Category Archives: Cyber War

When Russia Helps N Korea Cheat on Sanctions, What to Do

Posted on by

Primer: Do you wonder what Russia’s votes on the UNSC really do to help North Korea? Do you wonder about the 40,000+ North Korean slave laborers in Russia add to the North Korean economy each year? About $200 million. How about the Russian oil pipeline that goes through North Korea? What about the rail system between the two countries and how that helps North Korea skirt sanctions with illicit goods transportation? Then there is the alleged legitimate navy and fishing fleets between Russia and North Korea. Money? Or the weekly air flight service from Vladivostok to Pyongyang. Or how Russia provides internet service to North Korea in addition to China, known as SatGate and the fiber optic lines that run along the rail system. Check front companies in China, Singapore and the banking system known as Dalcombank or just flying cash twice a week.

Rajin, North Korea Image result for rajin north korea  Image result for rajin north korea

FDD: The Treasury Department on Monday sanctioned a North Korean trading company official for helping Pyongyang evade U.S. and UN sanctions through illicit activity in Vietnam. The designation, which arrived in the brief interval between two North Korean missile tests in less than a week, suggests that Washington understands the importance of investigating and disrupting North Korea’s extensive overseas illicit networks.

Treasury’s latest target is Kim Su Il, who works for a Vietnam-based trading company on behalf of North Korea’s Munitions Industry Department, which the U.S. and UN have both sanctioned. According to Treasury, Kim helped export UN-sanctioned goods such as anthracite coal, titanium ore concentrate, and other raw materials from North Korea to Vietnam. Both anthracite coal and titanium ore are among the top exports that fund the regime’s illicit activities. Treasury also found that Kim Su Il helped charter ships and export Vietnamese products to North Korea, as well as to China and other undisclosed countries.

Kim Su Il’s designation is a reminder that North Korea’s overseas networks continue to thrive despite sanctions. In January, The Wall Street Journalreported that up to six Chinese-owned vessels transported North Korean coal between North Korea and Vietnam throughout 2018. In March 2018, the UN Panel of Experts also found that North Korean coal shipments to Vietnam go as far back as January 2017 – eight months before the UN Security Council’s comprehensive coal ban on North Korea went into effect. This persistent trade affirms Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Marshall Billingslea’s assessment in 2017 that coal “has been the center of North Korea’s revenue generation” for many years.

In March 2019, the same UN Panel of Experts exposed North Korea’s numerous overseas illicit money-making schemes, which employ networks of front companies, North Korean government workers, and local banks. For example, in Malaysia, North Korea’s intelligence agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, operated two companies that provided revenue to Pyongyang: the Malaysia-Korea Partners Group and Global Communications.

The UN Panel also found that foreign governments were applying “insufficient scrutiny” on the activities of North Korea’s overseas banking and government representatives, thereby enabling these company networks to thrive. The lax monitoring has ultimately allowed Pyongyang’s representatives to conduct financial transactions across numerous borders. Chinese banks in particular have been key enablers of North Korea’s actions.

Treasury provided robust evidence of this lax oversight last month when it sanctioned the Russian Financial Society (RFS) for helping North Korea evade sanctions. This designation revealed how a U.S.-sanctioned North Korean banking representative in Moscow exploited local financial service providers, specifically RFS, to conduct business for sanctioned North Korean companies. The incident showed that designating only the North Korean nationals working abroad is not enough. Rather, Washington also should target the banks and financial institutions that allow North Korean government officials based overseas to thrive.

Treasury’s next steps therefore should focus on investigating Kim Su Il’s local network of companies, individuals, and banks. Closing these gaps in enforcement is an indispensable step for maximizing the impact of U.S. sanctions on North Korea.

A Tip Discovered the Capital One Data Hack

Posted on by

Lil miss Paige got what is in your wallet.

Paige Adele Thompson

MCLEAN, Va., July 29, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Capital One Financial Corporation (NYSE: COF) announced today that on July 19, 2019, it determined there was unauthorized access by an outside individual who obtained certain types of personal information relating to people who had applied for its credit card products and to Capital One credit card customers.

Capital One

Capital One immediately fixed the configuration vulnerability that this individual exploited and promptly began working with federal law enforcement. The FBI has arrested the person responsible and that person is in custody. Based on our analysis to date, we believe it is unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual. However, we will continue to investigate.

“While I am grateful that the perpetrator has been caught, I am deeply sorry for what has happened,” said Richard D. Fairbank, Chairman and CEO. “I sincerely apologize for the understandable worry this incident must be causing those affected and I am committed to making it right.”

Based on our analysis to date, this event affected approximately 100 million individuals in the United States and approximately 6 million in Canada.

***

According to the criminal complaint, the FBI honed in on Thompson after “information obtained from the obtrusion” was found on a GitHub page with Thompson’s name attached to it. A tipster had emailed Capital One on July 17, 2019, to alert them to the post. The message included a link to a file, that was confirmed to contain information for getting into Capital One systems.

paige thompsonAnd Paige bragged about her nefarious achievements.

 

Paige Adele Thompson described herself as a “Programmer, sysadmin, electronics enthusiast” on the GitLab profile mentioned in the third section of this article. Another profile states that she works at Netcrave Communications in Seattle. A search of online records brings up a now-deleted LinkedIn page that lists her occupation as “Owner / software engineer” at Netcrave. On a Meetup page, Thompson also described herself as the CTO of the company.

The resume that FBI investigators alluded to in the criminal complaint was easily found on Scribd, the online platform that allows for the sharing of documents. Thompson wrote on the resume that she worked for Amazon as a systems engineer in 2015 and 2016. She also lists prior jobs as a software engineer at companies including ATG Stores Inc, ConnectXYZLLC and Seattle Software Systems. The resume states that Thompson attended Bellevue Community College but did not graduate. Excellent work as published here.

According to the criminal complaint, Paige Thompson actually began the hack in March. It is quite the case and interesting reading found here.

Is the U.S. Prepared for Foreign Interference of 2020 Elections

Posted on by

The Democrats continue to declare the Russians helped Donald Trump win the presidency and that now President Trump has done nothing to prevent Russian interference of the 2020 elections.

DHS is worried about our elections, and it's asking ...

But we need to look at some real facts.

  1. DHS launched several programs to aid the U.S. security of the nation’s elections systems. Beginning in 2017, a National Infrastructure Protection Plan was launched which began the real partnership with Federal, State and local governments including private sector entities. The sharing of timely and actionable threats, cybersecurity assistance including sensors all at no charge to election officials. Scanning, risk assessment and analysis along with training are all part of the Protection Plan, including conference calls scheduled as needed. What is most interesting is this program was initiated by a Presidential Policy Directive #21 signed by then President Obama in 2013.
  2. As ODNI Dan Coats has tendered his resignation effective in mid-August, many have said he has no accomplishment. This agency is merely an intelligence coordinator of many agencies and is bureaucratic but Coats did create a position that is dedicated to election security efforts and is headed by Shelby Pierson who has a deep resume in intelligence and was a crisis manager for election security in the 2018 elections. He has briefed the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee several times so for any Democrat to declare that the Trump administration has done nothing is false.
  3. DHS has a resource library including a checklist that is available for free for any election officials that can be accessed as new threats or conditions arise. This library includes HTTPS encryption techniques, incident response, ransomware best practices and securing voter registration data. Additionally, email authentication techniques are available, layering credentialed access logins, security baselines, monitoring intrusions and brute force attack attempts are shared with all participating partners.

All of these efforts are positive steps against foreign interference, however fake news and rogue actors are crafty, resourceful and well financed. The United States is not the only country that is a victim of foreign intrusions.

Foreign spy services that are utilizing information operations in order to influence US elections reportedly include —aside from Russia— Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela and China.

The majority of foreign information operations take place on social-media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. But there are also campaigns to influence more traditional American media, for instance by tricking newspapers into publishing letters to the editor that are in fact authored by foreign intelligence operatives. Analysts from FireEye, Graphika and other cybersecurity and network-analysis firms told The Postthat some information operations are difficult to detect, because the presence of a state security service is not always apparent. However, the messages that are communicated in tweets, Facebook postings, online videos, etc., tend to echo —often word for word— the rhetoric of foreign governments, and promote their geopolitical objectives. As can be expected, these objectives vary. Thus, Russian, Israeli and Saudi information operations tend to express strong political support for US President Donald Trump, arguably because these governments see his potential re-election as a development that would further their national interest. In contrast, Iranian information operations tend to lambast Trump for his negative stance on the Iranian nuclear deal and for his support for Saudi Arabia’s intervention in the Yemeni Civil War.

Stanley McChrystal has called for a nonpartisan, non-governmental Fair Digital Election Commission to protect the integrity of our elections by detecting, exposing, evaluating and remediating the impact of disinformation. Well we already have one where non-government cyber experts are collaborating with government officials and issuing attributions to the cyber actors as well as recommendations.

Fake news and false news influence voter’s attitudes. So one must ask where in Silicon Valley and the tech giants? We already know that Instagram, Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter are censoring so voters must be diligent in research and cautious themselves regarding the spread of fake news and validating stories beyond just reading the headlines.

Last year, 2018:

A new study by three MIT scholars has found that false news spreads more rapidly on the social network Twitter than real news does — and by a substantial margin.

“We found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude,” says Sinan Aral, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the findings.

“These findings shed new light on fundamental aspects of our online communication ecosystem,” says Deb Roy, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab and director of the Media Lab’s Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM), who is also a co-author of the study. Roy adds that the researchers were “somewhere between surprised and stunned” at the different trajectories of true and false news on Twitter.

Moreover, the scholars found, the spread of false information is essentially not due to bots that are programmed to disseminate inaccurate stories. Instead, false news speeds faster around Twitter due to people retweeting inaccurate news items.

“When we removed all of the bots in our dataset, [the] differences between the spread of false and true news stood,”says Soroush Vosoughi, a co-author of the new paper and a postdoc at LSM whose PhD research helped give rise to the current study.

The study provides a variety of ways of quantifying this phenomenon: For instance,  false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories are. It also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people. When it comes to Twitter’s “cascades,” or unbroken retweet chains, falsehoods reach a cascade depth of 10 about 20 times faster than facts. And falsehoods are retweeted by unique users more broadly than true statements at every depth of cascade.

The paper, “The Spread of True and False News Online,” is published today in Science.

 

 

Meet the United Front Work Department

Posted on by

The U.S. should perhaps scrapping any trade deal with China. Why?

Just this week, the United States Navy and Taiwanese authorities sailed through the Taiwan Strait. China threatened use of force to thwart any U.S. move over the partnership with Taiwan. So, the U.S. just tested that.

As an aside, the United States just approved a major sale of weapons requested by Taiwan totaling $2.2 billion. This is actually in compliance with U.S. law where we are to provide Taiwan with sufficient equipment and services for self-defense.

As part of the U.S. 7th Fleet, a guided missile cruiser transited the route continuing efforts to keep free and open the Indo-Pacific. President Trump is defying China and should actually as we dont respond to threats of war all while the White House National Security advisor John Bolton is in S. Korea. China continues to push the One China principle so as not to harm relations. Meanwhile, China has a robust active measures operation going on in Washington DC. So read on.

China’s Communist Party is intensifying covert influence operations in the United States that include funding Washington think tanks and coercing Chinese Americans, according to a congressional commission report.

The influence operations are conducted by the United Front Work Department, a Central Committee organ that employs tens of thousands of operatives who seek to use both overt and covert operations to promote Communist Party policies.

Johns Hopkins School of Advance International Studies, a major foreign policy education and analysis institute, has received funding from Tung Chee-hwa, a vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the party group that directs the United Front Work Department and includes a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the collective dictatorship that rules China.

The funding for Johns Hopkins came from Tung’s non-profit group in Hong Kong, the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, which is a registered Chinese agent.

In addition to Johns Hopkins, other think tanks linked to China and influential in American policy circles include the Brookings Institution, Atlantic Council, Center for American Progress, EastWest Institute, Carter Center, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Exchange Foundation is tied to Chinese government influence operations and uses the same public relations firm as the Chinese embassy. More here.

***

President Xi views United Front work as an important tool to strengthen support for the CCP both inside and outside China by exploiting individuals’ emotional and ideological sympathies for China and providing financial support to key groups and individuals.24 Although the importance of United Front work declined after the founding of the People’s Republic of China,* a number of Western analysts agree it has regained its prominence since then, and especially since the rise of Xi Jinping, as Beijing has embraced a much more assertive approach to foreign policy.25In his address to the 19th National Congress of the CCP† in October 2017, President Xi called United Front work“an important way to ensure the success of the [Chinese Communist] Party’s cause” and urged the CCP to form the “broadest possible patriotic United Front.”26 President Xi has also called United Front work a “magic weapon” that is important for bringing about “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

Several pieces of U.S. legislation in 2018 have included important provisions for countering CCP and other malign foreign influence.‡ Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC) and Senators Rubio and Tom Cotton (R-AK) introduced legislation in March 2018, titled the Foreign Influence Transparency Act, which would require organizations that promote the political agendas of foreign governments to register as foreign agents§ and would require universities to disclose certain donations and gifts from foreign sources.127 Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the Stop Higher U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission 15Education Espionage and Theft Act in May 2018, which is intended to strengthen the U.S. government’s ability to counter foreign intelligence organizations working inside the U.S. educational system.128 Senator Rubio and his Congressional-Executive Commission on China co-chair Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ), along with co-sponsors, introduced companion bills in the Senate and House in June 2018 calling for the establishment of an interagency task force to compile an unclassified report on CCP influence operations targeting the United States and certain U.S. allies.129 Most significantly, the National Defense Authorization Act for 2019 contains important provisions to coordinate the U.S. government response to malign foreign influence operations and campaigns—including specifically by China.* Read in full here.

How About Consulting FBI and SOCOM on Immigration

Posted on by

Homeland Security and Homeland Defense cannot be divided, one relies on the other.

For starters, the FBI has had a long term operation in Central America. The FBI declares the gang operations for instance in El Salvador does affect public safety in America.

“Many of the gang members committing these homicides are 13-, 14-, and 15-year-olds,” he explained, “and every day there are new members coming in.”

“We aren’t facing a group of youths who are rebelling, but a very structured organization conducting criminal activities,” said Luis Martinez, El Salvador’s attorney general and the country’s highest ranking law enforcement officer. “They are using military-grade weapons, and they are using them against the police, military, and prosecutors.”

MS-13 and 18th Street gang members have gained a foothold in numerous U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Boston, Houston, Charlotte, Newark, and the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. They commit a variety of crimes—mainly trafficking drugs and extorting individuals and business owners—and they maintain strong ties to Central America.

The program is called Central American Law Enforcement Exchange (CALEE).

The success of the Central American Law Enforcement Exchange (CALEE) program hinges on bringing together U.S. and Central American law enforcement officers who share a common cause in the fight against violent transnational gangs. During the most recent CALEE, an important new partner was added to the group—prosecutors.

“We have seen that when prosecutors and investigators work together from the outset, cases tend to have more successful outcomes,” said Special Agent Grant Mann, who helped plan and administer CALEE 2015, the sixth session since the program began in 2009.

In the U.S, it is typical for FBI agents and prosecutors to sit down at the beginning of an investigation to discuss possible charges and investigative strategies. Historically, that collaborative process is less common in Central America—but thanks to programs such as CALEE, it is gaining acceptance.

***

At Joint Task Force-Bravo which is located at Soto Cano Air Base, Hondura, the task force supports training engagements, counterdrug missions and humanitarian and disaster relief efforts in Central America.

Southern Command continues support for Guatemala’s counter trafficking efforts, human rights efforts and future U.S. military engagement activities. Guatemalan police unit and an interagency task force – both focused on countering illicit traffickers in the nation in cooperation with the U.S. military.

Additionally, in El Salvador we have partnerships that provides key support to regional counter illicit trafficking efforts. The U.S. military has a Cooperative Security Location hosted at Comalapa International Airport where U.S. aircraft fly missions to detect, monitor and track aircraft or vessels engaged in illicit drug trafficking in the region.

File photo of the Curacao/Aruba Cooperative Security Location. (U.S. Air Force photo)

The CSLs are not bases.  They are tenant activities on existing airfields whose purpose is to support CTOC missions (see more on SOUTHCOM’s role in Countering Transnational Criminal Organizations).

U.S. Southern Command oversees the operations from the CSLs.  The Key West, Fla.-based Joint Interagency Task Force South coordinates U.S. aircraft usage and operations.

From these locations, U.S. detection and monitoring aircraft fly missions to detect, monitor and track aircraft or vessels engaged in illicit drug trafficking. The unarmed aircraft offer unique surveillance capabilities that support and compliment the counter-drug efforts of partner nation law enforcement agencies. (Note: Host nation officials are responsible for decisions to interdict suspected traffickers within their borders/airspace, and U.S. law enforcement agencies lead interdiction efforts in international waters.)

U.S. military, Drug Enforcement Agency, U.S. Coast Guard and U.S Customs personnel operate from the CSLs to support the U.S. aircraft and to coordinate communications and information.   More here.

The House Armed Services Committee is chaired by Democrat Adam Smith. Back in May of 2019, Chairman Smith admitted several crisis conditions in Central America, the Southern border and Latin America. This included the flow of migrants and the flaws of the asylum laws. However, Congressman Adam Smith still blames the Trump White House for the cause of the crisis.

There continues to be particular focus and resource attention on Venezuela which does affect other neighboring countries. Southern Command leader Adm. Faller declares that Iran, China and Russia exacerbate the problems not only in Venezuela but also in Central America. This rogue foreign actor declaration was also validated by other national security experts in the hearing, noting Kathryn Wheelbarger, acting assistant defense secretary for international security affairs and Kenneth Rapuano, assistant secretary for homeland defense and global security.