to GlobalFirePower.com, North Korea has the world’s largest submarine fleet by raw numbers with 76, though most of Pyongyang’s fleet consists of shorter-range, electric-diesel coastal patrol craft. China and Russia, both with modern nuclear-powered fleets that rival the U.S. fleet, have 68 subs and 63 subs, respectively.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, in an interview with the Frankfurt Allgemeine and other news outlets in December, said the Kremlin is investing heavily in its submarine fleet, with 13 delivered since 2013. NATO countries, he said, have let their underwater firepower lag. “We have practiced less and lost skills,” the NATO chief said.

A particular point of concern, said one former high-level U.S. Navy official, is that Moscow may be attempting to tap into or sever some of the 550,000 miles of underwater fiber-optic cables that span the Atlantic and Arctic sea lanes.

“Russians have had a capability … to do things with these cables for the last 20 to 30 years,” said Tom Callender, who once served as head of capabilities for the Navy’s deputy undersecretary office and is now a senior defense fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

“Russians have had a capability … to do things with these cables for the last 20 to 30 years,” said Tom Callender, who once served as head of capabilities for the Navy’s deputy undersecretary office and is now a senior defense fellow at The Heritage Foundation.More than 95 percent of the global internet traffic — military and civilian, classified and unclassified — is transmitted across the network of submerged cables along the ocean floor, according to Washington-based tech firm TeleGeography. The quantity is massive compared with just a decade ago, when just 1 percent of all online traffic went through the cables.

Seabed vulnerability

The majority of the 285 underwater cables in place crisscross beneath heavily trafficked sea lanes of the Atlantic and Arctic regions. According to TeleGeography, the longest single cable stretches 24,000 miles and relays internet traffic and other electronic communications from Europe, Asia and Africa.

The scale and scope of global communications moving through the network of cables — some of which are only 2 inches thick — present a lucrative target that is vulnerable to attack by U.S. adversaries. It also poses a significant challenge to U.S. forces defending the lines. Read more detail here.