Secret Companies with Secret Objectives Near You

Posted on January 12, 2016January 12, 2016 by Denise Simon

Is the nation’s largest online retailer part of a spy network? Have you given thought to the countless databases, harvesting data, human behavior, and all the interactions you have through the internet? Is Amazon now part of a larger incubation center for the federal government? You decide.

Amazon network

Why Amazon’s Data Centers Are Hidden in US Spy Country

DefenseOne: Of all the places where Amazon operates data centers, northern Virginia is one of the most significant, in part because it’s where AWS first set up shop in 2006. It seemed appropriate that this vision quest to see The Cloud across America which began at the ostensible birthplace of the Internet should end at the place that’s often to blame when large parts of the U.S. Internet dies.

Northern Virginia is a pretty convenient place to start a cloud-services business: for reasons we’ll get into later, it’s a central region for Internet backbone. For the notoriously economical and utilitarian Amazon, this meant that it could quickly set up shop with minimal overhead in the area, leasing or buying older data centers rather than building new ones from scratch.

The ease with which AWS was able to get off the ground by leasing colocation space in northern Virginia in 2006 is the same reason that US-East is the most fragile molecule of the AWS cloud: it’s old, and it’s running on old equipment in old buildings.

Or, that’s what one might conclude from spending a day driving around looking for and at these data centers. When I contacted AWS to ask specific questions about the data-center region, how they ended up there, and the process of deciding between building data centers from scratch versus leasing existing ones, they declined to comment.

The fact that northern Virginia is home to major intelligence operations and to major nodes of network infrastructure isn’t exactly a sign of government conspiracy so much as a confluence of histories (best documented by Paul Ceruzzi in his criminally under-read history Internet Alley: High Technology In Tysons Corner, 1945-2005). To explain why a region surrounded mostly by farmland and a scattering of American Civil War monuments is a central point of Internet infrastructure, we have to go back to where a lot of significant moments in Internet history take place: the Cold War.

Postwar suburbanization and the expansion of transportation networks are occasionally overlooked, but weirdly crucial facets of the military-industrial complex. While suburbs were largely marketed to the public via barely concealed racism and the appeal of manicured “natural” landscapes, suburban sprawl’s dispersal of populations also meant increased likelihood of survival in the case of nuclear attack. Highways both facilitated suburbs and supported the movement of ground troops across the continental United States, should they need to defend it (lest we forget that the legislation that funded much of the U.S. highway system was called the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956).

Unlike Google and Facebook, AWS doesn’t aggressively brand or call attention to their data centers. They absolutely don’t give tours, and their website offers only rough approximations of the locations of their data centers, which are divided into “regions.” Within a region lies at minimum two “availability zones” and within the availability zones there are a handful of data centers.

I knew I wasn’t going to be able to find the entirety of AWS’ northern Virginia footprint, but I could probably find bits and pieces of it. My itinerary was a slightly haphazard one, based on looking for anything tied to Vadata, Inc., Amazon’s subsidiary company for all things data-center-oriented.

Facebook data-center

Google’s web crawlers don’t particularly care about AWS’ preference of staying below the radar, and searching for Vadata, Inc. sometimes pulls up addresses that probably first appeared on some deeply buried municipal paperwork and were added to Google Maps by a robot. It’s also not too hard to go straight to those original municipal documents with addresses and other cool information, like fines from utility companies and documentation of tax arrangements made specifically for AWS. (Pro tip for the rookie data-center mapper: if you’re looking for the data centers of other major companies, Foursquare check-ins are also a surprisingly rich resource). My weird hack research methods returned a handful of Vadata addresses scattered throughout the area: Ashburn, Sterling, Haymarket, Manassas, Chantilly. Much more of the report is here.

Amazon’s Cloud center

CNBC: Palantir is notorious for its secrecy, and for good reason. Its software allows customers to make sense of massive amounts of sensitive data to enable fraud detection, data security, rapid health care delivery and catastrophe response.

Government agencies are big buyers of the technology. The FBI, CIA, Department of Defense and IRS have all been customers. Between 30 and 50 percent of Palantir’s business is tied to the public sector, according to people familiar with its finances. In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, was an early investor.

Annual revenue topped $1.5 billion in 2015, sources say, meaning Palantir is bigger than top publicly traded cloud software companies like Workday and ServiceNow. It has about 1,800 employees and is growing headcount 30 percent annually, said the sources, who asked not to be named because the numbers are private.

Palantir serves up free meals for employees at 542 High Street, home to its cafeteria. A red sign reading “Private Company Meal” is attached to the window, and a neon blue sign on the inside says “Hobbit House.”

Other perks, according to people with knowledge of the company’s policies, include subsidized housing for employees who live in the neighborhood and help with monthly commuter Caltrain passes for those traveling down from San Francisco or up from San Jose. Employees who drive in get complimentary parking permits.

“They’re making a commitment here,” said Cannon.

“The idea is that it’s physically locked down and there’s no way you can take information out.” -Avivah Litan, Gartner analyst

For Palantir to stay, it has no choice but to spread out. Only one building in downtown Palo Alto even tops 100,000 square feet, and last year city officials limited total annual development in the commercial districts to 50,000 square feet.

There’s another benefit to having a disparate campus. In doing highly classified work for government agencies, some contracts require the use of particular types of units called Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIFs.

Avivah Litan, a cybersecurity analyst with Gartner, says qualities of a SCIF building include advanced biometrics for security, walls that are impenetrable by radio waves and heavily protected storage of both physical items and digital data.

“They have to make the walls so that no signals can be transmitted out of those walls,” said Litan, who is based in Washington, D.C. “The idea is that it’s physically locked down and there’s no way you can take information out.”

Having entirely separate facilities makes it easier to clear that hurdle, but even so, the vast majority of Palantir’s offices aren’t SCIFs. Read the full summary here.

Remember that Russian Found Dead in a DC Hotel?

Posted on January 10, 2016January 10, 2016 by Denise Simon

Heart-attack? Hardly….

Corruption in Russia

The genesis of Putin, Putinism

A Putin hit job in the United States?

Lesin, 56, played an instrumental role in solidifying state control over the independent television channel NTV during Putin’s first term in office, and he went on to serve as a Kremlin adviser during Putin’s second term. He now heads state-controlled Gazprom-Media, the country’s largest media holding.

Documents provided to RFE/RL by Wicker’s office — and corroborated by public property registries — show that companies associated with Lesin’s immediate family purchased the three properties in the Los Angeles area.

These include a 13,000-square-foot Beverly Hills home purchased in August 2011 for $13.8 million by Dastel Coroporation, where Lesin’s son, Anton Lessine, served as a corporate officer, according to public records.

The address of this home and Dastel’s business address are the same, according to public records and a lawsuit pending in California Superior Court.

The property is located in Beverly Park, a swanky gated community with round-the-clock security and whose residents have included actor Samuel L. Jackson and professional basketball legend Magic Johnson, according to “The Los Angeles Times.”

Dastel also purchased 10,600-square-foot Brentwood home for $9 million in 2012.

A third home, totaling more than 6,800 square feet, was purchased in Beverly Hills for $5.6 million by HFC Management, a firm that lists Lesin’s daughter, Ekaterina Lesina, as a company officer.

Was Putin’s Media Chief Ready to Snitch Before He Dropped Dead?

DailyBeast: The D.C. cops won’t say what killed Mikhail Lesin—or what he was doing in a hotel room there. But all signs point to the former Kremlin propaganda boss cutting a deal with the FBI.

When police found Mikhail Lesin dead in a Washington, D.C., hotel room, the most interesting question wasn’t the cause of his demise, but what he was doing in the United States in the first place.

The former propaganda chief for Russian president Vladimir Putin, nicknamed “the bulldozer” for his history of rolling over his opposition, Lesin had been under scrutiny by the FBI and the Justice Department for potential money laundering and violation of corruption laws. Lesin was suspected of hiding ill-gotten gains in nearly $30 million worth of luxury real estate in southern California, an astounding set of assets for a man supposedly collecting a civil servant’s salary. He’d also been considered for sanctions that would have prevented him from obtaining a visa to enter the United States.

Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi who has spent years looking into corruption and human-rights abuses in Russia, had asked the Justice Department to investigate Lesin. In December 2014, the department confirmed it had referred Lesin’s case to the Criminal Division and to the FBI. While officials declined to say whether they formally opened an investigation, several close watchers of Lesin’s case told The Daily Beast they thought it was all but certain that he was being pursued by U.S. law enforcement. And if he wasn’t under active criminal investigation, the FBI had enough evidence to consider opening a case, they said. A bureau spokesperson declined to comment on the matter.

So why did Lesin, who was 57, tempt fate by entering the United States this past November?

The purpose of his visit was never made clear. But he was staying in a mid-range hotel on Washington’s DuPont Circle. While not shabby, it’s doesn’t seem the kind of place that attracts people who buy multimillion-dollar estates. It does, though, offer a comparatively low per-night rate, perhaps more in line with U.S. government budgets, and is known to host foreign government officials and visitors on exchange programs. It’s also located a short drive from FBI and Justice Department headquarters.

These are the broad strokes of Lesin’s case. And in some foreign policy circles in Washington—as well as in Russian media—they have fueled speculation that Lesin was murdered after coming to Washington to cut a deal with the FBI.

Lesin certainly would have had a lot to say about Putin’s inner circle—he worked with, and reportedly owed money to, some of the most powerful men in Russian media and finance. And he would have had a powerful incentive to cooperate with U.S. authorities, namely hanging onto his several mansions in Los Angeles, which potentially could have been seized. At least two of the homes are known to be occupied, respectively, by his daughter and his son, a Hollywood film producer whose star is on the rise.

Adding to the mystery, the precise cause of Lesin’s untimely demise hasn’t been revealed. Almost immediately, the broadcasting outfit RT (Russia Today), widely seen as a Kremlin mouthpiece, reported that Lesin died of a “heart attack,” citing an unnamed “family member.”

But a spokesperson for the Washington, D.C., police department told The Daily Beast that Lesin’s death is still under investigation. And although a coroner performed an autopsy nearly two months ago, the police aren’t saying how he died. That’s an unusually long time not to publicly state a cause of death.

The conspiracy theories are arguably well-founded, because it wouldn’t be the first time someone who posed a political threat to Putin wound up dead under unusual circumstances, including poisoning.

Lesin was also being squeezed by the U.S. government. Two years ago he’d been nominated by human-rights groups for the so-called Magnitsky list of Russian human-rights violators, which would have allowed Washington to deny him a visa and seize his assets in this country. Lesin was not placed on the public list, which consists mainly of mid-level officials not as influential as the former propaganda chief. But U.S. officials maintain a classified annex which reportedly includes more senior Russians, including those closer to Putin. It’s not known whether Lesin was on that list, but activists lobbied hard to put him there.

He would have been an ideal candidate. Not only was he one of RT’s founding fathers, credited with conceiving of the network while working for Putin in order to counter what he saw as anti-Russia journalism in the West. (“It’s been a long time since I was scared by the word propaganda,” Lesin said in 2007, according to RT. “We need to promote Russia internationally. Otherwise, we’d just look like roaring bears on the prowl.”)

The Washington, D.C., police department told The Daily Beast that Lesin’s death is still under investigation. And although a coroner performed an autopsy nearly two months ago, the police aren’t saying how he died. That’s an unusually long time not to publicly state a cause of death.

Lesin was also a longtime Putin crony, and he played a central role in an early project by the Russian strongman to gut the country’s independent television station, NTV, which had aired critical reports about government corruption, the war in Chechnya, and had become a soapbox for prominent Putin critics. While Lesin was serving as the information minister, Russia jailed NTV’s founder and majority shareholder, Vladimir Gusinsky.

“While he was there, the information minister made an offer: Gusinsky could have his freedom if he agreed to transfer his media holdings to Gazprom, the state-owned energy monopoly,” according to Russian journalist Vladimir Kara-Muzra, who has probed Lesin’s financial and real estate holdings. It was a naked power play that the European Court of Human Rights found was politically motivated and amounted to state-sanctioned blackmail.

Gusinksy didn’t end up going along with the deal to hand over the media company. But Gazprom took over NTV anyway–by force–and in 2013 Lesin became the head of Gazprom-Media, an actual state-run media organization. RT, which reported the cause of Lesin’s death before a medical examiner had even seen his body, merely receives funding from the state.

The Gazprom takeover has raised concerns among U.S. investigators that Lesin may have come by a fortune through illegal seizures of private property, and then laundered those proceeds by stashing them in American real estate, according to two sources who have followed Lesin’s finances and asked not to be identified.

Landing Lesin could have led investigators to other, even bigger fish. As Wicker wrote to then-Attorney General Eric Holder in 2014, Lesin “may also have close business ties with individuals subject to U.S. sanctions,” as well as organizations, including Bank Rossiya, which is closely linked to Gazprom, and the bank’s owner, Yury Kovalchuk, a billionaire who ranks among Russia’s richest people, is reportedly close to Putin personally, and was sanctioned by the Treasury Department after Russia invaded Crimea.

If Lesin were found to be violating U.S. money-laundering laws, it could provide a rare opportunity to snare a senior Putin aide. After Wicker pressed the issue, relying in part on public property records that clearly linked the L.A. mansions to Lesin, the Justice Department considered whether to go after him.

Following the news of his death, the Kremlin issued a statement on behalf of Putin, noting “The president has a high appreciation for Mikhail Lesin’s massive contribution to the creation of modern Russian mass media.”

But having Lesin as an informant would been a big contribution to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence. And the information that Wicker and his staff, as well as human-rights groups and journalists, dug up on Lesin may have pushed him closer to the FBI’s arms.

About two weeks after the Justice Department informed Wicker that the allegations against Lesin were referred to the FBI, Lesin resigned as the head of Gazprom-Media, citing unspecified “family reasons.” Kara-Murza, the journalist and Putin critic, who himself fell mysteriously ill last summer, has directly linked the department’s announcement to Lesin’s stepping down and said it showed that the threat of sanctions and prosecution could be used to bring down corrupt Russian officials.

“That’s just one example of how effective this process can be if it’s applied properly, if it’s done against the right people,” Kara-Murza said in remarks at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, in October. Kara-Murza declined to discuss Lesin’s case with The Daily Beast, citing the Latin admonition “de mortuis nihil nisi bonum.” Of the dead, [say] nothing, unless good. “And I have nothing good to say about him.”

Meanwhile, Lesin’s children have also kept mum. His son, Anton Lessine (the surnames are spelled differently), didn’t respond to a request for comment, and his daughter couldn’t be reached. Anton has been on a roll in Hollywood, helping financing high-profile movies with A-list talent. He was the executive producer of the Arnold Schwarzenegger action vehicle Sabotage, the Brad Pitt WWII tank pic Fury, 2015’s Bill Murray comedy Rock the Kasbah, and 2016’s transgenerational buddy flick Dirty Grandpa, starring Robert DeNiro and Zac Effron.

Times are good for the son of the ex-Putin aide, who seems to have come out of nowhere in the famously hard-to-crack world of big-budget filmmaking. He recently purchased a mansion in L.A.’s Pacific Palisades for an asking price of nearly $4 million. How exactly the Lesin family came into such good fortune is a question that has piqued the interest of U.S. investigators.

As might another question: Was Lesin in debt, and ready to flee Russia for a new life? After Lesin’s death, The Moscow Times reported that he may have stepped down from Gazprom-Media after losing an internal power struggle. Jobless and with high-level enemies, Lesin also owed “a huge amount of money” to Kovalchuk, the billionaire banker, which he didn’t intended to repay, the news organization reported, citing anonymous sources.

“He also underestimated his rivals,” The Moscow Times wrote. “The heads of three of Russia’s major TV channels complained to President Putin that Lesin had begun behaving as if he was their boss, as he had been while press minister.”

The walls were closing in on Lesin–in Washington and in Moscow. Perhaps Lesin’s trip to that DuPont Circle hotel was his first step towards a new life. But if he’d become an enemy of Putin and his friends, even the FBI might not have been able to save him.

Yes!, the FBI’s Successful Child Porn Sting

Posted on January 10, 2016January 10, 2016 by Denise Simon

FBI hacks world’s largest child porn site, 1,300 arrested

The ‘unprecedented’ sting op saw 1,300 people arrested.

The site, known as ‘Playpen’, launched in August 2014 and allowed users to sign up and upload images, primarily for “the advertisement and distribution of child pronagraphy”. This websites isn’t like an adult pornography website as it’s on the dark web, adult pornography websites such as fulltube you can find simply by searching in your normal browser but sites like Playpen you need to access the dark web first.

Within a month of Playpen’s launch, the website had garnered nearly 60,000 members. By 2015 that number had jumped to almost 215,000, with 11,000 unique users visiting the site each week, and a total of 117,000 posts.

Many of those posts contained some of the most extreme child abuse images one could imagine, according to FBI testimony seen byMotherboard.

Although the website also included advice on how users could avoid online detection, a sting operation began in February 2015 when the FBI hacked into the website’s server, but decided not to shut it down.

The bureau took the ‘unprecedented’ measure of running Playpen to spy on its users and hack their IP addresses, leading to the arrests.

According to Motherboard, a public defender for one of the accused called the operation an “extraordinary expansion of government surveillance and its use of illegal search methods on a massive scale.”

*** The Dark Web and the FBI

Motherboard: While it looks like several of those already charged will plead guilty to online child pornography crimes, one defense team has made the extraordinary step of arguing to have their client’s case thrown out completely. Their main argument is that the FBI, in briefly running the child pornography site from its own servers in Virginia, itself distributed an “untold” amount of illegal material.

“There is no law enforcement exemption, or statutory exemption for the distribution of child pornography,” Colin Fieman, one of the federal public defenders filing the motion to dismiss the indictment, claimed in a phone interview earlier this week. Jay Michaud, a Vancouver teacher arrested in July 2015, is also being represented by Linda Sullivan.

“THE GOVERNMENT’S OPERATION OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST ‘HIDDEN SERVER’ CHILD PORNOGRAPHY SITE AND ITS GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION OF UNTOLD NUMBERS OF PICTURES AND VIDEOS IS OUTRAGEOUS CONDUCT THAT SHOULD RESULT IN DISMISSAL OF THE INDICTMENT,” a court filing dated November 20, 2015 reads.

Fieman and Sullivan reason that if the methods of the investigation that supposedly identified his client “cannot be reconciled with fundamental expectations of decency and fairness,” then the indictment should be dismissed.

A section of the filing, which outlines the defense lawyers’ argument.

In February 2015, the FBI seized the server of “Playpen,” which court documents described as “the largest remaining known child pornography hidden service in the world.” Instead of shutting the site down straight away, however, the FBI moved Playpen to a government controlled server in Virginia, and deployed a network investigative technique (NIT)—the agency’s term for a hacking tool—in an attempt to identify people logging into the site. This NIT, according to other court documents, collected approximately “1300 true internet protocol (IP) addresses” between February 20 and March 4.

In their argument, Fieman and Sullivan point to the Department of Justice’s own view on the harm caused by the proliferation of child pornography. “Once an image is on the Internet, it is irretrievable and can continue to circulate forever,” the Department of Justice website reads. In an April 2015 press release, US Attorney Josh J. Minkler said that “Producing and distributing child pornography re-victimizes our children every time it is passed from one person to another.”

In essence, the lawyers’ point is that the FBI was, by running Playpen from its own servers, essentially distributing child pornography.

So, according to their argument, it is unclear how the “Government can possibly justify the massive distribution of child pornography that it accomplished in this case.”

They then posit that, rather than taking over the site to deploy a bulk hacking technique, and allowing the site to continue to distribute child pornography material in the process, the FBI could have posted individual links to malware-laden files on the site without running it from their own servers. Or, after seizing the site, the agency could have redirected users to a spoofed version of it, minus the child pornography material.

“We are in a protracted street fight with the Department of Justice and the FBI”

Instead, the FBI “continued to distribute thousands of illicit pictures and videos to thousands of visitors,” the filing states. It compares the case to “Operation Fast and Furious”: Between 2009 and 2011, law enforcement agents infamously proliferated illegal weapons in an attempt to trace them to Mexican drug cartels. Some of the weapons, however, ended up being used in the murder of a US Border Patrol agent.

The Department of Justice did not reply to repeated requests for comment. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication, but a spokesperson previously told Motherboard, “We are not able to comment on ongoing investigations, or describe the use of specific investigative techniques.”

This argument to dismiss the indictment is just one of the more recent phases of a heated legal back-and-forth between Michaud’s lawyers and the government. Since October, dozens of documents have been filed in the case, including motions to seal documents, affidavits, modifications to protective orders, and delays to responses.

“We are in a protracted street fight with the Department of Justice and the FBI,” Fieman told Motherboard.

Some of the issues circle around evidence: the defense argues that its client has not had access to important discovery information. It has had some success on that front though: on December 10, the Government wrote that the defense counsel will be provided with the computer code of the NIT under a protective order. The defense is also expected to receive a detailed list of the number of child pornography materials on Playpen while it was being run from an FBI server.

The government’s response to the motion to dismiss the indictment is currently sealed. It’s unclear how the government has replied to the lawyer’s arguments, but this move to have the indictment against a suspected online child pornographer totally scraped is a surprising and dramatic turn in a case that continues to grow in scope.

11 20 2015 Motion to Dismiss Indictment

Russia’s Cyber Warfare, Threat Matrix to USA

Posted on January 7, 2016January 7, 2016 by Denise Simon

Cyber Warfare

The CipherBrief Piret Pernik

The Russian government is considered to be one of the most advanced cyber actors globally, with highly sophisticated cyber capabilities on par with the other major cyber powers. Open source information about Russian cyber programs and funding is scarce, but an ultimate goal of the government is to gain information superiority, both in peacetime and in military conflicts.

According to U.S. intelligence, Russia is a top nation state threat to American interests. Russian armed forces have been establishing a cyber command and a specialized branch to carry out computer network operations. It is likely that Russia aspires to integrate cyber into all military services. For example, the Russian government news agency TASS has reported that strategic missile forces are establishing special cyber units, and according to Russian general Yuri Kuznetsov, cyber defense units in the Russian armed forces will acquire operational capabilities by 2017.

Researchers from China have observed that Russian armed forces have rehearsed both attacking an adversary’s cyber targets and defending themselves against cyber attacks. It is believed that Russia, in addition to its espionage over the last decade against Western governments, is conducting its own active research and development of cyber weapons. It has also been alleged that FSB develops sophisticated computer malware programs.

However, despite a belief shared by many that Russia possesses capabilities to conduct cyber network attacks with physical effects equivalent to a kinetic attack, in the recent hybrid conflicts in Georgia and Ukraine, only a limited use of cyber attacks has been recorded. No physical damage, or disruption of critical infrastructure or weapons has been reported, but there is evidence that Russian actors are capable of taking down services. For example, Russian APT28 (Pawn Storm/Sofacy/Tsar Team) shut off transmissions of French TV5 Monde for 18 hours, and its cyber attacks allegedly resulted in significant damage to the channel’s infrastructure. Moreover, the Ukrainian security service (SBU) reported in December 2015 that Russian security services have planted malware into the networks of Ukrainian regional power companies. Power outages are reported to have occurred shortly thereafter. However, due to the lack of investigation and evidence, it is not possible to attribute these outages to any actors.

The majority of analysts concede that Russian cyber attacks have been closely coordinated with military operations both in Georgia and Ukraine. As part of their information warfare campaign, Russians used electronic warfare (EW) and signals intelligence in both theatres. Much less known is the fact that in March 2014, Russian EW forces rerouted internet traffic from Crimean servers to Russian servers, most likely for eavesdropping purposes. There is also consensus that the effects of Russian cyber attacks have been limited – in Georgia, cyber attacks created a military advantage only at the operational and tactical levels, and in Ukraine, Russian cyber attacks had only a short term tactical effect. Hence in both theatres, strategic effects (diminishing opponent’s will or capacity to resist) and military effects (degrading performance of opponent’s military) were not achieved.

The most sophisticated cyber capabilities used in these conflicts have been cyber espionage campaigns sponsored or supported by the Russian government. For example, security companies have gathered evidence indicating that APT28 (which targeted the Georgian government), and APT29 (whose targets are consistent with Russian government interests in regards to the Ukrainian conflict) were both sponsored by the Russian government. Russian APTs possess sophisticated cyber capabilities (e.g. ability to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities, target mobile devices, evade detection, and hide operational command and control). Furthermore, a prominent cyber espionage campaign against the Ukrainian military and government officials, Operation Armageddon, has been attributed by SBU to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). This has been corroborated by technical evidence from an independent security company.

In addition to gathering intelligence, some Russian APTs are able to remotely access industrial control systems (ICS). A cyber espionage group Sandworm (that has been active in Ukraine) uses BlackEnergy malware that is believed to also be embedded into critical infrastructure in the U.S. It is interesting to note that four Russian APTs have been using particular types of malware, which suggests links between these actors.

Russia is developing asymmetric measures to offset the West’s technological and conventional edge. While total information superiority has not been attained, the final outcome of the cyber build up is uncertain, and it will continue to be a topic of concern for businesses and nations for the foreseeable future.

Iran unveils second underground missile site

Posted on January 5, 2016January 5, 2016 by Denise Simon

Oh, wonder if the Obama will give Tehran an Academy award for Iran’s theatrics, behavior and violations.

DUBAI (Reuters) – Iran unveiled a new underground missile depot on Tuesday with state television showing Emad precision-guided missiles in store which the United States says can take a nuclear warhead and violate a 2010 U.N. Security Council resolution.

The defiant move to publicize Iran’s missile program seemed certain to irk the United States as it plans to dismantle nearly all sanctions on Iran under a breakthrough nuclear agreement.

Tasnim news agency and state television video said the underground facility, situated in mountains and run by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, was inaugurated by the speaker of parliament, Ali Larijani. Release of one-minute video followed footage of another underground missile depot last October.

The United States says the Emad, which Iran tested in October, would be capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and U.S. officials say Washington will respond to the Emad tests with fresh sanctions against Iranian individuals and businesses linked to the program.

Iran’s boasting about its missile capabilities are a challenge for U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration as the United States and European Union plan to dismantle nearly all international sanctions against Tehran under the nuclear deal reached in July.

Iran has abided by the main terms of the nuclear deal, which require it to give up material that world powers feared could be used to make an atomic weapon and accept other restrictions on its nuclear program.

But President Hassan Rouhani ordered his defense minister last week to expand the missile program.

The Iranian missiles under development boast much improved accuracy over the current generation, which experts say is likely to improve their effectiveness with conventional warheads.

The Revolutionary Guards’ second-in-command, Brigadier General Hossein Salami, said last Friday that Iran’s depots and underground facilities are so full that they do not know how to store their new missiles.

***

Iranian-Saudi Tensions May Distract Iran’s Efforts to Attack Israel

InvestigativeProject: The dramatic escalation in the Iranian-Saudi Arabian rivalry poses critical potential ramifications for Israeli national security, according to the former head of Israel’s National Security Council, Yaakov Amidror.

Amidror – also formerly the head of Israeli military intelligence – told the Jerusalem Post that he expects the Iranian-Saudi crisis to prolong the Syrian civil war, leading both sides to increase support for their respective proxies in that country.

Such a scenario can intensify Israeli concerns of unpredictable and radical terrorist organizations consolidating bases of operations on the Jewish state’s northern borders.

However, other analysts view Syrian fragmentation as a strategic benefit – at least temporarily removing Syria as a conventional military threat and forcing Iranian proxies, including Hizballah, to divert resources and manpower to the Syrian front instead of conducting major attacks against Israel.

According to this perspective, Iran will also be more preoccupied with confronting Saudi Arabia in other regional theaters – including Bahrain, Yemen, and Iraq.

“That doesn’t meant they won’t do anything [toward Israel]. This doesn’t mean, for instance, that this will influence Hezbollah [backed by Iran] not to carry out revenge attacks against Israel. But it means that whenever there is something, there will be someone in Iran who will say that they have other problems to think about; we will not be the only issue they will be focusing on,” Amidror said.

This assessment supports other analyses that believe Hizballah failed to effectively retaliate to Israel’s reported assassination of arch-terrorist Samir Kuntar. On Monday, Hizballah detonated a large explosive on the Israel-Lebanon border, targeting two military vehicles. Israel said it suffered no casualties. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) followed with artillery fire against Hizballah targets in Lebanon, but limited its response to avoid escalating tensions.

The relatively weak show of force from Hizballah suggests that the terrorist organization continues to be bogged down in the Syrian civil war, unwilling and incapable of seriously challenging Israel at the moment. Fighting in Syria has cost Hizballah as much as a quarter of its fighters, Israeli military affairs journalist Yossi Melman points out.

Those losses “neutralized the Shi’ite-Lebanese organization’s ability to act against Israel,” he writes. At the least, it makes the prospect of opening a second front with Israel less appealing. Hizballah still enjoys an arsenal of more than 100,000 rockets it can fire at Israel when it opts for a confrontation.

Even though Hizballah and other Iranian proxies continue to enhance their presence in the Golan Heights for the purposes of targeting Israel, recent Iranian-Saudi tensions will likely force terrorist organizations at Iran’s behest to focus more of their efforts and resources on other fronts beyond the Jewish state.