Category Archives: Failed foreign policy

China’s Exploding Military Footprint

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This Map Visualizes China’s Growing Military Capabilities In The South China Sea

This Map Visualizes China's Growing Military Capabilities In The South China Sea

This awesome interactive map shows China’s emerging area denial and anti-access military capabilities in the South China Sea. It is useful in visually tracking China’s progress towards creating an overlapping field of control over a vast majority of the area.

The map, which you can access here, is built by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Great work Tyler:One of China’s highly developed islands in the northern part of the South China Sea, Woody Island, has been equipped with surface-to-air missiles and fighter aircraft. These moves have come just as many defense analysts have predicted for years and are likely an indication of things to come for China’s other island outposts throughout the South China Sea.

There is also evidence that China is installing a high-frequency long-range radar array on Cuarteron Reef, one of their handful of manmade islands in the south-central part of the South China Sea. This radar type is known to be used for detecting aircraft and ships at extreme ranges far over-the-horizon and can theoretically detect some stealthy aircraft under certain circumstances. It is just one of many other sensors popping up on this island and others, although the existence of such a capability provides even more evidence that China is actively seeking an aggressive anti-access, area denial strategy over the South China Sea.

China might be installing HF radar that can detect stealth aircraft in S. China Sea

This all comes as China’s largest island building project out of their manmade island initiative, Fiery Cross Reef, officially activated its 9,000-foot runway early last month. The runway is capable of supporting even China’s heaviest bomber and transport aircraft.

With any luck CSIS will keep updating this fabulous visual resource as China expands its military capabilities to its other islands that remain under construction in the South China Sea. Undoubtedly, the threat rings you see today will blossom and multiply, creating a massive overlapping area of control backed up by anti-ship and anti-air missiles, as well as fighter and maritime surveillance and attack aircraft.

Going back to 2015: (So much for that Obama Asia Pivot)

WSJ:

Analysts say the imminent end to China’s island-building work could signal a willingness to seek compromise with Washington and rival claimants in the South China Sea, even as it demonstrates Beijing’s ability to unilaterally dictate terms in the long-standing dispute.

“This is a step toward halting land reclamation, which the U.S. has demanded, and at the same time, China can tell its people that it has accomplished what it wanted to do,” said Huang Jing, an expert on Chinese foreign policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.

“China unilaterally started the land reclamation and now China is unilaterally stopping it,” Mr. Huang said. “China is showing that—as a major power—it can control escalation, that it has the initiative, and that it can do what it sees fit for its interests.”

Beijing lays claim to almost the entire South China Sea, a stretch of resource-rich waters that carries more than half the world’s trade. Its claims overlap with those of Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Taiwan and the Philippines—several of whom have criticized China’s rapid and extensive construction program in the Spratlys as the latest in a series of aggressive Chinese efforts to assert territorial rights.

 

Hillary’s Email Pals Included the WH and SCOTUS Judges

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Sheesh…..now what about the 30,000 emails about ah yoga and wedding plans…yeah, yoga sure Hillary. What about the emails from the White House to Hillary…ah all this transparency is well infectious eh?

Ever wonder why a Secretary of State needed to email, confer and be email pals with selected Supreme Court justices?

Hillary’s email account an open secret in Washington long before scandal broke

WashingtonTimes: Hundreds of people — from White House officials and titans of the mainstream media to senators, Supreme Court justices and many of her top colleagues at the State Department — could have known about Hillary Clinton’s secret email account, if only they’d cared to look closely enough.

Listed on some of the more than 28,000 messages Mrs. Clinton released so far are several White House chiefs of staff and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, much of the rest of official Washington, and a number of people who had oversight of the State Department’s key operations and open-records obligations. President Obama was also on a series of messages, though the government is withholding those.

But just how widely disseminated Mrs. Clinton’s address was became clear in a single 2011 message from Anne-Marie Slaughter, who appeared to include Mrs. Clinton on a message alongside Supreme Court Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan, reporters Jeffrey Toobin, David Brooks, Fred Hiatt and Evan Thomas, CIA Director David H. Petraeus, top Obama aide Benjamin Rhodes and former White House counsel Gregory Craig.

 
Computer specialists said they would have had to know what they were looking for to spot Mrs. Clinton’s address, but it was there for anyone who did look — raising questions about how her unique arrangement remained secret for so long. It came to the public’s attention when news broke in March 2015 in The New York Times — after it was uncovered by a congressional investigation into the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack.

The State Department has since acknowledged that it did not search Mrs. Clinton’s messages in response to open-records requests filed under federal law, and federal District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan is prodding the department about how the situation got so out of hand.

“We’re talking about a Cabinet-level official who was accommodated by the government for reasons unknown to the public. And I think that’s a fair statement — for reasons unknown to the public,” the judge said at a hearing last week, where he decided to approve conservative legal group Judicial Watch’s request for discovery to pry loose more details about who approved the odd email setup and how it ducked the rules.
“All the public can do is speculate,” Judge Sullivan told the government lawyers who have been fighting to drag out the release of the messages Mrs. Clinton has turned over, and to prevent her from having to relinquish thousands of others. “You want me to say it’s done, but I can’t do that right now.”

The final batch of messages the State Department has in its custody — 2,000 of them — is due to be released Monday.

The facts have changed dramatically since the emails were first revealed and Mrs. Clinton insisted that she set up her unique arrangement out of “convenience” for herself and insisted no classified material was sent on the account.

Already, 1,782 messages have been deemed to contain classified material, and 22 of those messages contain “secret” information. Another 22 messages contain “top secret” material so sensitive that the government won’t even release any part of them, meaning they will remain completely hidden from the public.

Mrs. Clinton’s arrangement set off public policy and security debates. Analysts said her server was likely unprotected against any moderately sophisticated attack.

Although details remain sketchy as to what protection Mrs. Clinton used, analysts said having one person maintaining her server is no way to protect sensitive information from a hack. Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, said there is no evidence that Mrs. Clinton was having her server tested by independent specialists — a major oversight.

“You cannot secure your server with one guy working part time,” Mr. Soghoian said.

That one person, Bryan Pagliano, who reportedly worked for Mrs. Clinton at the State Department and on the side as her server technician, asserted his Fifth Amendment right against incriminating himself in testimony to Congress last year.

Even if the server itself wasn’t compromised, Mr. Soghoian said, Mrs. Clinton was sending email over the broader Internet, where an enterprising opponent could have intercepted messages. If she had been using a State.gov account to email others within the government, that wouldn’t have been possible, he said.

There is no evidence that Mrs. Clinton was hacked, but analysts said that’s of little comfort. Even if the FBI doesn’t find evidence, it is not conclusive.

“Clinton’s use of unencrypted email left her vulnerable to nation states. There’s no amount of investigation the FBI can do to prove that didn’t happen,” Mr. Soghoian said.

Bob Gourley, co-founder of cybersecurity consultancy Cognitio, said the government has to assume Mrs. Clinton’s server was compromised, and he said it begs the question of why she declined to use a State.gov account and instead set up her own off-site server.

“All indications are this was not just a matter of convenience,” he said. “There’s no reason why she should have used her own server and go to all the trouble to do that unless she wanted to hide something.”

That something, Mr. Gourley believes, is the negotiating she did on behalf of the Clinton Foundation, founded by her husband, former President Bill Clinton. She helped lead the foundation as soon as she stepped down from the secretary’s job.

The security analyst said he suspects details of those negotiations are part of the 30,000 messages Mrs. Clinton indicated she sent during her time in office but that she declined to turn back to the State Department. The former secretary said those messages were personal business, such as scheduling yoga classes or arranging her daughter Chelsea’s wedding.

Judicial Watch is trying to get Mrs. Clinton to turn over those messages to the State Department, and that’s the case pending before Judge Sullivan.

“The big story on Monday is, wow, now we have reviewed about half of Mrs. Clinton’s reported records. Where’s the other half?” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “That’s what our discovery is about. Where’s the other half, and how can we find out so they can be retrieved and reviewed and released to the public?”

Mrs. Clinton says the Obama administration is overclassifying her messages. She says she would like all of the messages she returned to the government released, including presumably the 22 the government deems so “top secret” that they can’t be shared even in part.

She and her campaign have questioned the political motivations or conclusions of the inspectors general who have pushed for classification, to Judge Sullivan, whose order of discovery could force her aides to answer tough questions and could eventually lead to her having to return the rest of her emails.

Mr. Fitton said the questions Judicial Watch will ask during discovery include how the government supported her email server, why the folks who handled Freedom of Information Act open-records requests weren’t made aware of it, who else used it, what security precautions were taken and who approved it.

A Washington Times analysis of the more than 28,000 messages that have been released show dozens of State Department employees, from the lowest to the highest levels, were aware that Mrs. Clinton was using her unique arrangement to conduct government business.

The extensive awareness within the department struck Judge Sullivan.

“How on earth can the court conclude that there’s not, at a minimum, a reasonable suspicion of bad faith regarding the State Department’s response to this FOIA request?” he said at a hearing last week.

Mrs. Clinton’s successor, current Secretary of State John F. Kerry, was one of those who emailed with Mrs. Clinton on her secret account during his time in the Senate. He was one of a handful of senators The Times found who were pen pals with Mrs. Clinton.

Last week, Mr. Kerry tried to explain how he missed Mrs. Clinton’s behavior and told Congress he simply mailed the address he was given.

“I didn’t think about it. I didn’t know if she had an account, or what the department gave her at that point in time, or what she was operating with. I had no knowledge,” he told Rep. Darrell E. Issa, a California Republican who prodded him on the matter.

Stories about odd email practices have continued to dog Mr. Obama’s tenure. His former administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa P. Jackson, used a secret agency email address to conduct government business, but the EPA says those messages were searched in open-records requests.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter used a private address to conduct some government business in the first months after taking office. He said the practice was wrong and apologized for it.

Mr. Gourley, the cybersecurity specialist, said Mrs. Clinton’s practice went beyond that. He compared it to a phone, saying everyone has a home phone or personal cellphone, and even top government officials occasionally use it for official business. But in Mrs. Clinton’s case, she rejected an official government email account and used only her secret account.

“Those kinds of rules were just totally flouted by Clinton,” he said.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Then, Now and Hillary

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Wonder if Hillary or Anne Patterson received and read the full Great Britain document on the investigation into the Muslim Brotherhood? The scrubbed UK investigation report is here.

Misguided diplomacy at the White House and the U.S. State department is mission objectives and investment over terror facts and names, of this there is no dispute.

 

Hillary Emails: State Discussed ‘Cooperating,’ ‘Increased Investment’ With Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Government

TEL AVIV – 1,500 pages of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails provide insight into the level of support the U.S. was considering in 2012 for Egypt’s newly elected Muslim Brotherhood government.

Breitbart: On August 30, 2012, Robert D. Hormats, the under-secretary of state for economic affairs, wrote to Clinton’s then-Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan to update him on a meeting he held with .

Shater was later sentenced to life imprisonment and then to death for multiple alleged crimes, including inciting violence and financial improprieties.

The email reveals Hormats and other U.S. diplomats discussed  methods of cooperation with Shater, including an increase in American direct foreign investment.

Hormats wrote:

Anne Patterson, Bill Taylor, and I met with Muslim Brotherhood Deputy Supreme Guide Khairat al-Shater. He discussed broad principles of economic development based on 100 large infrastructure projects (over a billion dollars each) as part of Morsi’s Nadah (Renaissance Plan) Plan; ways of cooperating with the US to obtain support for these projects and for SMEs; and his hope for an IMF agreement and increased foreign direct investment from the US, the West, and the Arab world. He also noted that it was a priority for the GOE to build a true democratic system based on human rights and the rule of law.

Patterson, the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt at the time, was known for her repeated engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood. Taylor was the U.S. Special Coordinator for Middle East Transitions; that is, the U.S. envoy to the new leadership that emerged in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring.

Hormats’ meetings with the Muslim Brotherhood were not secret. But the emails reveal the scope of his discussions with the group about possible future investment.

In September 2012, the New York Timesreported that Hormats had led a delegation of businesses to Egypt to discuss possible private investment.

That same month, the State Department published a document that received little news media attention. It revealed that in August and September 2012, “Hormats visited Egypt to negotiate possible bilateral debt relief,”but the document did not provide further details.

After the toppling of Egypt’s longtime president Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi served as president from June 30, 2012 to July 3, 2013, when he was removed from office amidst widespread protests and a military coup. After Mubarak was removed from office, the Obama administration pledged $1 billion in assistance to bolster Egypt’s transition to democracy.

Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta each visited Cairo and met with Morsi during his tenure as president.

The meeting that Hormats describes in the email took place while the U.S. was negotiating an aid package to help relieve Egypt’s debt crisis amid concerns from U.S. lawmakers about funding the Muslim Brotherhood.

The email was sent a week and a half before protesters besieged the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on September 11, 2012, the same day the U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi came under attack.

Following the attacks, Obama stated of Morsi’s government, “I don’t think that we would consider them an ally, but we don’t consider them an enemy.”

***

Back in November of 2015, Senator Cruz was leading a charge in the Senate to list the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror organization. The Muslim Brotherhood is part of several proven terror organizations. Going back to 2014, Saudi Arabia joined the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in withdrawing its ambassadors from Qatar, which it sees as an important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

in 2014, Prime Minister David Cameron ordered an investigation into the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror organization and the results were conclusive they were, however due to internal pressure from Islamists all over Europe and especially the UK, Cameron pulled the report.

 

It’s Friday, TWO Hillary Dumps

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Townhall: The department on Friday posted 1,589 pages of Clinton’s emails on its website, bringing to 48,535 the number of pages released as part of its ongoing release of the former secretary’s correspondence. The last batch of the roughly 55,000 work-related emails Clinton turned over to the department is scheduled to be released on Monday in accordance with a court order.

In the latest release, portions of 88 documents were deemed to be classified at the “confidential” level, the lowest classification category. The department said none of those emails was marked classified at the time they were sent. More here.

#1   

State Dept. Hands 1,600 Documents From Hillary Clinton’s Office To Benghazi Committee

Alex Plitsas/Opinion: The U.S. State Department Friday afternoon turned over 1,600 pages of never before seen documentation from the Office of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding the Benghazi terrorist attacks to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Benghazi CommitteeVerified account ‏@HouseBenghazi 2h2 hours ago

: Today the State Dept turned over more than 1,600 pages of new documents related to former Secretary Clinton and Libya.

Sources from the Select Committee say it first asked for these records related to Benghazi and Libya nearly a year ago, and is the first to receive them now — four months after the hearing with former Secretary Clinton. In a court filing in response to a FOIA suit filed by the watch dog group “Judicial Watch”, dated January 8, 2016, the State Department claimed it only recently, “located additional sources of documents that originated within the Office of the Secretary that are reasonably likely to contain records responsive to Plaintiff’s request.”

The State Department defines the “Office of the Secretary” as being “comprised of the Secretary’s Chief of Staff, the Counselor of the Department, Deputy Chief of Staff, the Secretary’s secretary, the Executive Assistant, two special assistants, the Secretary’s scheduler, staff assistant, and two personal assistants. This staff handles all of the day-to-day matters of the Secretary, including meetings at the Department, functions in Washington and throughout the country, and travel around the world.”

This latest revelation once again proves that the investigation into the terrorist attacks against the U.S. state Department Complex in Benghazi, Libya is not over and that Democrats who claim that the event has already been investigated in its entirety are just plain wrong. It also speaks to the professional and meticulous manner in which Rep. Gowdy has conducted this investigation and should give confidence to the American people that he will get to the bottom of what actually happened before, during, and after the terrorist attack in Benghazi – to include what role Hillary Clinton played in the Administration’s failures.

According to the Select Committee, the State Department has still not turned over other records it has been requesting for more than year. The fact that the Obama Administration has withheld these records until this time, and is still withholding more, is suspect given the timing of the U.S. presidential election. What else is the Obama administration hiding from the committee and the American people?

#2 

Feds release more Clinton emails on eve of South Carolina primary

TheHill: The State Department on Friday released 881 new emails from Hillary Clinton’s personal server, a day before Democrats in South Carolina head to the polls.

The new release brings the total number of classified emails on the former secretary of State’s machine up to more than 1,800. The vast majority of those classified emails were listed at the lowest level, that of “confidential,” but nearly two dozen were classified as “secret” and another 22 were deemed “top secret” — the highest level of classification.

Those top secret emails were deemed too dangerous to release to the public, even in a redacted form.

None of the 88 classified emails in Friday’s dump were classified at the time they were sent, a State Department official said.

Friday’s release is the second-to-last from the State Department, which has been laboring to make Clinton’s emails public since last May.

Under the terms of a court order earlier this month, the department will need to publish the very last of the roughly 35,000 supposedly work-related emails on Monday.

Federal officials planned to work through the weekend to reach that goal, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said earlier in the day.

“We’re still reviewing them – a lot of them, frankly,” Toner told reporters at the State Department. “Going to be working hard through the weekend.”

On Saturday, Clinton’s presidential campaign is hoping to cement its front-runner status with a strong showing in South Carolina, where polls show her with a significant lead over rival Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Sanders has repeatedly refused to attack Clinton over her emails, but Republicans have been less kind. Critics of Clinton allege that her unconventional use of a personal email account on a private server throughout her time in office posed a major threat to national security and skirted federal recordkeeping laws.

After Ukraine, DHS Warns Domestic Utility Companies

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Feds advise utilities to pull plug on Internet after Ukraine attack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is also a mystery to the attackers’ actions.

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

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

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

*** 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2014 from the Department of Interior and DHS:

Summary: Investigation of NPS-GCNP SCADA SYSTEM

Report Date: August 7, 2014

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

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

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