Category Archives: North Korea

A Look Back at the Last Decade

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Sadly, so much of the domestic and world events have affected our daily lives while other events have carried into this new decade. This is hardly a complete look back and readers are encouraged to leave comments with additional major events of the last decade. Congratulations for surviving and prevailing the last decade.

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2010: The Arab Spring

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Apple introduces first iPad

President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law

7.0 Earthquake strike Haiti

Instagram Debuts

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2011:  Abbottabad Raid Killing Osama bin Ladin

8.9 Earthquake Hits Japan

Prince William Marries Catherine Middleton

Casey Anthony Acquitted of Killing her Daughter

Syrian Civil War Began

2012: Baumgartner’s Stratosphere Jump

Benghazi attack

Super Hurricane Sandy

Aurora, Colorado Theater Shooting

Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting

2013: IRS Targeting

Boston Marathon Bombing

Edward Snowden NSA leaks

Pope Benedict Resignation, First Ever

Black Lives Matter Activist Movement Originates

Failed Government Launch of Healthcare.gov

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2014: Malaysia Flight #370 Goes Missing

Actor Robin Williams Dies by Suicide

Bowe Bergdahl Taliban Prisoner Swap

Ebola Virus Outbreak

Boko Harem Kidnaps 200 Schoolgirls

Uber Launches Rideshare

Obama Normalizes Relations with Cuba

Islamic State (ISIL-ISIS) Battle Begins in Mosul

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2015:  San Bernardino Terror Attack

Pope Francis Speech to Joint Session of Congress

Hillary Clinton Email Scandal

Charlie Hebdo Terror Attack

Paris Stade de France Bombing

Bataclan Terror Attack

Syrian European Refugee Crisis

2016: Rio Olympic Games, Ryan Lochte scandal

U.S. Supreme Court Legalizes Gay Marriage

Singer Prince Found Dead from Fentanyl Overdose

Colin Kaepernick Began Kneeling Protest

Brexit Vote for Withdraw of United Kingdom from European Union

Russia Hacks U.S. Obama Expels Russian Diplomats and Spies

2017: Rare Coast to Coast Full Solar Eclipse

#MeToo Movement Begins

Las Vegas Mandalay Bay Hotel Shooting Killing 58 Wounding 413

Arianna Grande Manchester Bombing

Robert Mueller Named Special Council to Investigate Donald Trump and Russian Collusion

Hurricane Harvey, Category 4 Hits Leaving $125 Billion in Damage

Hurricane Irma, Category 5

Hurricane Maria, Category 5

President Trump Launches #FakeNews

ANTIFA Launches National Activist Operations

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2018: Thailand Soccer Team Rescued from Cave

North Korea Agrees to Trump to Denuclearize

Cambridge Analytica-Facebook Scandal

Christine Blasey Ford v. Brett Kavanugh (Supreme Court Nominee)

Prince Harry Marries American Meghan Markle

Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting, Killing 17

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2019:  Robert Mueller Special Council Investigation Ends

U.S. House of Representatives Votes on Two Articles of Impeachment of President Trump

Trump Installs Sweeping Immigration Enforcement Measures

U.S. China Trade Pact Finalizes First Agreement

Boeing Jets Grounded

Hong Kong Freedom Fighters Protest China for Freedom

Fix Bayonets Secretary Spencer, Remember?

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In an interview with CBS news after being fired Monday evening, Spencer said Trump’s insistence on maintaining Gallagher’s rank as a Navy SEAL tells troops that they “can get away with it,” if they commit a crime. “We have to have good order and discipline, it’s the backbone of what we do,” he said. Spencer added be believes Trump doesn’t fully understand the definition of a war fighter. “A war fighter is a profession of arms,” Spencer told CBS’s David Martin outside the Pentagon. “And a profession of arms has standards.”

Did any of the Pentagon military brass or bureaucracy (profession of arms) speak out at all when President Obama interfered/intervened of the scandal of Bowe Berghdal and the trade of 5 Taliban commanders? What about when President Obama commuted the 35 year sentence of Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning for stealing thousands of pages of classified material? Secretary Spencer where is your commentary on those cases? What about General Cartwright when he admitted to lying to federal investigators on the 2012 leak of classified material to the press regarding the covert cyber attack against Iran’s nuclear program, a cyber operation known at Stuxnet?

As the daughter of a Marine that fought in World War ll and Korea, it is striking to me the unique differences of war then as to military conflict today. Anyone out there care to comment on the number of bureaucrats and lawyers today as compared to those battles in the last several decades? Anyone? To be sure, the ethos of the military for decades has been core values, ethics, loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity and personal courage. But hold on. To currently serving military and to veterans, please comment, has the brass bureaucracy and lawyers impeded the ethos of the military over political correctness and rules of engagement?

Secretary Spencer has earnestly defended the handling of the Gallagher case. Do you sir defend the Navy prosecutors for spying on Gallagher’s defense team among other tactics such that the prosecution team was fired? So, the latest review on Gallagher was to review the case for keeping his rank and trident over a photo with a corpse. Others ‘posing’ with the corpse were not punished, why not? Oh yeah they got immunity in exchange for testimony. You mean no penalty or drop in rank or removal of an award?

I hold the collection of slides and film my father took at war in Korea. Among those photos. he stands beside a corpse with a cigarette in the mouth. Should my father’s Navy Cross be posthumously be revoked? And when it comes to Rules of Engagement, would the bureaucracy and lawyers forbid fixed bayonets?

From the Arlington National Cemetery website in part:

First Lieutenant Lucian L. Vestal of “Fox” Company, 2d Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment was a man with an easy smile who liked to joke with his platoon. The smile left his face when he received his mission on May 28 to make a frontal assault across open ground near Hangye and take a hill.

He ordered his men to fix bayonets and led them out. There is something inherently eerie about the command to fix bayonets in combat. The sound of cold metal sliding from the scabbard, the metallic click of the knife locking to the rifle lug and bonding with its man chills the soul more than chambering a round. Men can chamber a round when hunting game or on the rifle range. Marines seldom fix naked steel unless against other men when death is imminent; one-on-one, muno u mum. The site of Marines advancing with fixed bayonets also has a disturbing psychological effect on the enemy. The Communists opened up with everything they had; machine guns, small-arms fire and grenades.

Marines around Vestal were dropping and only a few feet from the enemy position, Vestal himself was painfully wounded in the stomach. They closed with the Communists, driving them in fear from their  positions while Vestal calmly redeployed his platoon, directed the evacuation of his wounded and set up a screen of protective fire. They evacuated Vestal with the last of the wounded. He used his smile to hide his pain and again joked with his fellow Marines, who promptly recommended Vestal for the Navy Cross.

War is for sure ugly. It could be argued today it is uglier by an additional means and that is bureaucracy. In 2018, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved the first ‘chief management officer’ for the Pentagon to ‘shake up the bureaucracy. Congress has written the law may times and that bureaucracy seeps down to the commands and battlefield. The warfighters see it, feel it, experience it while ‘wining hearts and minds of the enemy’ but not so much for our own warfighters.

Image result for marines with dead viet cong December 1967, dead Viet Cong 

 

Image result for marines with dead viet cong A dead Viet Cong soldier who broke into the air base at An Khe in the Highlands of the Republic of South Vietnam. Take a look at the Army soldiers and what they are wearing. This is 1968 and in the Highlands some of them have not been issued jungle fatigues, boots and M16’s. However, back in Saigon all the brass were wearing starched jungle fatigues and M16’s were everywhere. No wonder we called them REMF’s. Tom Bigelow photo.

Today frontal assaults on the enemy or fixed bayonets are but a forgotten memory. Bureaucracy and lawyers make it so. Law and order is well understand among the ranks as is the military ethos, a photo with a corpse is hardly crime for court martial or is it? And the long war goes on.

 

 

 

Trump’s Reelection Operation Targeted by Cyber Attacks

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Hey Hillary it is not Russia, but they are out there for sure. This time most notable attributions are pointing to Iran.

When the Pentagon recently awarded Microsoft a $10 billion contract to transform and host the US military’s cloud computing systems, the mountain of money came with an implicit challenge: Can Microsoft keep the Pentagon’s systems secure against some of the most well-resourced, persistent, and sophisticated hackers on earth?

“They’re under assault every hour of the day,” says James Lewis, vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

Microsoft’s latest win over cloud rival Amazon for the ultra-lucrative military contact means that an intelligence-gathering apparatus among the most important in the world is based in the woods outside Seattle. These kinds of national security responsibilities once sat almost exclusively in Washington, DC. Now in this corner of Washington state, dozens of engineers and intelligence analysts are dedicated to watching and stopping the government-sponsored hackers proliferating around the world.

Members of the so-called MSTIC (Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center) team are threat-focused: one group is responsible for Russian hackers code-named Strontium, another watches North Korean hackers code-named Zinc, and yet another tracks Iranian hackers code-named Holmium. MSTIC tracks over 70 code-named government-sponsored threat groups and many more that are unnamed.

El acuerdo del Pentágono con Microsoft conlleva un centro ...

What are the superpowers of Microsoft?

“Microsoft sees stuff that just nobody else does,” says Williams, who founded the cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec. “We routinely find stuff, for instance, like flags for malicious IPs in Office 365 that Microsoft flags, but we don’t see it anywhere else for months.”

Connect the dots

Cyber threat intelligence is the discipline of tracking adversaries, following bread crumbs, and producing intelligence you can use to help your team and make the other side’s life harder. To achieve that, the five-year-old MSTIC team includes former spies and government intelligence operators whose experience at places like Fort Meade, home to the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, translates immediately to their roles at Microsoft. 

MSTIC names dozens of threats, but the geopolitics are complicated: China and the United States, two of the most significant players in cyberspace and the two biggest economies on earth, are virtually never called out the way countries like Iran, Russia, and North Korea frequently are. 

“Our team uses the data, connects the dots, tells the story, tracks the actor and their behaviors,” says Jeremy Dallman, a director of strategic programs and partnerships at MSTIC. “They’re hunting the actors—where they’re moving, what they’re planning next, who they are targeting—and getting ahead of that.”

Microsoft, like other tech giants including Google and Facebook, regularly notifies people targeted by government hackers, which gives the targets the chance to defend themselves. In the last year, MSTIC has notified around 10,000 Microsoft customers that they’re being targeted by government hackers. 

New targets

Beginning in August, MSTIC spotted what’s known as a password spraying campaign. Hackers took around 2,700 educated guesses at passwords for accounts associated with an American presidential campaign, government officials, journalists, and high-profile Iranians living outside Iran. Four accounts were compromised in this attack.

“Once we understand their infrastructure—we have an IP address we know is theirs that they use for malicious purposes—we can start looking at DNS records, domains created, platform traffic,” Dallman says. “When they turn around and start using that infrastructure in this kind of attack, we see it because we’re already tracking that as a known indicator of that actor’s behavior.” 

After doing considerable reconnaissance work, Phosphorus tried to exploit the account recovery process by using targets’ real phone numbers. MSTIC has spotted Phosphorus and other government-sponsored hackers, including Russia’s Fancy Bear, repeatedly using that tactic to try to phish two-factor authentication codes for high-value targets.

What raised Microsoft’s alarm above normal on this occasion was that Phosphorus varied its standard operating procedure of going after NGOs and sanctions organizations. The cross-hairs shifted, the tactics changed, and the scope grew.

Microsoft’s sleuthing ultimately pointed the finger at Iranian hackers for targeting presidential campaigns including, Reuters reported, Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection operation.

One consequence of the 2016 US election is a rise in the sheer number of players fighting to hack political parties, campaigns, and think tanks, not to mention government itself. Election-related hacking has typically been the province of the “big four”—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. But it’s spreading to other countries, although the Microsoft researchers declined to specify what they’ve seen.

“What is different is that you’re getting additional countries joining the fray that weren’t necessarily there before,” says Jason Norton, a principal project manager on MSTIC. “The big two [Russia and China]—now, we can say they’ve been historically going after this since well before the 2016 election. But now you’re getting to see additional countries do that—poking and prodding the soft underbelly in order to know the right pieces to have an influence or impact in the future.” 

“The field is getting crowded,” Dallman agrees. “Actors are learning from each other. As they learn tactics from the more prominent names, they turn that around and use them.” 

The upcoming election is different, too, in that no one is surprised to see this malicious activity. Leading into 2016, Russian cyber activity was greeted with a collective dumbfounded naïveté, contributing to paralysis and an unsure response. Not this time.

You saw them in 2016, you saw what they did in Germany, you saw them in the French elections—all following the same MO. The 2018 midterms, too—to a lesser degree, but we still saw some of the same MO, the same actors, the same timing, the same techniques. Now we know, going into 2020, that this is the MO we’re looking for. And now we’ve started to see other countries come out and start doing other tactics.”

In 2016, it was CrowdStrike that first investigated and pointed the finger at Russian activity aiming to interfere with the American election. The US law enforcement and intelligence community later confirmed the company’s findings and eventually, after Robert Mueller’s investigation, indicted Russian hackers and detailed Moscow’s campaign.

MIT Technology Review visited Microsoft, the full summary is here.

About Those NK Miniature Warheads

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Primer: North Korea could now have as many as 60 nuclear warheads in its inventory. The new number is more than double the maximum estimate of 20 to 25 weapons by Siegfried Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor at Stanford University. Hecker was the last American scientist to visit North Korea’s nuclear weapons complex, in late 2010. Most estimates of the size of the North’s inventory have been far more conservative, generally in the range of 12 to 15 to 20.
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Japan defense white paper to concede North Korea has miniaturized nuclear warheads, report says

Reuters, Kyodo

TOKYO/BEIJING – Japan has upgraded its estimate of North Korea’s nuclear weapons capability in an upcoming annual defense white paper, saying it seems Pyongyang has already achieved the miniaturization of warheads, the Yomiuri newspaper said in an unsourced report Wednesday.

That compares with the assessment in last year’s report in which the government said it was possible North Korea had achieved miniaturization, the daily said without citing sources.

The report, to be approved at a Cabinet meeting in mid-September, will maintain the assessment that North Korea’s military activities pose a “serious and imminent threat,” the Yomiuri said.

South Korea’s 2018 defense white paper, released in January, reported that North Korea’s ability to miniaturize nuclear weapons “appears to have reached a considerable level.”

According to South Korean media reports late last year, the South Korean intelligence agency told lawmakers that North Korea had continued to miniaturize nuclear warheads even after the Singapore summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June 2018.

At that time, North Korea committed “to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” and destroyed some tunnels and buildings at its Punggye-ri nuclear test site.

But a second Trump-Kim meeting in February collapsed without an agreement, and North Korea has since resumed missile tests.

American officials have concluded for years that North Korea had likely produced miniaturized nuclear warheads. A leaked report by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2017 concluded that North Korea had successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, according to The Washington Post.

In last year’s defense white paper, Japan said “miniaturizing a nuclear weapon small enough to be mounted on a ballistic missile requires a considerably high degree of technological capacity,” and that “it is possible that North Korea has achieved the miniaturization of nuclear weapons and has developed nuclear warheads.”

Also Wednesday, North Korea voiced its eagerness via its state-run media to continue developing and testing new weapons while accusing the United States of seeking confrontation through joint military drills with the South.

“There can be no constructive dialogue while confrontation is fueled,” the Rodong Sinmun, the mouthpiece of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, said. “We have to develop, test and deploy powerful physical means essential for national defense.”

The remarks by North Korea’s most influential newspaper came a day after the United States and South Korea ended their joint military exercise that started Aug. 5. Pyongyang has denounced such drills as a rehearsal for an invasion.

North Korea has repeatedly launched projectiles, including what appeared to be short-range ballistic missiles, off its east coast since July 25, in protest against the latest U.S.-South Korea joint military exercise.

The moves came despite Trump’s revelation earlier this month that he received what he called a “beautiful” letter from Kim. Trump said Kim expressed his desire in the letter to hold more summit talks following the end of the military drill.

North Korea is scheduled to convene the second session of its top legislative body this year on Aug. 29. All eyes are on whether Kim will make a speech at the legislature to announce his policy of how to proceed with denuclearization negotiations with the United States.

At their June 30 meeting at the inter-Korean truce village of Panmunjeom, Trump and Kim agreed that Washington and Pyongyang would resume stalled denuclearization talks within weeks, but they have yet to take place.

35 North Korean cyberattacks in 17 countries

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Pwned: North Korea's Facebook clone hacked by UK teen ...

According to a South Korean politician, last fall North Korean hackers gained access to South Korea’s Defense Integrated Data Center and stole 235 gigabytes of classified military plans. More here.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — U.N. experts say they are investigating at least 35 instances in 17 countries of North Koreans using cyberattacks to illegally raise money for weapons of mass destruction programs — and they are calling for sanctions against ships providing gasoline and diesel to the country.

Last week, The Associated Press quoted a summary of a report from the experts which said that North Korea illegally acquired as much as $2 billion from its increasingly sophisticated cyber activities against financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges.

The lengthier version of the report, recently seen by the AP, reveals that neighboring South Korea was hardest-hit, the victim of 10 North Korean cyberattacks, followed by India with three attacks, and Bangladesh and Chile with two each.

Thirteen countries suffered one attack — Costa Rica, Gambia, Guatemala, Kuwait, Liberia, Malaysia, Malta, Nigeria, Poland, Slovenia, South Africa, Tunisia and Vietnam, it said.

The experts said they are investigating the reported attacks as attempted violations of U.N. sanctions, which the panel monitors.

The report cites three main ways that North Korean cyber hackers operate:

—Attacks through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication or SWIFT system used to transfer money between banks, “with bank employee computers and infrastructure accessed to send fraudulent messages and destroy evidence.”

—Theft of cryptocurrency “through attacks on both exchanges and users.”

— And “mining of cryptocurrency as a source of funds for a professional branch of the military.”

The experts stressed that implementing these increasingly sophisticated attacks “is low risk and high yield,” often requiring just a laptop computer and access to the internet.

The report to the Security Council gives details on some of the North Korean cyberattacks as well as the country’s successful efforts to evade sanctions on coal exports in addition to imports of refined petroleum products and luxury items including Mercedes Benz S-600 cars.

One Mercedes Maybach S-Class limousine and other S-600s, as well as a Toyota Land Cruiser, were transferred from North Korea to Vietnam for last February’s summit between the country’s leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump, the experts said, adding that Vietnam said it asked for but was never provided a list of vehicles being brought into the country.

The panel also said it obtained information that the Taesong Department Store in Pyongyang, which reopened in April and is selling luxury goods, is part of the Taesong Group which includes two entities under U.N. sanctions and was previously linked to procurement for North Korea’s ballistic missile programs.

The panel recommended sanctions against six North Korean vessels for evading sanctions and illegally carrying out ship-to-ship transfers of refined petroleum products.

Under U.N. sanctions, North Korea is limited to importing 500,000 barrels of such products annually including gasoline and diesel. The U.S. and 25 other countries said North Korea exceeded the limit in the first four months of 2019.

The panel also recommended sanctions against the captain, owner, and parent company of the North Korean-flagged Wise Honest, which was detained by Indonesia in April 2018 with an illegal shipment of coal.

As for North Korea’s military cooperation with other countries, the experts said Iran rejected an unnamed country’s allegation that two North Korean entities under sanctions maintained offices in Iran — the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation known as KOMID, which is the country’s primary arms dealer and main exporter of goods and equipment related to ballistic missiles and conventional weapons, and Saeng Pil Company.

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The experts said they have requested information from Rwanda on a report that North Koreans are conducting special forces training at a military camp in Gabiro. And they said they are also waiting for a response from Uganda “to multiple inquires” about reports indicating specialized training is being conducted in the country, and KOMID and North Korean workers maintain a presence.

As examples of North Korean cyberattacks, the panel said hackers in one unnamed country accessed the infrastructure managing its entire ATM system and installed malware modifying the way transactions are processed. As a result, it forced 10,000 cash distributions to individuals working for or on behalf of North Korea “across more than 20 countries in five hours.”

In Chile, the experts said, North Korean hackers demonstrated “increasing sophistication in social engineering,” by using LinkedIn to offer a job to an employee of the Chilean interbank network Redbanc, which connects the ATMs of all the country’s banks.

According to a report from one unnamed country cited by the experts, stolen funds following one cryptocurrency attack in 2018 “were transferred through at least 5,000 separate transactions and further routed to multiple countries before eventual conversion” to currency that a government has declared legal money, “making it highly difficult to track the funds.”

In South Korea, the experts said, North Korean cyber actors shifted focus in 2019 to targeting cryptocurrency exchanges, some repeatedly.

The panel said South Korea’s Bithumb, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, was reportedly attacked at least four times. It said the first two attacks in February 2017 and July 2017 each resulted in losses of approximately $7 million, while a June 2018 attack led to a $31 million loss and a March 2019 attack to a $20 million loss.

The panel said it also investigated instances of “cryptojacking” in which malware is used to infect a computer to illicitly use its resources to generate cryptocurrency. It said one report analyzed a piece of malware designed to mine the cryptocurrency Monero “and send any mined currency to servers located at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang.”