Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security

WannaCry Hacking Bad, but This is Terrifying

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WASHINGTON — CIA Director Mike Pompeo says he thinks disclosure of America’s secret intelligence is on the rise, fueled partly by the “worship” of leakers like Edward Snowden.

“In some ways, I do think it’s accelerated,” Pompeo told MSNBC in an interview that aired Saturday. “I think there is a phenomenon, the worship of Edward Snowden, and those who steal American secrets for the purpose of self-aggrandizement or money or for whatever their motivation may be, does seem to be on the increase.”

Pompeo said the United States needs to redouble its efforts to stem leaks of classified information. More here.

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A Cyberattack ‘the World Isn’t Ready For’

Golan Ben-Oni, of the IDT Corporation, which was attacked in April with two cyberweapons stolen from the National Security Agency.  Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times

NEWARK — There have been times over the last two months when Golan Ben-Oni has felt like a voice in the wilderness.

On April 29, someone hit his employer, IDT Corporation, with two cyberweapons that had been stolen from the National Security Agency. Mr. Ben-Oni, the global chief information officer at IDT, was able to fend them off, but the attack left him distraught.

In 22 years of dealing with hackers of every sort, he had never seen anything like it. Who was behind it? How did they evade all of his defenses? How many others had been attacked but did not know it?

Since then, Mr. Ben-Oni has been sounding alarm bells, calling anyone who will listen at the White House, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the New Jersey attorney general’s office and the top cybersecurity companies in the country to warn them about an attack that may still be invisibly striking victims undetected around the world.

And he is determined to track down whoever did it.

“I don’t pursue every attacker, just the ones that piss me off,” Mr. Ben-Oni told me recently over lentils in his office, which was strewn with empty Red Bull cans. “This pissed me off and, more importantly, it pissed my wife off, which is the real litmus test.”

Two weeks after IDT was hit, the cyberattack known as WannaCry ravaged computers at hospitals in England, universities in China, rail systems in Germany, even auto plants in Japan. No doubt it was destructive. But what Mr. Ben-Oni had witnessed was much worse, and with all eyes on the WannaCry destruction, few seemed to be paying attention to the attack on IDT’s systems — and most likely others around the world.

The strike on IDT, a conglomerate with headquarters in a nondescript gray building here with views of the Manhattan skyline 15 miles away, was similar to WannaCry in one way: Hackers locked up IDT data and demanded a ransom to unlock it.

But the ransom demand was just a smoke screen for a far more invasive attack that stole employee credentials. With those credentials in hand, hackers could have run free through the company’s computer network, taking confidential information or destroying machines.

Worse, the assault, which has never been reported before, was not spotted by some of the nation’s leading cybersecurity products, the top security engineers at its biggest tech companies, government intelligence analysts or the F.B.I., which remains consumed with the WannaCry attack.

Were it not for a digital black box that recorded everything on IDT’s network, along with Mr. Ben-Oni’s tenacity, the attack might have gone unnoticed.

Scans for the two hacking tools used against IDT indicate that the company is not alone. In fact, tens of thousands of computer systems all over the world have been “backdoored” by the same N.S.A. weapons. Mr. Ben-Oni and other security researchers worry that many of those other infected computers are connected to transportation networks, hospitals, water treatment plants and other utilities.

An attack on those systems, they warn, could put lives at risk. And Mr. Ben-Oni, fortified with adrenaline, Red Bull and the house beats of Deadmau5, the Canadian record producer, said he would not stop until the attacks had been shut down and those responsible were behind bars.

“The world is burning about WannaCry, but this is a nuclear bomb compared to WannaCry,” Mr. Ben-Oni said. “This is different. It’s a lot worse. It steals credentials. You can’t catch it, and it’s happening right under our noses.”

And, he added, “The world isn’t ready for this.”

Targeting the Nerve Center

Mr. Ben-Oni, 43, a Hasidic Jew, is a slight man with smiling eyes, a thick beard and a hacker’s penchant for mischief. He grew up in the hills of Berkeley, Calif., the son of Israeli immigrants.

Even as a toddler, Mr. Ben-Oni’s mother said, he was not interested in toys. She had to take him to the local junkyard to scour for typewriters that he would eventually dismantle on the living room floor. As a teenager, he aspired to become a rabbi but spent most of his free time hacking computers at the University of California, Berkeley, where his exploits once accidentally took down Belgium’s entire phone system for 15 minutes.

To his parents’ horror, he dropped out of college to pursue his love of hacking full time, starting a security company to help the city of Berkeley and two nearby communities, Alameda and Novato, set up secure computer networks.

He had a knack for the technical work, but not the marketing, and found it difficult to get new clients. So at age 19, he crossed the country and took a job at IDT, back when the company was a low-profile long-distance service provider.

As IDT started acquiring and spinning off an eclectic list of ventures, Mr. Ben-Oni found himself responsible for securing shale oil projects in Mongolia and the Golan Heights, a “Star Trek” comic books company, a project to cure cancer, a yeshiva university that trains underprivileged students in cybersecurity, and a small mobile company that Verizon recently acquired for $3.1 billion.

Which is to say he has encountered hundreds of thousands of hackers of every stripe, motivation and skill level. He eventually started a security business, IOSecurity, under IDT, to share some of the technical tools he had developed to keep IDT’s many businesses secure. By Mr. Ben-Oni’s estimate, IDT experiences hundreds of attacks a day on its businesses, but perhaps only four each year give him pause.

Nothing compared to the attack that struck in April. Like the WannaCry attack in May, the assault on IDT relied on cyberweapons developed by the N.S.A. that were leaked online in April by a mysterious group of hackers calling themselves the Shadow Brokers — alternately believed to be Russia-backed cybercriminals, an N.S.A. mole, or both.

The WannaCry attack — which the N.S.A. and security researchers have tied to North Korea — employed one N.S.A. cyberweapon; the IDT assault used two.

Both WannaCry and the IDT attack used a hacking tool the agency had code-named EternalBlue. The tool took advantage of unpatched Microsoft servers to automatically spread malware from one server to another, so that within 24 hours North Korea’s hackers had spread their ransomware to more than 200,000 servers around the globe.

The attack on IDT went a step further with another stolen N.S.A. cyberweapon, called DoublePulsar. The N.S.A. used DoublePulsar to penetrate computer systems without tripping security alarms. It allowed N.S.A. spies to inject their tools into the nerve center of a target’s computer system, called the kernel, which manages communications between a computer’s hardware and its software.

In the pecking order of a computer system, the kernel is at the very top, allowing anyone with secret access to it to take full control of a machine. It is also a dangerous blind spot for most security software, allowing attackers to do what they want and go unnoticed. In IDT’s case, attackers used DoublePulsar to steal an IDT contractor’s credentials. Then they deployed ransomware in what appears to be a cover for their real motive: broader access to IDT’s businesses.

Mr. Ben-Oni learned of the attack only when a contractor, working from home, switched on her computer to find that all her data had been encrypted and that attackers were demanding a ransom to unlock it. He might have assumed that this was a simple case of ransomware.

But the attack struck Mr. Ben-Oni as unique. For one thing, it was timed perfectly to the Sabbath. Attackers entered IDT’s network at 6 p.m. on Saturday on the dot, two and a half hours before the Sabbath would end and when most of IDT’s employees — 40 percent of whom identify as Orthodox Jews — would be off the clock. For another, the attackers compromised the contractor’s computer through her home modem — strange.

The black box of sorts, a network recording device made by the Israeli security company Secdo, shows that the ransomware was installed after the attackers had made off with the contractor’s credentials. And they managed to bypass every major security detection mechanism along the way. Finally, before they left, they encrypted her computer with ransomware, demanding $130 to unlock it, to cover up the more invasive attack on her computer.

Mr. Ben-Oni estimates that he has spoken to 107 security experts and researchers about the attack, including the chief executives of nearly every major security company and the heads of threat intelligence at Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

With the exception of Amazon, which found that some of its customers’ computers had been scanned by the same computer that hit IDT, no one had seen any trace of the attack before Mr. Ben-Oni notified them. The New York Times confirmed Mr. Ben-Oni’s account via written summaries provided by Palo Alto Networks, Intel’s McAfee and other security firms he used and asked to investigate the attack.

“I started to get the sense that we were the canary,” he said. “But we recorded it.”

Since IDT was hit, Mr. Ben-Oni has contacted everyone in his Rolodex to warn them of an attack that could still be worming its way, undetected, through victims’ systems.

“Time is burning,” Mr. Ben-Oni said. “Understand, this is really a war — with offense on one side, and institutions, organizations and schools on the other, defending against an unknown adversary.”

‘No One Is Running Point’

Since the Shadow Brokers leaked dozens of coveted attack tools in April, hospitals, schools, cities, police departments and companies around the world have largely been left to fend for themselves against weapons developed by the world’s most sophisticated attacker: the N.S.A.

A month earlier, Microsoft had issued a software patch to defend against the N.S.A. hacking tools — suggesting that the agency tipped the company off to what was coming. Microsoft regularly credits those who point out vulnerabilities in its products, but in this case the company made no mention of the tipster. Later, when the WannaCry attack hit hundreds of thousands of Microsoft customers, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, slammed the government in a blog post for hoarding and stockpiling security vulnerabilities.

For his part, Mr. Ben-Oni said he had rolled out Microsoft’s patches as soon as they became available, but attackers still managed to get in through the IDT contractor’s home modem.

Six years ago, Mr. Ben-Oni had a chance meeting with an N.S.A. employee at a conference and asked him how to defend against modern-day cyberthreats. The N.S.A. employee advised him to “run three of everything”: three firewalls, three antivirus solutions, three intrusion detection systems. And so he did.

But in this case, modern-day detection systems created by Cylance, McAfee and Microsoft and patching systems by Tanium did not catch the attack on IDT. Nor did any of the 128 publicly available threat intelligence feeds that IDT subscribes to. Even the 10 threat intelligence feeds that his organization spends a half-million dollars on annually for urgent information failed to report it. He has since threatened to return their products.

“Our industry likes to work on known problems,” Mr. Ben-Oni said. “This is an unknown problem. We’re not ready for this.”

No one he has spoken to knows whether they have been hit, but just this month, restaurants across the United States reported being hit with similar attacks that were undetected by antivirus systems. There are now YouTube videos showing criminals how to attack systems using the very same N.S.A. tools used against IDT, and Metasploit, an automated hacking tool, now allows anyone to carry out these attacks with the click of a button.

Worse still, Mr. Ben-Oni said, “No one is running point on this.”

Last month, he personally briefed the F.B.I. analyst in charge of investigating the WannaCry attack. He was told that the agency had been specifically tasked with WannaCry, and that even though the attack on his company was more invasive and sophisticated, it was still technically something else, and therefore the F.B.I. could not take on his case.

The F.B.I. did not respond to requests for comment.

So Mr. Ben-Oni has largely pursued the case himself. His team at IDT was able to trace part of the attack to a personal Android phone in Russia and has been feeding its findings to Europol, the European law enforcement agency based in The Hague.

The chances that IDT was the only victim of this attack are slim. Sean Dillon, a senior analyst at RiskSense, a New Mexico security company, was among the first security researchers to scan the internet for the N.S.A.’s DoublePulsar tool. He found tens of thousands of host computers are infected with the tool, which attackers can use at will.

“Once DoublePulsar is on the machine, there’s nothing stopping anyone else from coming along and using the back door,” Mr. Dillon said.

More distressing, Mr. Dillon tested all the major antivirus products against the DoublePulsar infection and a demoralizing 99 percent failed to detect it.

“We’ve seen the same computers infected with DoublePulsar for two months and there is no telling how much malware is on those systems,” Mr. Dillon said. “Right now we have no idea what’s gotten into these organizations.”

In the worst case, Mr. Dillon said, attackers could use those back doors to unleash destructive malware into critical infrastructure, tying up rail systems, shutting down hospitals or even paralyzing electrical utilities.

Could that attack be coming? The Shadow Brokers resurfaced last month, promising a fresh load of N.S.A. attack tools, even offering to supply them for monthly paying subscribers — like a wine-of-the-month club for cyberweapon enthusiasts.

In a hint that the industry is taking the group’s threats seriously, Microsoft issued a new set of patches to defend against such attacks. The company noted in an ominously worded message that the patches were critical, citing an “elevated risk for destructive cyberattacks.”

Mr. Ben-Oni is convinced that IDT is not the only victim, and that these tools can and will be used to do far worse.

“I look at this as a life-or-death situation,” he said. “Today it’s us, but tomorrow it might be someone else.”

1.8 Million Exchange Students Part of Security Investigation Review

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Primer: Chinese spies target US intellectual property (important due to universities relationships with government operations) Further is 2015, U.S. diplomats previously warned China to stop using covert law enforcement agents on U.S. soil. CNN reported that the agents pressure Chinese citizens to return to the country to face justice, often on corruption charges, United States officials confirmed to CNN. The agents have successfully coerced several Chinese nationals to return to China from the U.S., they said.

So, between India and China we have more than a million foreign nationals at the student level. Are they really students? This is a number too, where American students are eliminated from college acceptance due to favorable foreign student policy.

The Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) is a part of the National Security Investigations Division and acts as a bridge for government organizations that have an interest in information on nonimmigrants whose primary reason for coming to the United States is to be students.

On behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), SEVP manages schools, nonimmigrant students in the F and M visa classifications and their dependents. The Department of State (DoS) manages Exchange Visitor Programs, nonimmigrant exchange visitors in the J visa classification and their dependents. Both SEVP and DoS use the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) to track and monitor schools; exchange visitor programs; and F, M and J nonimmigrants while they visit the United States and participate in the U.S. education system.

WASHINGTON — There are 1.18 million international students with F (academic) or M (vocational) status studying at 8,774 schools in the United States according to the latest “SEVIS by the Numbers.” The biannual report on international student data, which includes a new section on regional data trends, is prepared by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

The report, released Thursday by SEVP, highlights May 2017 data from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a web-based system that includes information about international students, exchange visitors and their dependents while they are in the United States.

Based on data extracted from SEVIS May 5, the international student population increased 2 percent compared to May 2016, with 76 percent of students enrolled in higher education programs of study.

Seventy-seven percent of international students hailed from Asia. Among continents, South America had the largest percentage increase (6.5 percent) in international students studying in the United States when compared to May 2016.  

China and India continue to send the largest number of students to study in the United States, at 362,368 students and 206,698 students, respectively. And even with a 19 percent decline – the steepest percentage decline among the top 10 Asian countries – Saudi Arabia still had 55,806 students studying in the United States in May 2017, ranking fourth among Asian countries. With an 18 percent increase, Nepal saw the largest proportional growth in students coming to the United States.

Nearly 514,000 international students pursued science, technology engineering or mathematics (STEM) degrees in May 2017, marking an 8 percent increase from May 2016. Thirty-nine percent of those students pursued engineering degrees. India not only had the largest number of STEM students, but also the largest proportional STEM student population; 84 percent of Indian students in the United States studied STEM.

In May 2017, 10 U.S. universities certified to enroll only F international students accounted for 10 percent of the entire international student population. New York University (15,386 students), the University of Southern California (13,365 students) and Northeastern University (12,372 students) – all certified to enroll F students – had the highest international student enrollment numbers among U.S. schools.

Nine percent of schools can enroll both F and M international students. The top three schools in this category included: Cornell University (5,716 students), the Houston Community College System (4,768 students) and Santa Monica College (3,554 students).

The international student population in the Northeast increased 4 percent when compared to May 2016, marking the highest proportional growth of the four U.S. regions. Rhode Island was the only state in the region to experience a dip in the number of international students compared to the previous year, while New York and Massachusetts added the largest number of international students during that same period, 4,490 students and 2,770 students, respectively. New Jersey saw an increase of 10 percent in international students pursuing bachelor’s degrees.

In the South, the international student population grew 3 percent since May 2016. Florida, Georgia and Texas all saw significant increases in the number of international students studying in those states.  While Louisiana, Tennessee and Oklahoma saw decreases in the number of international students studying there..

Arkansas, Kentucky and Maryland all saw major growth in international students taking part in their higher education system. Maryland saw a 10 percent increase in the number of students earning a bachelor’s degree. However, the southern region saw the largest growth at the graduate degree level. The number of international students pursuing master’s degrees increased 25 percent in Arkansas and 35 percent in Kentucky.

The Midwest saw minimal growth of 1 percent. Illinois added 1,331 students to its international student population, marking the largest increase in the region, while Nebraska experienced the largest proportional growth of 7 percent. Missouri experienced the largest decrease in international students, both in terms of student numbers and proportional decline, 763 students and 3 percent, respectively.

In the western part of the United States, international student enrollment stayed relatively static in California, other than an 8 percent increase in the number of students earning bachelor’s degrees. Idaho saw a 14 percent drop in the total number of international students studying in the state, with a 16 percent decrease in the number of students earning a bachelor’s degree. But, Nevada’s international student population grew by 5 percent, marking the largest proportional growth in the region.

The full “SEVIS by the Numbers” report can be viewed here. Report data was extracted from SEVIS May 5. The report captures a point-in-time snapshot of data related to international students studying in the United States. Data for the previous “SEVIS by the Numbers” report was extracted from SEVIS in November 2016.

Individuals can explore more international student data from current and previous “SEVIS by the Numbers” reports by visiting the Study in the States interactive mapping tool. This information is accessible at the continent, region and country level and includes information on gender and education levels, as well as international student populations by state, broken down by geographical areas across the globe.

SEVP monitors the more than one million international students pursuing academic or vocational studies (F and M visa holders) in the United States and their dependents. It also certifies the schools and programs that enroll these students. The U.S. Department of State monitors exchange visitors (J visa holders) and their dependents, and oversees exchange visitor programs.

Both SEVP and the Department of State use SEVIS to protect national security by ensuring that students, visitors and schools comply with U.S. laws. SEVP also collects and shares SEVIS information with government partners, including U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, so only legitimate international students and exchange visitors gain entry into the United States.

HSI reviews SEVIS records for potential violations and refers cases with possible national security risks or public safety concerns to its field offices for further investigation. Additionally, SEVP’s Analysis and Operations Center reviews student and school records for administrative compliance with federal regulations related to studying in the United States.

 

Investigating the Other Collusion Case

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Seems it at least began in 2015, long before Donald Trump was campaigning for the Oval Office.

Also, as an aside, John Podesta is testifying before the House Intelligence Committee next week. He too has financial ties to Moscow operations.

The Vnesheconombank is Russian owned and has been under a sanctions architecture due to the annexing of Crimea. In Russia, by law, the bank’s board chairman is the Prime Minister of Russia. Vladimir Putin increased leading when he became the bank’s chairman in 2008. Now precisely why is Russia investing at all in the United States in the first place? Well soft power and doing business with the Export Import Bank, an agency that is corrupt to the core. Further, Sergei Gorkov is head of the bank and is is/was a Russian spy.

Image result for Vnesheconombank  ABC

BusinessInsider:The U.S. Treasury has added a bunch of entities to its Russia sanctions list, including a sovereign wealth fund that used to be connected to some pretty high-profile U.S. billionaires.

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assistance Control on Thursday added The Russian Direct Investment Fund to the list, along with a number of entities linked to RDIF parent Vnesheconombank and energy giant Rosneft.

Vnesheconombank was first sanctioned last year, but RDIF hadn’t been explicitly targeted until the announcement on Thursday.

Private equity moguls Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone, David Bonderman of TPG, and Leon Black of Apollo Global Management all served as board members for RDIF when it was established in 2011, according to a press release at the time.

At some point, those names were removed from the RDIF website.

The Wall Street Journal first reported that the investors’ names had disappeared from the site in September 2014, but said that they still served on the board at that time. There are currently no names listed on the international advisory board on RDIF’s website.

Back in 2011, each board member issued statements about joining the board. Here are some highlights:

“We believe there are many attractive investment opportunities in Russia — the RDIF will provide the strong and experienced local partnership needed for investors to realize those opportunities.” — David Bonderman

“Russia has strong fundamentals that will continue to fuel its growth trajectory and offer attractive investment opportunities. We believe the Russia Direct Investment Fund will help further align U.S. and Russian objectives in terms of identifying paths toward partnership in the private sector.” — Leon Black

“It’s always good to have friends when you are going to a place that you are not as familiar with.”  — Stephen Schwarzman

Bonderman has spoken publicly about investing in the country in recent months, telling an audience at the Milken Global Conference this year that the Russian market remains attractive, according to a report by CNN Money.

He is quoted as saying: “Sanctions are perfectly set up not to work at all but to make a political statement.”

Spokespeople for Blackstone and TPG declined to comment. Apollo could not be reached for comment.

A spokesperson for the Russian Direct Investment Fund said: “For Vnesheconombank subsidiaries the new clarification by the US Department of the Treasury is essentially a technical repetition of sanctions imposed a year ago, which targeted a number of Russian companies including Vnesheconombank and its subsidiaries.

“Given the nature of the Fund’s activity, RDIF has never attracted financing in the USA, it invests its own funds. Since the introduction of sanctions last year RDIF has continued to invest into the Russian economy and build new international partnerships.”

So what you ask?

Image result for sergei gorkov Sergei Gorkov

Well due to sanctions, those on the Trump campaign team, transition team and now in the White House may have violated sanctions. If so, the reason would be why, to what end and how many may be involved? It should also be added that many Republicans have ties to Russians and oligarchs, not all is as it seems. We can only hope, while not knowing details, the Senate is also investigating Hillary Clinton in much the same condition. Yet as Secretary of State, Hillary and Obama had the ability to sign waivers to finesse sanctions. This was likely the case between Hillary and the Kremlin regarding Skolkovo.

Remember, don’t shoot the messenger. Furthermore, it seems some on the Senate committee are leaking too.

Senate investigators are examining the activities of a little-known $10-billion Russian investment fund whose chief executive met with a member of President Donald Trump’s transition team four days before Trump’s inauguration, a congressional source told CNN.

The source said the Senate intelligence committee is investigating the Russian fund in connection with its examination of discussions between White House adviser Jared Kushner and the head of a prominent Russian bank. The bank, Vnesheconombank, or VEB, oversees the fund, which has ties to several Trump advisers. Both the bank and the fund have been covered since 2014 by sanctions restricting U.S. business dealings.
Separately, Steve Mnuchin, now Treasury Secretary, said in a January letter that he would look into the Jan. 16 meeting between the fund’s chief executive and Anthony Scaramucci, a member of the transition team’s executive committee and a fundraiser and adviser for Trump’s presidential campaign. At the time, Mnuchin had not yet been confirmed as Treasury Secretary. The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for an update.
Two Democratic senators had asked Treasury to investigate whether Scaramucci promised to lift sanctions — a policy shift that would help the fund attract more international investment to Russia.
The questions draw attention to the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a government investment arm that has helped top U.S. private-equity firms invest in Russia and that was advised by Stephen Schwarzman, who is now chairman of Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, an advisory group of business leaders.
Schwarzman, chief executive officer of Blackstone Group, was named in 2011 to the fund’s International Advisory Board along with other leaders of major equity companies and sovereigh-wealth funds who reviewed the fund’s operations, plans and potential investments. Schwarzman declined to comment. A source close to him said Schwarzman has not spoken to anyone on the fund “for some time.”
The fund also worked with Goldman Sachs, whose former president Gary Cohn is Trump’s chief economic adviser and where Kirill Dmitriev, the fund’s chief executive, worked as an investment banker in the 1990s. Goldman was part of a consortium created in 2012 to invest in large Russian businesses preparing to go public, and was hired in 2013 to burnish Russia’s investment image. The company declined to comment.

‘I would reach out to people to help him”

Senate and House investigators are looking into various Russian entities to determine whether anyone connected to the Trump campaign helped Russians as they meddled in the 2016 presidential election, and whether Trump associates discussed sanctions with Russian officials.
The congressional inquiries, along with a criminal investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller, have shadowed the Trump administration. Trump has denied any connection to Russia’s election-meddling, calling the criminal probe “a witch hunt.”
Scaramucci, the founder of SkyBridge Capital, minimized his January meeting with Dmitriev in the resort town of Davos, Switzerland, at the celebrated annual gathering of the World Economic Forum. Scaramucci had met Dmitriev at previous Davos meetings, although at the gathering in January, Scaramucci was expecting to be named White House liaison to the business community.
Dmitriev “came over to say hello in a restaurant, and I was cordial,” Scaramucci said in a recent email to CNN. “There is nothing there.”
The day after the meeting, Scaramucci told Bloomberg TV that he had “as a private citizen” been working with Dmitriev on bringing a delegation of executives to Russia.
“What I said to him last night, in my capacity inside the administration, I would certainly reach out to some people to help him,” Scaramucci said before describing a thicket of ethical clearances he would face. “The idea was many months ago to have more outreach with Russia but also other countries, not just Russia. China, other countries.”
Scaramucci’s comments alarmed Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Ben Cardin of Maryland, who asked Mnuchin investigate whether Scaramucci sought to “facilitate prohibited transactions” or promised to waive or lift sanctions against Russia.
In a reply Jan. 30, before he was sworn in, Mnuchin said he would “ensure the appropriate Department components assess whether further investigation of this matter is warranted.”
A spokeswoman for the Russian fund said the two men did not discuss sanctions, and that the discussion itself did not violate sanctions that U.S. imposed in 2014 after Russia annexed part of neighboring Ukraine. The spokeswoman declined to describe the conversation, saying, “We do not comment on private meetings.”

An advocate for lifting sanctions

Since Trump’s election, Dmitriev has been one of Russia’s most vocal officials in calling for an end to U.S. sanctions and arguing that joint U.S.-Russia projects can create jobs in the United States.
The fund hired two U.S. lobbying firms in September 2014, after sanctions were imposed, paying them a combined $150,000 over two months for public relations work. The fund has not hired any lobbyists since then.
With a history of helping U.S. manufacturers and asset management companies invest in Russia, the fund is a logical starting point for Russia’s push to lift U.S. sanctions, former State Department chief economist Rodney Ludema said.
“If you’re going to get your nose under the tent, that’s a good place to start,” said Ludema, a Georgetown University economics professor. “I’m sure their objective is to get rid of all the sanctions against the financial institutions. But RDIF is one [sanctioned organizations] where a number of prominent U.S. investors have been involved.”
Scaramucci also questioned U.S. sanctions while he was in Davos and echoed Trump’s statements about improving relations with Russia.
Two weeks after the meeting between Scaramucci and Dmitriev, when President Trump spoke by phone to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the fund announced it would open an office in New York in May.
No New York office has been opened but the fund “still expects to open a representative office in the US this year,” the spokeswoman said.

 

 

2016 Internet Crime Report

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IC3 Releases Annual Report Highlighting Trends in Internet Crime

Giving someone access to your computer is like giving out a key to your front door. A computer can have your bank account information, family photos, and other private documents and data—information that fraudsters would like to steal. That’s why tech support fraud has become a significant trend in online crime, according to the 2016 Internet Crime Report from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

In tech support fraud cases, criminals convince unsuspecting victims to provide remote access to their computer by calling and posing as tech support personnel from a legitimate company. The criminal can then simply charge your credit card for a fake anti-virus product, or, in more sinister situations, they can steal your personal information or install malware. More than 10,000 incidents of tech support fraud were reported to the IC3 in 2016, with victims losing nearly $8 million. Though anyone can be a victim, older computer users are the most vulnerable targets.

“They’ll trick you into letting them into your computer,” said IC3 Unit Chief Donna Gregory. “You open the door and allow them in. You may think you’re just watching them install a program to get rid of a virus, but they are really doing a lot of damage behind the scenes.”

In addition to tech support fraud, the other major fraud categories last year were business e-mail compromise, ransomware, and extortion.

The IC3 receives complaints on a variety of Internet scams and crimes, and it has received more than 3.7 million complaints since it was created in 2000. In 2016, the IC3 received a total of 298,728 complaints with reported losses in excess of $1.3 billion. The IC3 uses the information from public complaints to refer cases to the appropriate law enforcement agencies and identify trends. The IC3’s extensive database is also available to law enforcement. Internet users should report any Internet fraud to IC3, no matter the dollar amount. Additional data helps the FBI and law enforcement gain a more accurate picture of Internet crime.

Screenshot of the front cover of the Internet Crime Complaint Center’s 2016 Internet Crime Report
View full report | View state reports

The IC3 publishes the Internet Crime Report annually to increase public awareness of current trends in Internet crime. For this report, the IC3 has also created a separate state-by-state breakdown that allows users to select their state from a dropdown menu so they can review local trends in Internet crime. The top states for reported dollar amounts lost to Internet fraud in 2016 were California ($255 million), New York ($106 million), and Florida ($89 million).

Though Internet crime is a serious threat, there are ways to help keep yourself safe online. The IC3 recommends computer users update their anti-virus software and operating system. Additionally, the Internet is an especially important place to remember the old adage: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

“Be aware of what you are clicking on and also what you’re posting on social media. Always lock down your social media accounts as much as possible,” Gregory said. “Try to use two factor authentication, and use safe passwords or things more difficult to guess. The tougher the password, the harder it is for someone to crack.”

Should Voting Systems be Classified as Critical Infrastructure?

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While members of all political party voters seem to diss the notion that Russia intruded on voting systems in 2016, the proof is there. If you watched former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson during his congressional testimony, it was not so much his responses but more about what members of congress know, to pose questions to Johnson.

Image result for u.s. voting systems

J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, contended U.S. election equipment is “vulnerable to sabotage” that “could change votes.”

“We’ve found ways for hackers to sabotage machines and steal votes. These capabilities are certainly within reach for America’s enemies,” Halderman told senators.

He said he and his team spent 10 years researching cyber vulnerabilities of election equipment. The professor said:

Some say that the fact that voting machines aren’t directly connected to the internet makes them secure. But, unfortunately, this is not true. Voting machines are not as distant from the internet as they may seem. Before every election, they need to be programmed with races and candidates. That programming is created on a desktop computer, then transferred to voting machines. If Russia infiltrated these election management computers, it could have spread a vote-stealing attack to a vast number of machines. I don’t know how far Russia got or whether they managed to interfere with equipment on Election Day. More here from Daily Signal.

Okay…still a non-believer? Let’s see what the States experiences.

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Click here for additional video and interactive map of states using paper ballot backup systems.

Elections officials outgunned in Russia’s cyberwar against America

WASHINGTON/Charlotte Observer

Local officials consistently play down suspicions about the long lines at polling places on Election Day 2016 that led some discouraged voters in heavily Democratic Durham County, N.C., to leave without casting a ballot.

Minor glitches in the way new electronic poll books were put to use had simply gummed things up, according to local elections officials there. Elections Board Chairman William Brian Jr. assured Durham residents that “an extensive investigation” showed there was nothing to worry about with the county’s new registration software.

He was wrong.

What Brian and other election officials across eight states didn’t know until the leak of a classified intelligence is that Russian operatives hacked into the Florida headquarters of VR Systems, Inc., the vendor that sold them digital products to manage voter registrations.

A week before the election, the hackers sent emails using a VR Systems address to 122 state and local election officials across the country, inviting them to open an attachment wired with malicious software that spoofed “legitimate elections-related services,” the report said. The malware was designed to retrieve enough additional information to set the stage for serious mischief, said the National Security Agency report disclosed by the Intercept, an investigative web site.

That wasn’t the only type of attack.

The new revelations about the Kremlin’s broad and sophisticated cyber offensive targeting Democrat Hillary Clinton and aimed at seating Donald Trump in the Oval Office have set off a wave of worry about the security of the nation’s voting systems. State election officials, facing questions as to whether they ignored oddities or red flags, have responded by accusing intelligence agencies of failing to alert them of the risks.

The truth is a hodge-podge of electronic machinery that enables Americans to exercise their most sacred democratic right is weakly guarded by state and local agencies. Those officials are quick to assure the voting public that their systems are secure, but they lack the resources and technical know-how to defend against cyber intrusions, or even to perform forensic examinations to ensure nothing happened.

Election officials in Illinois, another state that VR Systems lists as a customer, did not find out they were hacked by Russian operatives late last June until a week or two later. By then, the Russian operatives had downloaded about 90,000 voter registration records, leading to an investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said Ken Menzel, general counsel of the Illinois Board of Elections. Menzel confirmed a Bloomberg report that the Russians appeared to have made unsuccessful attempts to alter or delete some records.

In Georgia, where a nationally watched congressional runoff race is scheduled for Tuesday, Politico magazine reported that a U.S. hacker from a national laboratory seeking to expose vulnerabilities in election systems was able to easily download millions of voter records from Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems, which manages them. Election watchdog groups say subsequent warnings to the state about a hole in their system went unheeded for months.

David Jefferson, a computer scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who has acted in his personal capacity in trying to safeguard election integrity, said he believes it is “absolutely possible” that the Russians affected last year’s election.

“And we have done almost nothing to seriously examine that,” he said.

“The Russians really were engaged in a pattern of attacks against the machinery of the election, and not merely a pattern of propaganda or information warfare and selective leaking,” said Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science professor. “The question is, how far did they get in that pattern of attacks, and were they successful?” Election officials across the country may not even know if they’ve been attacked, computer scientists say, pointing to the scenario that played out in Durham County.

EASY PREY

State and local voting systems appear to be easy prey for sophisticated hackers.

Five states use electronic voting machines with no paper backups, precluding audits that might verify the accuracy of their vote counts. They include Georgia, scene of Tuesday’s 6th District runoff election, Delaware, Louisiana, New Jersey and South Carolina. Parts of another nine states also are paperless, including the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania.

Although Congress has discouraged use of internet voting because of the potential for hackers to tamper with ballots, some 32 states allow military and overseas voters to transmit ballots online or via insecure fax machines. Alaska, Washington state and Hawaii have been the most permissive.

“If we don’t fix our badly broken system before the next major presidential election, we’re going to be hacked into,” said Barbara Simons, author of “Broken Ballots,” a 2012 book about election security published by Stanford University. “It might not just be Russia. It might be North Korea, China, Iran or partisans.”

While the Netherlands opted to shift to paper ballots when alerted the Russians were trying to swing its election outcome to the right, U.S. election officials have stood pat.

But former FBI Director James Comey, in widely watched testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, said “there should be no fuzz” about Russia’s barrage of millions of social media messages spreading falsehoods about Clinton.

“The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle,” he said. “They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts … And it is very, very serious.”

America’s saving grace could be its decentralized system in which cities, counties and states have used federal grants to procure a wide variety of voting equipment, limiting the potential impact of a single attack.

But that doesn’t mean targeted attacks couldn’t tip the outcome of closely divided races, even for the presidency.

CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

On Jan. 6, American intelligence agencies issued a declassified report accusing Russia of the cyber attack ultimately aimed at helping Trump, calling it the Kremlin’s “boldest” operation ever aimed at influencing the United States. In a brief notation, the report said that, while the Russians targeted state and local voting systems, they did not attempt to corrupt vote-tallying equipment.

On the same day the report was released, in one of his last acts as U.S. secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson proclaimed the nation’s election systems to be “Critical Infrastructure,” a designation that not only makes their security a higher priority, but improves the climate for federal-state cooperation. Because state and local officials exert total control over their operations, the agency only can investigate a vulnerability or possible breach if asked to do so – an obstacle the new designation didn’t change.

A senior Homeland Security official, in an interview with McClatchy, batted down as wildly exaggerated a Bloomberg report stating that Russian cyber operatives had made “hits” on voting systems in 39 states. Every web site is constantly scanned by “bad actors,” just as burglars might case homes in a neighborhood. That doesn’t equate to hacking, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

“The ability to manipulate the vote tally, that’s quite complicated,” the Homeland Security official said. “We didn’t see an ability to really accomplish that even in an individual voting machine. You have to have physical access to do that. It’s not as easy as you think.”

Some of the nation’s top experts in voting security disagree.

Lawrence Livermore’s Jefferson voiced frustration with the “defensive” refrain of denials from state and local election officials, including the National Association of Secretaries of State.

“Election officials do not talk about vulnerabilities,” Jefferson said, “because that would give the advantage to the attacker. And they don’t want to undermine public confidence in elections.”

Halderman said Homeland Security officials told him they were unaware of a single county in any state that had conducted post-election forensic examinations of their voting equipment.

The Homeland Security official who spoke with McClatchy said the main concern for agency cyber specialists is not about vote-tampering; it’s related to the ability of intruders to sow confusion and chaos. That could entail schemes to foul voter registration data by, for example, removing the names of voters from the rolls so they are turned away at polling stations.

“This scenario is what we witnessed on the ground in North Carolina on Election Day,” said Susan Greenhalgh, a spokeswoman for the election watchdog group Verified Voting.

“If attackers wanted to impact an election through an attack on a vendor like VR Systems,” she said, “they could manipulate or delete voter records impacting a voter’s ability to cast a regular ballot. Or, they could cause the E-Pollbooks (electronic databases of voters) to malfunction, hampering the check-in process and creating long lines.”

North Carolina was considered to be a swing state in the presidential race, and Durham County, with an African-American population of more than 37 percent, had voted more than 75 percent in favor of putting and keeping Barack Obama in the White House. Last year’s governor’s race was a dead heat entering Election Day.

The chaos in Durham County led to 90-minute delays. Some voters rang a Voter Protection Hotline to complain that their names had disappeared from the registration system or that they were told they already had voted.

The county hired a contractor to investigate the foul-up, but the inquiry never examined whether the system was hacked.

Twenty other North Carolina counties used the system, including Mecklenburg County, encompassing most of Charlotte. Though none reported problems on the scale of Durham County, release of the NSA report prompted the North Carolina Board of Elections to order a new investigation.

A former FBI agent is leading the inquiry. Critics say the three-member investigative team again lacks expertise in forensics.

Mindy Perkins, VR Systems’ president and chief executive officer, said in a statement that the company immediately notified all of its customers as soon as it was alerted “to an obviously fraudulent email purporting to come from VR Systems” and advised them not to click on the attachment.

“We are only aware of a handful of our customers who actually received the fraudulent email,” she said. “We have no indication that any of them clicked on the attachment or were compromised as a result.”

She said the company has “policies and procedures in effect to protect our customers and our company.”

Even so, Russia succeeded in sneaking up on U.S. agencies, voting system vendors and intelligence agencies.

Halderman, the University of Michigan expert, said he believes the best solution is for states to require paper trails for all voting equipment and post-election audits to ensure the vote counts are authentic.

“There’s no guarantee that we’ll know we’re under attack,” he said, “unless we do the quality control that we need by doing these audits to detect manipulation.”