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WASHINGTON — The final ground-based interceptor for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system — designed to protect the homeland from intercontinental ballistic missiles threats from North Korea and Iran — is now in place at Fort Greely, Alaska, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency has confirmed.
“MDA and Boeing emplaced the 44th interceptor in its silo at the Missile Defense Complex at Ft. Greely on Thursday, Nov. 2,” the agency said in a statement sent to Defense News.
The agency planned to have all 44 required interceptors in the ground and ready to respond to threats by the end of 2017. The Pentagon and the MDA have indicated in recent months a serious move to build up beyond 44 interceptors. In September, the Pentagon proposed reprogramming $136 million in fiscal 2017 to start raising the number of ground-based interceptors from 44 to 64 in a new Missile Field 4 at Fort Greely. The boost was part of a $416 million reprogramming request targeting missile defense needs. And the White House submitted a supplemental budget request for FY18 on Nov. 6 that asked for further funding to increase the number of ground-based interceptors by 20 and to build an additional missile field at the Alaska base.
While the left is quick to blame President Trump on the matter of a nuclear North Korea, including Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and those in Hollywood, Kim Jung Un has been collaborating and testing nuclear weapons and missiles long before Trump entered the White House. They omit the fact that in the last 8 years, Obama did nothing….NOTHING.
Americans can travel to North Korea, if they wish — but it may just be a death wish, the U.S. State Department cautioned.
The State Department last week issued a stark warning to people setting out for the Hermit Kingdom, cautioning that anyone heading to the dangerous dictatorship should prepare for the possibility of not returning.
“The U.S. government is unable to provide emergency services to U.S. citizens in North Korea as it does not have diplomatic or consular relations with North Korea,” the State Department published Wednesday on its website.
Those who wish to travel to North Korea must be approved for a special validation, which are handed out on “very limited circumstances.” U.S. travelers given the approval to experience Kim Jong Un’s regime should then prepare for the worst — including drafting a will and making funeral and property arrangements with family and friends.“Draft a will and designate appropriate insurance beneficiaries and/or power of attorney; discuss a plan with loved ones regarding care/custody of children, pets, property, belongings, non-liquid assets (collections, artwork, etc.), funeral wishes, etc.,” according to the recommendations. More here.
“On December 28, there was a large number of personnel (~100 to 120) observed in seven different formations whose purpose is unknown in the Southern Support Area,” it adds.
“It is rare to observe personnel in this area,” the report says.
The report concludes that such activities “underscore North Korea’s continued efforts to maintain the Punggye-ri site’s potential for future nuclear testing.”
News of apparent active nuclear test site comes just days after North Korean officials met with South Korean officials for the first time in more than two years. More here.
Meanwhile there is the matter of the false alarm in Hawaii….
Hawaii Gov. David Ige claimed Saturday that alert was the result of an official simply “[pressing] the wrong button” during an employee shift change, but broader questions remain. Why didn’t I get the notification here in San Diego, well within the range of intercontinental ballistic missiles that North Korea has tested in recent months? And assuming you weren’t lucky enough to be on a beach in Hawaii when the alert went out, why didn’t the average U.S. citizen receive one where they live?
To understand today’s scare, it’s important to understand how our national emergency alert system functions. The National Incident Management System (NIMS) is the systematic approach laid out by the federal government for departments and agencies at all levels of government, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector to prevent, respond to, recover from, and mitigate any and all kinds of incidents, no matter the size or scope. NIMS dictates that the initial authority for disaster response resides at the county level, so that’s where most Mass Notification Systems that participate in the Emergency Alert System network reside.
The Emergency Alert System network is layered between federal, state, county, and local authorities through a system called the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) and controlled through the IPAWS Program Management Office at FEMA. The IPAWS PMO encourages partners to regularly test public alert and warning systems; in fact, the IPAWS Modernization Act of 2015, ratified in April 2016, requires IPAWS PMO to test the system not less than once every three years.
All systems compatible with IPAWS use the Common Alerting Protocol, an international standard, to send public alerts and warnings between systems and jurisdictions. State and local agencies, like Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA), have their own systems, produced by a variety of manufacturers, to alert the public when a natural or manmade disaster is occurring or imminent. These mass notification systems use a variety of mediums to communicate danger to wide (or very narrow) swaths of people: they’re capable of desktop alerts, text messaging, reverse 9-1-1, email, Wireless Emergency Alerts, announcement or siren over a loudspeaker, and more. All systems in use on bases, municipalities, and other agencies are IPAWS compatible but not all can send information two-way; most of the bases operate in a receive-only manner.
These systems, the modern version of the CONELRAD (Control of Electromagnetic Radiation) method of emergency broadcasting established in 1951 at the outset of the Cold War, are powerfully effective in their ubiquity and power. Mass notification systems happen to be excellent tools for public awareness, and required testing can take any form. On many military bases, for example, the systems are tested each morning and night by using loudspeakers to play colors. Pretty smart, eh?
The specific kind of alert that Hawaiians received while they slept in or ate breakfast this morning was a Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA). WEAs use a different technology than voice calls or text messages and can only be used in three situations: 1. Alerts issued by the President; 2: Alerts involving imminent threats to safety or life; or 3: Amber Alerts. Participating carriers may block all but Presidential alerts.
The good news about WEAs are that they are location specific: even if you happened to be a tourist visiting Hawaii this morning, you would’ve received the alert (so long as your carrier participates). Carriers who do not participate are required to notify consumers, but the major carriers have all opted in. But the big problem, obviously, is that they’re more subject to human error than their military counterparts.
Now, civilian agencies probably don’t have the capability to detect ballistic missile launches, so in a real-life incident that message would have to come from the military, likely U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) headquartered right there in Hawaii. PACOM would notify their base Emergency Operations Center (EOC) who would pass it up to the Regional EOC. Of note, the bases usually don’t have control of the WEA tech and can notify only those registered in their systems (but can receive all IPAWS notifications). Because of that, the base or regional EOC would have to notify Hawaii EMA for transmission. That didn’t happen today because there wasn’t a ballistic missile inbound.
The governor of Hawaii claims that during a shift change, an operator simply hit the wrong button. Well, it doesn’t exactly work that way. These alerts are not actuated by physically pushed buttons because the number of buttons that would require, for all of the different types of alerts, would be unwieldy. An operator would either type in the desired alert (or select from canned messages), select which communications mediums they’d like to use and the populations they’d like to alert, and then hit “send” and then again confirm that they really want to send that message. The canned messages might be available as electronically selectable on a computer screen (like a Windows button) but a “confirm” dialogue would still be required.
Time will tell what really happened, but as a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM) who helped set up the Mass Notification System for a major military base, I know that what likely occurred was a serious breach in procedure at Hawaii EMA. The authority who issued today’s alert and then took 40 minutes to send a retraction on WEA. PACOM immediately released a message saying that there was no threat, so why didn’t Hawaii EMA immediately send a retraction via WEA? There are serious implications associated with false alerts. What happens when an alert about a tsunami, wildfire, or active shooter are real and people ignore them?
Maybe we were hacked, as some have alleged, but probably not. No matter what happened, someone must be held accountable for this egregious breach of professionalism — and that person is almost definitely sitting at HI-EMA. Let’s hope that this scare motivates agencies across the nation to take a look at their own procedures. And let’s hope Gov. Ige holds his team accountable. Hat tip.
In 2016, it was Russia dropping the barrel bombs on Aleppo and Homs.
Warplanes from Russia’s lone aircraft carrier and a missile frigate struck targets in Syria on Tuesday, bombing areas southwest of the embattled city of Aleppo, as Syrian government aircraft renewed barrel bomb attacks on the city itself.
The first-ever Russian strikes from the Mediterranean-based carrier Admiral Kuznetsov were described by the Kremlin on Tuesday as targeting extremists in Idlib and Homs provinces. More here.
Now that Aleppo, Idlib and Homs are for the most part ghost towns, people that fled to Idlib and Ghouta are being killed by even more Russian barrel bombs.
The war in Syria is forgotten by the West and that is shameful. What the media is ignoring is reporting on the never ending war and suffering. Why is this an issue? Because the United States is still in Syria.
The U.S.-led coalition is working with its Syrian militia allies to set up a new border force of 30,000 personnel, the coalition said on Sunday, a move that has added to Turkish anger over U.S. support for Kurdish-dominated forces in Syria.
A senior Turkish official told Reuters the U.S. training of the new “Border Security Force” was the reason that the U.S. charge d‘affaires was summoned in Ankara last week, and President Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesman said the development was worrying and unacceptable.
The force, whose inaugural class is currently being trained, will be deployed at the borders of the area controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – an alliance of militias in northern and eastern Syria dominated by the Kurdish YPG. More here.
Meanwhile, as Russia has become a full time military occupier in Syria, Foreign Minister Lavrov is yelling squirrel and blaming the United States for destroying peace globally. Yup..imagine that. He has a full list of grievances against the United States.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has accused the United States of destabilizing the world, airing a list of grievances over the Trump administration’s foreign policy.
Lavrov dedicated the opening of his annual press conference Monday to castigating the US, which is expected to soon issue a fresh round of sanctions against Russia over its interference in the 2016 US election. Russia has long denied meddling in the vote.
Lavrov criticized the US for issuing regular “threats” in relation to events in North Korea and Iran, saying they had “further destabilized” the global situation.
He did not mention President Donald Trump by name, but the US President has issued stern threats to North Korea and Iran, sending a series of fiery Twitter posts attacking the leadership in both nations.
Trump has openly ridiculed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Twitter over Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear testing and threatened military intervention. He recently lambasted the Iranian leadership for being repressive, “brutal and corrupt,” and supported anti-government protesters challenging the government in six days of rallies.
Lavrov accused the US of provoking tensions on the Korean peninsula.
“The United States quite plainly says that the military confrontation is inevitable, however, everyone understands the catastrophic consequences of such recklessness,” he said.
He also criticized the US for expanding its military exercises around North Korea, “which provoked a new escalation of tensions,” while others were working through diplomatic channels to resume talks with Pyongyang.
Lavrov warned the US not to back out of the Iran nuclear deal. Trump had vowed to tear up the 2015 agreement, brokered by the Obama administration, alongside several European allies, Russia and China. The deal obliges Iran to restrict its nuclear program in exchange for eased sanctions.
Trump signed a waiver on Iran sanctions Friday under the deal, but signaled that he would not do so again. He has been under pressure from foreign allies and, according to US officials, his own national security team to stick to the deal.
Lavrov said that US threats to walk away from the deal would undermine any future agreement with North Korea.
“It’s sad that United States once again gives a reason to doubt their ability to be reliable contract partners,” he said.
“And if this agreement is being taken aside and Iran is being told — you stay within the frame of agreements but we will return the sanctions — well, put yourself in place North Korea’s place. They are being promised that sanctions will be lifted if they say no to their nuclear program, what if they do it but sanctions are still there?”
Relations between Moscow and Washington deteriorated in 2017, as several US investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election got underway. The US tightened sanctions against Russia and closed several of its diplomatic compounds in the country, while Moscow forced the US to cut back on its diplomatic staff in Russia.
Lavrov laughed when CNN asked if he regretted Trump’s ascension to the presidency, given the diplomatic tumult, and whether he might now prefer it if Hillary Clinton had won the election.
“This is not what diplomats do — regret something that has happened. We work with facts, and facts are what we have today, so we just do what needs to be done to advance Russia’s interests under the current circumstances,” he responded.
US officials have not publicly responded to Lavrov’s comments.
Reading through the summary below, it begs the question once again: Did Iran demand Obama remove troops from Iraq in order to advance the talks on the nuclear agreement? It also adds a similar question: Did Iran demand the same in Afghanistan?
With the relationship between military intervention and domestic public support in mind, the comparison of forces between Iran and the United States depends more on willingness to use those forces than the capabilities they represent. On the surface, Iran faces the overwhelming power projection of the United States, along with the conventional superiority of US and Gulf Cooperation Council military forces. Despite this disparity, Iran is able to use a suite of conventional, unconventional, and proxy forces to deter potential aggressors, compete with regional peers, and influence states it considers vital to its national security. Along these lines, Iran attempts to circumvent American military strengths against which the Iranian military would lose, in favor of asymmetric concepts including its ballistic missile program; anti-access, area denial tactics; and support to proxy groups.
These three methods hinge on a competition of resolve between Iran and its rivals to incur the costs of conflict: the former two affect the cost calculation of potential adversaries and the latter displays Iran’s willingness to assume more risk than its opponents in pursuit of its political ends abroad. Determining the interests for which Iran is willing to incur high costs is essential if the United States expects to “neutralize Iranian malign influence,” a priority identified in the 2017 National Security Strategy. This comes as the US public decidedly prefers intervention in the form of airstrikes and Tomahawk cruise missiles rather than ground troops who could actually influence partner forces determined to counter that Iranian influence.
Balance of Power in the Middle East
Kenneth Waltz quipped that “power begs to be balanced” while defending the notion that proliferation of nuclear weapons technology to Iran would stabilize the Middle East. For Waltz and other theorists who espouse a realist view of international politics, the Middle East faces a two-pronged challenge to future stability based on the distribution of power among states therein. First, Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons under “strategic ambiguity” makes the relationship between Israel and other states in the region inherently imbalanced and therefore prone to conflict. Second, US abandonment of its “dual containment” strategy in favor of aggressive interventionist policies in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks destroyed Iraq as a major Middle East power and the regional bipolar balance between Iraq and Iran as a consequence.
According to realists’ view, even distributions of power promote stability and peace as the cost-benefit analysis of war yields little chance of positive gains against an adversary of similar strength, whereas uneven distributions of power increase the uncertainty of intentions between states who assess war as a likely result of a zero-sum security competition. In this latter scenario, weaker states tend to balance against stronger rivals by increasing political, military, and economic power through either internal means or alliance formation. As Stephen Walt further points out in his work “Alliance Formation and the Balance of Power,” this balancing behavior is most likely when states assess a rival as having not only the capability of attacking, but also the intention of doing so. Furthermore, situations where states face an overwhelming power differential are particularly vexing because the prospects of successfully balancing are so grim.
There is, however, a difference between possessing military power and actually using it, especially when doing so involves risks to domestic political support and stability. Whereas William Wohlforth in his article on unipolarity predicts that no state would bother attempting to balance against the clear and unambiguous military and economic superiority of the United States, the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led potential rivals to reassess US willingness to use its insurmountable ability to project and sustain military force. Therefore, rather than competing with the entire US military, Iran must make foreign policy decisions based on the military forces it expects the United States and its partners to use regionally. When the fight is between proxies and special operations forces, Iran’s prospects for balancing against its regional rivals and expanding its influence are less daunting and even optimistic.
Iran’s Play in Syria
Iran has been on a trajectory of increasing commitment to Syria since an uprising nearly deposed the regime of Bashar al-Assad starting in 2011. Unwilling to lose a longstanding ally and mechanism of supporting proxy groups in Lebanon and Palestine, Iran has relied upon the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), especially the externally oriented Quds Force, to support the Syrian regime. Originally founded to defend the Islamic revolution in Iran from internal and external threats, the IRGC has expanded in scope as the political and military mechanism of choice for Iran to expand its influence in the Middle East. Beyond sending its own forces, Iran has used the IRGC to lead foreign fighters and has directed the deployment of Lebanese Hezbollah fighters to Syria by the thousands. Iran’s model for applying force in the Middle East plays to its asymmetric strengths, while exploiting the perceived weaknesses of the United States and its allies, which Iran regards as risk averse, sensitive to casualties, and reliant on technological superiority and regional bases from which to project power. Iran has displayed not only a willingness to assume risk by deploying IRGC operatives to contested and denied areas, but has also been sustaining casualties in its campaign in Syria.
These casualties have varied in number, nationality, and military unit since the beginning of Iranian intervention in Syria, which speaks to Iranian resolve to support the Assad regime. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has done extensive research on Iranian media reporting of casualties in Syria. At first, the majority of those killed under the direction of Iran were Lebanese and Afghan, due to extensive Hezbollah deployments and IRGC recruitment of Afghan Shi’a to fight in Syria. Iranian casualties however, tended to be high-ranking IRGC members such as its deputy commander, Gen. Hossein Hamedani, who was killed in October 2015 near Aleppo. This indicates that IRGC operatives were training, advising, and leading Syrian units and foreign fighters, rather than their own military formations of lower-ranking Iranian soldiers.
As the civil war continued and foreign fighters could no longer sustain the tempo of operations, Iran began committing its own forces in 2015, including lower-ranking soldiers from IRGC units like the 2nd Imam Majtaba Brigade, 7th Vali Asr Division, and 2nd Imam Sajjad Brigade. These units are from the IRGC Ground Forces, whose security mandate is more internally focused than that of the Quds Force. This indicates not only a shift from a training and advisory mission to a more direct role in the fighting, but also a commitment of a larger portion of the Iranian armed forces to the fight in Syria. As a result, Iranian fatalities skyrocketed. However, Iran has given no indication of war weariness in the face of mounting human and economic costs of its unconventional fight in Syria, with even the semiofficial Fars news agency openly reporting IRGC casualties.
Domestic Backlash in Iran
Iran is no stranger to internal protests over domestic politics and foreign affairs. The Green Movement of June 2009 protesting the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad showed that Iranian authorities cannot simply ignore public opinion and revealed a true power struggle between the government and the opposition. While the lasting effects of the Green Movement on the relationship between public opinion and Iranian decision-making are unclear, polling leading up to the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action indicated vast public support in Iran for a deal, often in contrast with the public statements of Ayatollah Khamenei against it.
Recent massive public protests against Iranian macroeconomic conditions including high inflation and high unemployment have further displayed the Iranian government’s exposure to domestic political backlash for its policies. President Hassan Rouhani was reelected in 2017 by wide margins on a platform of economic hope in the wake of sanctions relief under the nuclear deal. However, inbound investment that results from improving economic relationships tends to benefit large conglomerates often owned by the IRGC like Khatam al-Anbiya, which has large stakes in the oil, transportation, and construction industries. Meanwhile, unemployment among youth and inflation remain high, as Iranian economic policies have not promoted growth that would create jobs for most Iranian citizens. As novelist Suzanne Collins’ character President Snow said in The Hunger Games: “Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous. A spark is fine, as long as it’s contained.” Iranians have a lot of hope about their economic future; failure to deliver might lead to disaster, especially as Iran announces vast increases in military spending with an extra $7.5 billion to the IRGC (15 percent increase), $2.7 billion to the Iranian army (25 percent increase), and a separate $72 million subsidy directly to Khatam al-Anbiya.
Cost Calculation in Foreign Policy
Iran’s willingness to incur the costs of an aggressive foreign policy is not uniform across the Middle East. Iran views the outcome of the Syrian civil war as critical to its national interests and is therefore willing to expend physical and economic costs to sustain the Assad regime. However, Iran is reticent to suffer Syria-type casualties in places like Yemen, where Iran has limited its intervention to Lebanese Hezbollah fighters and high-ranking IRGC operatives leading Houthi militias. This is reminiscent of the “train, advise, and assist” mission that marked the initial phases of Iranian intervention in Syria. As a result, Iran has only sustained forty-four fatalities over the past two years of fighting in Yemen and has not publicized those deaths. This is problematic for Iran as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates show no signs of wavering in support of the government of Abdrabbuh Mansur al-Hadi, despite international backlash against the air campaign.
Conflicts like those in Yemen and Syria display the gruesome truth of the competition between the United States and Iran in the Middle East; namely, it boils down to a question of who wants it more. While the United States has shown its willingness to incur human and economic costs in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past fifteen years, it is not clear whether the American people would support another effort of similar size and scope in the near term. In fact, according to Gallup, American support for the ongoing campaign in Syria has reached historic lows when compared to other conflicts over the past thirty-five years. Furthermore, US Central Command, charged with leading military operations across the Middle East and Central Asia, is preparing to shift its priority back to Afghanistan—this as Iran shows no intention of decreasing its presence in either Iraq or Syria.
This is not to say that the United States cannot achieve its foreign policy goals vis-à-vis Iran in the Middle East without incurring high costs; it means that the United States will need to enable partners who are willing to do so. However, merely funding and providing material support to partner forces does not guarantee that they will act according to US national interests. That more elusive objective depends on the influence that sponsors have over proxies and still involves accepting a degree of risk. Although varying in scope depending on the target country, Iran exposes its IRGC operatives to the inherent dangers of the battlefield and shares that risk with its partners. Combined with what is often an ideological connection with proxies, this shared danger does much to influence the forces with which Iran partners. In contrast, the United States rarely exposes its special operations forces in the same way. In Iraq and Syria especially, the United States has largely demanded that its proxies assume the vast majority of the tactical risk, which negatively affects the perception of American resolve to accomplish its stated objectives.
Even overwhelming military force is only a useful deterrent if adversaries believe a state has the resolve to use it. American reticence to use the breadth of its military strength to counter Iranian influence in the Middle East has reduced the competition to irregular forces and both state and nonstate partners. In this realm, displaying resolve is still vitally important. Although recent protests indicate Iran is not immune to domestic backlash, Iran has shown a willingness to use and lose its special operations forces in external operations. The United States risks losing influence in the Middle East and control of its partner forces if it is not willing to expose its own special operations forces in a similar way. In the end, the competition between the United States and Iran in the Middle East comes down to resolve.
“Significant tunneling” excavation is underway at North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site and shows the regime’s continued efforts to maintain the site for potential future nuclear testing, a think tank specializing in tracking North Korean activities reported Thursday.
It follows reports in October that the test site is unstable and experienced tunnel collapses that have killed several hundred North Korean laborers.
The report on the 38 North website was based on an analysis of new commercial satellite images released of Punggye-ri, where the North Koreans have conducted the last six underground nuclear tests. It said throughout December 2017, there were “mining carts and personnel” as well as what appeared to be a “spoil pile” that had been greatly expanded at the test facility’s west portal.
The test site’s north portal, used in the last five nuclear tests, “remains dormant,” but there’s new activity at the west portal, according to the 38 North, a think tank at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Yet, it said there appears to be draining going on at the entrance to this portal.
The last nuclear test at Punggye-ri was conducted in September. Pyongyang claimed that blast was a miniaturized hydrogen weapon designed for an intercontinental ballistic missile.
DigitalGlobe | 38 North | Getty Images
On December 28, 2017, large numbers of personnel are observed at the Southern Support Area, located south of the Command Center Area.
In Thursday’s report, 38 North said about 100 to 200 people were observed in satellite images taken Dec. 28 in a “Southern Support Area,” which it said rarely has such activity. And it said “the purpose of their activities is unknown.”
The new analysis of the Punggye-ri satellite imagery was done by Frank Pabian, Joseph Bermudez Jr. and Jack Liu, the 38 North website said. They concluded that the recent activity is a sign that the regime will maintain the facility.
The recent activity at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site comes on the heels of North and South Korean negotiators meeting Tuesday at the Demilitarized Zone. It was the first high-level talks between the two countries since late 2015.
The negotiations resulted in Pyongyang agreeing to send a delegation of athletes to the upcoming Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang, South Korea. The two sides also agreed to reinstate a military hotline and to hold future talks, although no deal was reached on denuclearization.
Also, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported Thursday that Chinese President Xi Jinping had a 30-minute phone conversation with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and they jointly agreed “to continue working together to peacefully resolve the North Korean nuclear issue.”
While Robert Mueller continues his robust investigation into all things Russia and his team is under critical pushback, one must consider that his work could and should produce a report on the constant and critical threat of cyber hacking by Russia. The United States does not have a cyber policy but it does have a CyberCommand. Congress cannot draft any legislation on global cyber policy and consequence.
Beginning in June 2017, phishing sites were set up mimicking the ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) of the U.S. Senate. By looking at the digital fingerprints of these phishing sites and comparing them with a large data set that spans almost five years, we can uniquely relate them to a couple of Pawn Storm incidents in 2016 and 2017. The real ADFS server of the U.S. Senate is not reachable on the open internet, however phishing of users’ credentials on an ADFS server that is behind a firewall still makes sense. In case an actor already has a foothold in an organization after compromising one user account, credential phishing could help him get closer to high profile users of interest. More here from:
PARIS (AP) — The same Russian government-aligned hackers who penetrated the Democratic Party have spent the past few months laying the groundwork for an espionage campaign against the U.S. Senate, a cybersecurity firm said Friday.
The revelation suggests the group often nicknamed Fancy Bear, whose hacking campaign scrambled the 2016 U.S. electoral contest, is still busy trying to gather the emails of America’s political elite.
“They’re still very active — in making preparations at least — to influence public opinion again,” said Feike Hacquebord, a security researcher at Trend Micro Inc., which published the report . “They are looking for information they might leak later.”
The Senate Sergeant at Arms office, which is responsible for the upper house’s security, declined to comment.
Hacquebord said he based his report on the discovery of a clutch of suspicious-looking websites dressed up to look like the U.S. Senate’s internal email system. He then cross-referenced digital fingerprints associated with those sites to ones used almost exclusively by Fancy Bear, which his Tokyo-based firm dubs “Pawn Storm.”
Trend Micro previously drew international attention when it used an identical technique to uncover a set of decoy websites apparently set up to harvest emails from the French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campaign in April 2017. The sites’ discovery was followed two months later by a still-unexplained publication of private emails from several Macron staffers in the final days of the race.
Hacquebord said the rogue Senate sites — which were set up in June and September of 2017 — matched their French counterparts.
“That is exactly the way they attacked the Macron campaign in France,” he said.
Attribution is extremely tricky in the world of cybersecurity, where hackers routinely use misdirection and red herrings to fool their adversaries. But Tend Micro, which has followed Fancy Bear for years, said there could be no doubt.
“We are 100 percent sure that it can attributed to the Pawn Storm group,” said Rik Ferguson, one of the Hacquebord’s colleagues.
Like many cybersecurity companies, Trend Micro refuses to speculate publicly on who is behind such groups, referring to Pawn Storm only as having “Russia-related interests.” But the U.S. intelligence community alleges that Russia’s military intelligence service pulls the hackers’ strings and a months-long Associated Press investigation into the group, drawing on a vast database of targets supplied by the cybersecurity firm Secureworks, has determined that the group is closely attuned to the Kremlin’s objectives.
If Fancy Bear has targeted the Senate over the past few months, it wouldn’t be the first time. An AP analysis of Secureworks’ list shows that several staffers there were targeted between 2015 and 2016.
Among them: Robert Zarate, now the foreign policy adviser to Florida Senator Marco Rubio; Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who now runs a Washington consultancy; and Jason Thielman, the chief of staff to Montana Senator Steve Daines. A Congressional researcher specializing in national security issues was also targeted.
Fancy Bear’s interests aren’t limited to U.S. politics; the group also appears to have the Olympics in mind.
Trend Micro’s report said the group had set up infrastructure aimed at collecting emails from a series of Olympic winter sports federations, including the International Ski Federation, the International Ice Hockey Federation, the International Bobsleigh & Skeleton Federation, the International Luge Federation and the International Biathlon Union.
The targeting of Olympic groups comes as relations between Russia and the International Olympic Committee are particularly fraught. Russian athletes are being forced to compete under a neutral flag in the upcoming Pyeongchang Olympics following an extraordinary doping scandal that has seen 43 athletes and several Russian officials banned for life. Amid speculation that Russia could retaliate by orchestrating the leak of prominent Olympic officials’ emails, cybersecurity firms including McAfee and ThreatConnect have picked up on signs that state-backed hackers are making moves against winter sports staff and anti-doping officials.
On Wednesday, a group that has brazenly adopted the Fancy Bear nickname began publishing what appeared to be Olympics and doping-related emails from between September 2016 and March 2017. The contents were largely unremarkable but their publication was covered extensively by Russian state media and some read the leak as a warning to Olympic officials not to press Moscow too hard over the doping scandal.
Whether any Senate emails could be published in such a way isn’t clear. Previous warnings that German lawmakers’ correspondence might be leaked by Fancy Bear ahead of last year’s election there appear to have come to nothing.
On the other hand, the group has previously dumped at least one U.S. legislator’s correspondence onto the web.
One of the targets on Secureworks’ list was Colorado State Senator Andy Kerr, who said thousands of his emails were posted to an obscure section of the website DCLeaks — a web portal better known for publishing emails belonging to retired Gen. Colin Powell and various members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign — in late 2016.
Kerr said he was still bewildered as to why he was targeted. He said that while he supported transparency, “there should be some process and some system to it.
“It shouldn’t be up to a foreign government or some hacker to say what gets released and what shouldn’t.”
