Category Archives: Cyber War

After Ukraine, DHS Warns Domestic Utility Companies

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Feds advise utilities to pull plug on Internet after Ukraine attack

WashingtonExaminer: The Department of Homeland Security advised electric utilities Thursday that they may need to stop using the Internet altogether, after the agency found that a cyberattack that brought down Ukraine’s power grid in December could have been far more devastating than reported.

The Dec. 23 cyberattack forced U.S. regulators to place utilities on alert after unknown attackers caused thousands of Ukrainian residents to lose power for hours by installing malicious software, or malware, on utility computers. But the Department of Homeland Security said Thursday that the attack may have been directed at more than just the country’s electricity sector, suggesting the attackers were looking to cause more harm than was reported.

In response, federal investigators are recommending that U.S. utilities and other industries “take defensive measures.” To start with, they need to best practices “to minimize the risk from similar malicious cyber activity,” according to an investigative report issued Thursday by Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team.

But the team is also recommending more drastic action, such as keep control-system computers away from the Internet.

“Organizations should isolate [industrial control system] networks from any untrusted networks, especially the Internet,” the report says. “All unused ports should be locked down and all unused services turned off. If a defined business requirement or control function exists, only allow real-time connectivity to external networks. If one-way communication can accomplish a task, use optical separation.”

The findings show that the power outages were caused by three attacks using cyberintrusion software to attack electric power distribution companies, affecting about 225,000 customers. It also reveals that once power was restored, the utilities continued “to run under constrained operations,” implying that the damage to grid control systems was profound.

The team also learned that “three other organizations, some from other critical infrastructure sectors, were also intruded upon but did not experience operational impacts.” That suggests the attackers were going after more than just the power grid, and may have been planning a much more economy-wide attack. The team does not disclose what other sectors of the country were targeted.

The team said the attack was well-planned, “probably following extensive reconnaissance of the victim networks,” the report says. “According to company personnel, the cyberattacks at each company occurred within 30 minutes of each other and impacted multiple central and regional facilities.”

The attackers were attempting to make the damage permanent. The report says the attackers installed “KillDisk” malware onto company computers that would erase data necessary to reboot operations after a cyberattack.

There is also a mystery to the attackers’ actions.

“Each company also reported that they had been infected with BlackEnergy malware; however, we do not know whether the malware played a role in the cyberattacks,” the report says. The malware was delivered using an email embedded hacking technique known as “spear phishing” that contained a number of malicious Microsoft Office attachments.

“It is suspected that BlackEnergy may have been used as an initial access vector to acquire legitimate credentials; however, this information is still being evaluated,” the team says.

The investigation was done with Ukraine authorities and involved the FBI, Department of Energy and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.

*** 

New research is shining a light on the ongoing evolution of the BlackEnergy malware, which has been spotted recently targeting government institutions in the Ukraine.

Security researchers at ESET and F-Secure each have dived into the malware’s evolution. BlackEnergy was first identified several years ago. Originally a DDoS Trojan, it has since morphed into “a sophisticated piece of malware with a modular architecture, making it a suitable tool for sending spam and for online bank fraud,” blogged ESET’s Robert Lipovsky.

“The targeted attacks recently discovered are proof that the Trojan is still alive and kicking in 2014,” wrote Lipovsky, a malware researcher at ESET.

ESET has nicknamed the BlackEnergy modifications first spotted at the beginning of the year ‘BlackEnergyLite’ due to the lack of a kernel-mode driver component. It also featured less support for plug-ins and a lighter overall footprint.

“The omission of the kernel mode driver may appear as a step back in terms of malware complexity: however it is a growing trend in the malware landscape nowadays,” he blogged. “The threats that were among the highest-ranked malware in terms of technical sophistication (e.g., rootkits and bootkits, such as Rustock, Olmarik/TDL4, Rovnix, and others) a few years back are no longer as common.”

The malware variants ESET has tracked in 2014 – both of BlackEnergy and of BlackEnergy Lite – have been used in targeted attacks. This was underscored by the presence of plugins meant for network discovery, remote code execution and data collection, Lipovsky noted.

“We have observed over a hundred individual victims of these campaigns during our monitoring of the botnets,” he blogged. “Approximately half of these victims are situated in Ukraine and half in Poland, and include a number of state organizations, various businesses, as well as targets which we were unable to identify. The spreading campaigns that we have observed have used either technical infection methods through exploitation of software vulnerabilities, social engineering through spear-phishing emails and decoy documents, or a combination of both.”

In a whitepaper, researchers at F-Secure noted that in the summer of 2014, the firm saw samples of BlackEnergy targeting Ukrainian government organizations for the purposes of stealing information. These samples were nicknamed BlackEnergy 3 by F-Secure and identified as the work of a group the company refers to as “Quedagh.” According to F-Secure, the group is suspected to have been involved in cyber-attacks launched against Georgia during that country’s conflict with Russia in 2008.

“The Quedagh-related customizations to the BlackEnergy malware include support for proxy servers and use of techniques to bypass User Account Control and driver signing features in 64-bit Windows systems,” according to the F-Secure whitepaper. “While monitoring BlackEnergy samples, we also uncovered a new variant used by this group. We named this new variant BlackEnergy 3.”

Only Quedagh is believed to be using BlackEnergy 3, and it is not available for sale on the open market, noted Sean Sullivan, security advisor at F-Secure.

“The name [of the group] is based on a ship taken by Captain Kidd, an infamous privateer,” he said. “It is our working theory that the group has previous crimeware experience. Its goals appear to be political but they operate like a crimeware gang. There have been several cases this year of which BlackEnergy is the latest. The trend is one of off-the-shelf malware being used in an APT [advanced persistent threat] kind of way. The tech isn’t currently worthy of being called APT, but its evolving and scaling in that direction.”

Within a month of Windows 8.1’s release, the group added support for 64-bit systems. They also used a technique to bypass the driver-signing requirement on 64-bit Windows systems.

In the case of BlackEnergy 3, the malware will only attempt to infect a system if the current user is a member of the local administration group. If not, it will re-launch itself as Administrator on Vista. This will trigger a User Account Control (UAC) prompt. However, on Windows 7 and later, the malware will look to bypass the default UAC settings.  

“The use of BlackEnergy for a politically-oriented attack is an intriguing convergence of criminal activity and espionage,” F-Secure notes in the paper. “As the kit is being used by multiple groups, it provides a greater measure of plausible deniability than is afforded by a custom-made piece of code.”

In 2014 from the Department of Interior and DHS:

Summary: Investigation of NPS-GCNP SCADA SYSTEM

Report Date: August 7, 2014

OIG investigated allegations that the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system at Grand Canyon National Park (Park) may be obsolete and prone to failure. In addition, it was alleged only one Park employee controlled the system, increasing the potential for the system to fail or become unusable.

The SCADA system is a private utilities network that monitors and controls critical infrastructure elements at the Park. Failure of the system could pose a health and safety risk to millions of Park visitors. Due to potential risks that system failure posed, we consulted with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) and asked that they assess the overall architecture and cybersecurity of the Park’s SCADA system.

ICS-CERT conducted an onsite review and issued a report outlining the weaknesses it found at the Park’s SCADA system, including obsolete hardware and software, inadequate system documentation and policies, insufficient logging and data retention. We provided a copy of ICS-CERT’s assessment report to the National Park Service for review and action.

 

 

U.S. 133 Cyber Teams Under Construction

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Is this a change and an approval by Obama from 2012? (Note this is only a defensive strategy)

Presidential Cyberwar Authority

 

In October 2012, President Obama signed the top-secret Presidential Policy Directive 20, which enabled the military to aggressively initiate and thwart cyber­attacks related our nation’s security. While most of the cyber attack targets are network systems or infrastructure-based, an elite Psychological Operations (PsyOps) team has focused its efforts on secretly defacing the public websites of our adversaries. Due to the high visibility and sensitive nature of this activity, only President Obama has the authority to target and launch these types of attacks.

The President authorizes these attacks using the global Cyber Warfare Command and Control System (CWCCS), which is accessible from this web page only from the President’s authorized computer.

****

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Not long after Defense Secretary Ash Carter prodded his cyber commanders to be more aggressive in the fight against Islamic State, the U.S. ramped up its offensive cyberattacks on the militant group.

According to several U.S. officials, the attacks are targeting the group’s abilities to use social media and the Internet to recruit fighters and inspire followers, U.S. officials told The Associated Press.

U.S. officials confirmed that operations launched out of Fort Meade, Maryland, where the U.S. Cyber Command is based, have focused on disrupting the group’s online activities. The officials said the effort is getting underway as operators try a range of attacks to see what works and what doesn’t. They declined to discuss details, other than to say that the attacks include efforts to prevent the group from distributing propaganda, videos or other types of recruiting and messaging on social media sites such as Twitter, and across the Internet in general.

Other attacks could include attempts to stop insurgents from conducting financial or logistical transactions online.

The surge of computer-based military operations by U.S. Cyber Command began shortly after Carter met with commanders at Fort Meade last month.

Several U.S. officials spoke about the cyber campaign on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. Much of the effort is classified.

Carter mentioned the operations briefly Thursday, telling a House Appropriations subcommittee only that Cyber Command is beginning to conduct operations against the Islamic State group. He declined to say more in a public setting.

The more aggressive attacks come after months of pressure from Carter, who has been frustrated with the belief that the Pentagon — and particularly Cyber Command — was losing the war in the cyber domain.

Late last year Carter told cyber commanders they had 30 days to bring him options for how the military could use its cyberwarfare capabilities against the group’s deadly insurgency across Iraq and Syria, and spreading to Libya and Afghanistan. Officials said he told commanders that beefing up cyberwarfare against the Islamic State group was a test for them, and that they should have both the capability and the will to wage the online war.

 

But the military cyber fight is limited by concerns within the intelligence agencies that blocking the group’s Internet access could hurt intelligence gathering.

Officials said Carter told commanders that he the U.S. to be able to impact Islamic State operations without diminishing the indications or warnings U.S. intelligence officers can glean about what the group is doing. On Jan. 27, Carter and Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went to Fort Meade for an update.

Officials familiar with Carter’s meetings said the secretary was frustrated that as Cyber Command has grown and developed over the past several years, it was still focused on the cyberthreats from nations, such as Iran, Russia and China, rather than building a force to block the communications and propaganda campaigns of Internet-savvy insurgents.

 

“He was right to say they could be more forward leaning about what they could possibly do against ISIS,” said James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “You could disrupt their support networks, their business networks, their propaganda and recruitment networks.” However, Lewis added, the U.S. needs to be careful about disrupting the Internet to insure that attacks don’t also affect civilian networks or systems needed for critical infrastructure and other public necessities. U.S. officials have long been stymied by militants’ ability to use the Internet as a vehicle for inspiring so-called lone wolf attackers in Western nations, radicalized after reading propaganda easily available online.

“Why should they be able to communicate? Why should they be using the Internet?” Carter said during testimony before the defense appropriations subcommittee. “The Internet shouldn’t be used for that purpose.” He added that the U.S. can conduct cyber operations under the legal authorities associated with the ongoing war against the Islamic State group. The U.S. has also struggled to defeat high-tech encryption techniques used by Islamic State and other groups to communicate. Experts have been working to find ways to defeat those programs.

Cyber Command is relatively new. Created in 2009, it did not begin operating until October 2010.

Early on, its key focus was on defending military networks, which are probed and attacked millions of times a day. But defense leaders also argued at length over the emerging issues surrounding cyberwarfare and how it should be incorporated.

 

The Pentagon is building 133 cyber teams by 2018, including 27 that are designed for combat and will work with regional commands to support warfighting operations. There will be 68 teams assigned to defend Defense Department networks and systems, 13 that would respond to major cyberattacks against the U.S. and 25 support teams.

FBI/NSA Versus Encryption, Investigating Plotting Attacks

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Perspective only: Paris Attack and operating in a realm before any attack

NSA chief: ‘Paris would not have happened’ without encrypted apps

Michael Isikoff

Chief Investigative Correspondent

National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael Rogers warns that encryption is making it “much more difficult” for the agency to intercept the communications of terrorist groups like the Islamic State, citing November’s Paris attacks as a case where his agency was left in the dark because the perpetrators used new technologies to disguise their communications.

In an exclusive interview with Yahoo News, Rogers confirmed speculation that began right after the attack: that “some of the communications” of the Paris terrorists “were encrypted,” and, as a result, “we did not generate the insights ahead of time. Clearly, had we known, Paris would not have happened.”

Rogers’ comments were made on Friday, just days before the FBI obtained a court order requiring Apple to provide a “backdoor” into the data on the iPhone of one of the shooters in the San Bernardino, Calif., terror attack in December — an order the company is resisting. But his remarks are likely to fuel the debate over encryption that has sorely divided the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community, on one side, and privacy advocates and U.S. technology companies. (A spokesman for the NSA had no comment today on the court order or on Apple’s response.)

Rogers has at times sought to steer a middle ground in this debate, acknowledging that encryption is “foundational to our future” and even saying recently that arguing about it “is a waste of time.” In the Yahoo News interview, he frankly acknowledged, “I don’t know the answer” to unencrypting devices and applications without addressing the concerns over privacy and competitiveness, calling for a national collaboration among industry and government officials to solve the problem.

But he left little doubt about the impact encryption is having on his agency’s mission.

“Is it harder for us to generate the kind of knowledge that I would like against some of these targets? Yes,” Rogers said. “Is that directly tied in part to changes they are making in their communications? Yes. Does encryption make it much more difficult for us to execute our mission. Yes.”

Rogers also provided new details about his agency’s efforts to implement the USA Freedom Act, a law passed in the wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures, which he said has made it “more expensive” for his agency to access the phone records of terror suspects inside the United States and has resulted in a “slightly slower” retrieval of data from U.S. phone companies.

But Rogers said the delay in retrieving phone records is measured “in hours, not days or weeks,” and he has not yet seen any “significant” problems that have “led to concerns … this is not going to work.”

“When I say more difficult to do the job, it’s certainly a little slower,” he said. “There is no doubt about that. It is not as fast.”

The new law — which has become a contentious issue in the presidential campaign — requires the NSA to get a secret court order to retrieve individual domestic phone records rather than collecting them in bulk and storing them in agency computers, as it had been doing before the Snowden disclosures. Critics, such as Sen. Marco Rubio, charge that the act has weakened the country’s defenses in the face of the mounting threats from the Islamic State and other terror groups.

But Rogers confirmed for the first time that the law was used successfully by the NSA after the San Bernardino terror attack to retrieve the phone records of the two perpetrators, and the agency “didn’t find any direct overseas connections.” Those records provided “metadata” — the time and duration of phone calls — but not the content of emails and text messages that the FBI is seeking by requiring Apple to unlock one of the iPhones. The FBI is continuing its efforts to track down who the two shooters “may have communicated with to plan and carry out” the attack, according to a court filing Tuesday.

Rogers’ comments came during a rare and wide-ranging interview inside the “Battle Bridge,” a special NSA situation room at its headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., equipped with teleconference screens to the White House and secure facilities around the world. It was built after the Osama bin Laden raid for use during international crises.

The former Navy cryptographer described a far-reaching reorganization of the electronic spying agency — dubbed NSA21 — that he is implementing this month to cope with evolving new national security threats. Chief among them: persistent cyberattacks from “nation state actors,” who he said are repeatedly hacking into — and Rogers believes laying the groundwork for manipulation of — the nation’s critical infrastructure systems, such as the electrical grid, the banking system and the energy sector.

Those foreign powers — widely acknowledged to be Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, although he wouldn’t name them — are “penetrating systems, what we think is for the purpose of reconnaissance. To get a sense of how they are structured. Where are their vulnerabilities? What are the control points that someone would want to access?”

While Rogers said he was “not going to get into specifics,” U.S. officials have confirmed that those attacks included an Iranian hack into the computer system of a New York dam that alarmed White House officials in 2013 and a highly sophisticated Russian infiltration of an unclassified Pentagon Joint Staff computer network that prompted the NSA director to shut down the entire network for two weeks last summer.

“This is not episodic or short-term focused,” said Rogers, who also serves as commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. “My sense is you are watching these actors make a long-term commitment. How do we ensure we have the capability to potentially impair [their] ability to actually operate?”

Yahoo News asked Rogers what motivated the attacks.

“I believe they want to have the capability, should they come to a political decision, that they in some way want to interfere with the United States or send a message to us,” he said.

One question Rogers pointedly declined to address is whether any overseas intelligence services had penetrated Hillary Clinton’s unsecured private email server — a scenario that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently said was “highly likely.”

“It’s something I’m not going to get into right now,” he said when pressed by Yahoo News as to whether such a penetration had taken place.

Rogers’ answer to the threat of foreign cyberattacks, incorporated into NSA21, is to create a new Directorate of Operations by merging the agency’s Signals Intelligence directorate — its electronic spying arm, which intercepts hundreds of millions of telephone calls, emails and text messages around the globe — with its smaller Information Assurance arm, which works with private industry to defend U.S. computer networks.

The proposal has prompted criticism that it will heighten suspicions of the NSA, making private companies even less willing to cooperate with the agency for fear of being seen as part of its massive global surveillance mission.

“I have to admit, it was something I spent a lot of time, as did the team, thinking about,” Rogers said when asked about the criticism. He added later, “I certainly acknowledge that there are some who would argue, ‘Hey, but you have this perception battle.’ My statement to that would be, ‘We have that perception battle every single day of the year, given the fact that the NSA, we acknowledge, works in both the offensive [signals interception] and defensive [cybersecurity] structures.’”

Dealing with the “perception” of the NSA as an unchecked surveillance colossus has been Rogers’ principal challenge since he took over the agency nearly two years ago during the biggest crisis in its history — the aftermath of the Snowden leaks, described by his predecessor, Gen. Keith Alexander, at the time as “the greatest damage to our combined nation’s intelligence systems that we have ever suffered.”

A congenial career Navy cryptologist who previously was commander of the Navy’s Fleet Cyber Command, Rogers has sought to repair the agency’s image and mend fences with Capitol Hill, striking a noticeably more measured and less combative tone in his public statements than Alexander did.

But when pressed about the lingering impact of the Snowden disclosures and persistent questions among privacy advocates and members of Congress about the NSA’s continued “incidental” collection of U.S. citizens’ communications, Rogers was unyielding and unapologetic.

He twice refused, for example, to shed any light on how many Americans’ emails and phone calls are “incidentally” collected by the NSA in the course of intercepting the communications of foreign targets. “We don’t talk about the specifics of the classified mission we do,” he said. He declined to explain why such information would be classified but insisted that access to those communications by the FBI is governed by legal processes.

Rogers warned that terrorist groups such as the Islamic State are moving to encrypted apps and networks, the so-called dark Web — a trend he asserted was “accelerated” by the Snowden disclosures.

“The trend has happened much faster than we thought,” he said. “And the part that is particularly discouraging to me is when we get groups, actors, specifically discussing the [Snowden] disclosures saying, ‘Hey, you need to make sure you don’t do X, Y or Z, or you don’t use this, because remember we know the Americans are into this.

“You’ve seen al-Qaida expressly, for example, reference the [Snowden] disclosures. You’ve seen groups — ISIL does the same — talk about how they need to change their discipline, need to change their security as a result of their increased knowledge of what we do and how we do it.”

But while many experts have argued that the movement toward encryption is the inevitable result of evolving new technologies, Rogers pointed to Snowden.

“No one should doubt for one minute there has been an impact here,” Rogers said. “I will leave it to others to decide right, wrong, good or bad. But there shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind that there has been an impact as a result of these disclosures.”

Rogers has strong feelings about what should happen to Snowden, who remains in Moscow, hailed around the world by many civil liberties groups, receiving accolades and awards (and financial compensation for speeches he delivers via Skype) — all while remaining a fugitive from U.S. justice. Rogers has not seen “Citizenfour,” the Oscar-winning documentary by Laura Poitras that presents the former NSA contractor as a courageous whistleblower, and he says he will “probably” not see the upcoming film “Snowden,” due in theaters this May, by Oliver Stone.

Asked about proposals that Snowden should receive some sort of leniency as part of a deal that would bring him home, Rogers talked about the concept of “accountability.” He recalled a conversation he had with his father about the My Lai Massacre when he joined the Naval ROTC in the post-Vietnam era in 1981.

“Dad, what do you do when you get an order that you think is immoral, unethical or illegal?” he said. “And my father, something I’ll always remember, said to me, ‘Michael, you must be willing to stand up and say, “This I will not do.” But Michael, you must also be willing to be held accountable for the decision you have made. And don’t ever forget, son, responsibility and accountability are intertwined. And it ain’t one or the other. It’s about both.’ And that seems to have been forgotten in all of this.”

DHS: 12 Years, $180 Million, Not Close to Complete

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Same personnel as those that did the Obamacare website? Is there a single agency that works?

DHS excoriated for mismanaged HR IT system

An ambitious program begun by the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 to consolidate all of its component agencies’ HR systems, from payroll to timesheets and beyond, isn’t near completion after more than 12 years of work. Many in Congress are not pleased.

A Government Accountability Office study on the DHS HRIT investment released for a Feb. 25 House Homeland Security Oversight and Management Efficiency subcommittee hearing said 400 of the agency’s human capital systems that were to have been consolidated under the program are unaccounted for.  The program has cost millions, GAO found, but DHS did not keep track of exact costs.

Carol Cha, GAO’s director of IT acquisition management issues, testified at the hearing that the HRIT has been on her agency’s list of high-risk IT projects for some time.

“That’s breathtaking,” said subcommittee Chairman Scott Perry (R-Pa.). More than a dozen years and $180 million later, he said, DHS is “no closer” to completing the project than it was in 2003.  The exact cost to date, said Perry,  because of the inadequate record-keeping.

“This is a poster child of inept management,” he said, declaring the lack of cost tracking “reprehensible, unacceptable.”

DHS, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J) said, “has shown a tremendous lack of commitment” to the project.

Later in the hearing, Perry’s irritation with DHS’ handling of the sprawling project flared again and again. “For the love of God Mr. Fulghum, [the money] has been pissed away,” he snarled at Chip Fulghum, DHS’ deputy undersecretary for management.

Fulghum was in the hot seat to defend the agency’s work on the project. “We don’t care if it’s hard to do,” Perry said, later adding, “you’re the heavies, get it done.”

 

Although Fulghum said DHS agreed with the GAO’s 14 recommendations to address HRIT’s poor progress and ineffective management, he pointed to the agency’s work on the consolidated performance management and learning system called PALMS as evidence that DHS can execute on enterprise-wide IT consolidation. He said the agency’s component agencies are close to signing off on PALMS’ use.

Fulghum also said DHS is working aggressively to strengthen the program’s oversight and direction. He said the agency had also appointed Angela Bailey as chief human capital officer a few months ago to coordinate the project.

Bailey, who also testified at the hearing, assured the panel that her agency has stepped up oversight meetings with an executive review councils and boards to spur progress. “Clearly we have work to do,” she said.

Amid the admonitions from the congressional panel, Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.) threw something of a life preserver to Fulghum in the middle of the hearing, asking the DHS executive if the agency has considered shared services to handle some of the HR functions that HRIT would do.

Richmond noted that the Agriculture Department’s National Finance Center provides payroll and other financial management services, as well as human resources management services. “At the end of the day, we just want things to work,” said Richmond, whose Louisiana district is home to the NFC. “You should talk to the director of the National Finance Center. They say they can solve the problem.”

Fulghum said he supported shared services and that “we’re absolutely interested” in exploring such opportunities.

At the end of the hearing, Flughum pledged to spur progress on the program in the coming months. He said the oversight panel would receive a concrete plan by early May that contains hard deadlines and a blueprint for moving ahead.

CENTCOM Probe Includes Deleted Files

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House chairman: Military files, emails deleted amid probe

WASHINGTON (AP)— Personnel at U.S. Central Command have deleted files and emails amid allegations that intelligence assessments were altered to exaggerate progress against Islamic State militants, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Thursday.

“We have been made aware that both files and emails have been deleted by personnel at CENTCOM and we expect that the Department of Defense will provide these and all other relevant documents to the committee,” Rep. Devin Nunes said at a hearing on worldwide threats facing the United States. Central Command oversees U.S. military activities in the Middle East.

A whistleblower whose position was not disclosed told the committee that material was deleted, according to a committee staff member who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly disclose the information.

Navy Cmdr. Kyle Raines, a spokesman for CENTCOM, said the combatant command was fully cooperating with the Defense Department inspector general’s probe into the allegations.

“While it would be inappropriate to discuss the details of that investigation, I can tell you that as a matter of CENTCOM policy, all senior leader emails are kept in storage for record-keeping purposes, so such records cannot be deleted,” Raines said. It’s unclear if emails written by lower-level staff were also maintained.

Nunes, R-Calif., also said the Office of the Director of National Intelligence briefed the committee on a survey indicating that more than 40 percent of Central Command analysts believe there are problems with the integrity of the intelligence analyses and process.

“To me, it seems like 40 percent of analysts who are concerned at CENTCOM — that’s just something that can’t be ignored,” Nunes said.

A senior intelligence official said that each year the DNI conducts a survey at all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies to gain feedback on the integrity, standards and objectivity of the process used to analyze intelligence. In the most recent survey, conducted between August and October of last year, approximately 120 employees from CENTCOM responded to the survey. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose details of the internal survey.

A report on the survey issued in December 2015 indicated that 40 percent of those who responded at CENTCOM answered “yes” to the question: “During the past year, do you believe that anyone attempted to distort or suppress analysis on which you were working in the face of persuasive evidence?”

Asked whether he considered 40 percent an unusually high number, Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the committee that he did.

Stewart said that while it would be favorable for all to “get closure on exactly the extent of this allegation,” he cannot control the pace of the watchdog’s investigation. He said that while the investigation proceeds, intelligence officials continue to look into ways to improve the process of producing the assessments, and he noted that the DIA’s ombudsman had looked into a particular incident.

The New York Times, which first disclosed the investigation, reported that the probe began after at least one civilian DIA analyst told authorities he had evidence that officials at Central Command were improperly reworking conclusions of assessments prepared for President Barack Obama and other top policymakers.

*** So this begs the question, what is the truth today on Islamic State, on Russia, Syria, North Korea, China, Iran or the thousands of terror groups? What is the final product including today with briefings? What does the media receive other than filtered reports? Who really DID order this suppression of intelligence data? Who is going to be the fall person? What was shared with foreign intelligence through normal daily collaboration?