Category Archives: Terror

Is the U.S. Hacking Back? Uh Huh

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Like here perhaps? This could lead to a real devastating condition as it should be remembered what Russia did to Ukraine just a few months ago, hacked their power system.

Russia cyber attack: Large hack ‘hits government’

BBC: A “professional” cyber attack has hit Russian government bodies, the country’s intelligence service says.

A “cyber-spying virus” was found in the networks of about 20 organisations, the Federal Security Service (FSB) said.

The report comes as Russia stands accused over data breaches involving the Democratic Party in the US.

The Russian government has denied involvement and has denounced the “poisonous anti-Russian” rhetoric coming out of Washington.

The FSB did not say who it believed was responsible for hacking Russian networks, but said the latest hack resembled “much-spoken-about” cyber-spying, without elaborating.

What are Trump’s ties to Russia?

Democrat hack: Who is Guccifer 2.0?

It said the hack had been “planned and made professionally”, and targeted state organisations, scientific and defence companies, as well as “country’s critically important infrastructures”.

The malware allowed those responsible to switch on cameras and microphones within the computer, take screenshots and track what was being typed by monitoring keyboard strokes, the FSB said.

In the US, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have both suffered hacks in recent weeks.

Emails from the DNC were later distributed by the Wikileaks organisation, and showed party officials had been biased against Bernie Sanders in his primary race against Hillary Clinton.

US officials believe the cyber attacks were committed by Russian agents.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied being responsible, and Mrs Clinton’s presidential rival Donald Trump said he had no ties to Russia.

The Clinton campaign said on Friday that an analytics data program, which it shared with other entities, had been accessed by hackers.

But, her press secretary Nick Merrill said, there was “no evidence that our internal systems have been compromised”.

The FBI said it was investigating the extent of any hacking.

The NSA Is Likely ‘Hacking Back’ Russia’s Cyber Squads

  • By Lee Ferran ASPEN, Color ado — Jul 30, 2016
  • U.S. government hackers at the National Security Agency are likely targeting Russian government-linked hacking teams to see once and for all if they’re responsible for the massive breach at the Democratic National Committee, according to three former senior intelligence officials. It’s a job that the current head of the NSA’s elite hacking unit said they’ve been called on to do many times before.

ABC: Robert Joyce, chief of the NSA’s shadowy Tailored Access Operations, declined to comment on the DNC hack specifically, but said in general that the NSA has technical capabilities and legal authorities that allow the agency to “hack back” suspected hacking groups, infiltrating their systems to gather intelligence about their operations in the wake of a cyber attack.

“In terms of the foreign intelligence mission, one of the things we have to do is try to understand who did a breach, who is responsible for a breach,” Joyce told ABC News in a rare interview this week. “So we will use the NSA’s authorities to pursue foreign intelligence to try to get back into that collection, to understand who did it and get the attribution. That’s hard work, but that’s one of the responsibilities we have.”

 

Predators Exploiting Personal Info in DNC Hack

‘Beyond a Reasonable Doubt,’ Russians Hacked DNC, Analyst Says

 

The NSA deferred direct questions about its potential involvement in the DNC hack investigation to the FBI, which is the leading agency in that probe. Representatives for the bureau have not returned ABC News’ request for comment. Lisa Monaco, President Obama’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser whose responsibilities include cyber policy, declined to comment.

A former senior U.S. official said it was a “fair bet” the NSA was using its hackers’ technical prowess to infiltrate two Russian hacking teams that the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike alleged broke into the DNC’s system and were link ed to two separate Russian intelligence agencies, as first reported by The Washington Post. In some past unrelated cases, the former official said, NSA hackers have been able to watch from the inside as malicious actors conduct their operations in real time.

Rajesh De, former general counsel at the NSA, said that if the NSA is targeting the Russian groups, it could be doing it under its normal foreign intelligence authorities, as the Russian government is “clearly … a valid intelligence target.” Or the NSA could be working under the FBI’s investigative authority and hacking the suspects’ systems as part of technical support for investigators, said De, now head of the cyber security practice at the law firm Mayer Brown.

In the aftermath of an attack, a CIA official said that if there is an “overseas component,” the NSA would be involved along with the CIA’s own newly formed Directorate of Digital Innovation. The two agencies would work, potentially along with others in government, to sniff out suspects’ “digital dust.”

“It turns out that the people who carry out these activities use their keyboards for other things too,” said Sean Roche, Associate Deputy Director for Digital Innovation at the CIA. Any attribution investigations, Roche said, would also include offline information — the product of old fashioned, on-the-street intelligence gathering.

Like Joyce, Roche said he was speaking generally and could not comment on the DNC hack.

 

While U.S. officials have told news outlets anonymously they concur with Crowdstrike and other private cybersecurity firms who have pointed to Russian culpability, the U.S. government has declined to publicly blame the Russians.

The Russian government has said the hacking allegations are “absurd”.

 

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the audience at the Aspen Security Forum Thursday that the U.S. intelligence community was “not quite ready to make a call on attribution,” though he said there were “just a few usual suspects out there.” The next day CIA Director John Brennan said that attribution is “to be determined” and a lot of people were “jumping to conclusions.”

 

Professional hackers often use proxies, Brennan said, so investigators have to make two or three “hops” before tracing cyber attacks back to a state’s intelligence agency, which makes the attribution process more difficult.

 

Kenneth Geers, a former cyber analyst at the Pentagon who recently published a book about Russian cyber operations, told ABC News earlier this week that he didn’t necessarily doubt it was the Russians, but said that even in the best cases when doing cyber investigations, “You can have a preponderance of evidence — and in nation-state cases , that’s likely what you’ll have — but that’s all you’ll have.”

 

That, he said, opens the possibility, however remote, that a very clever hacker or hacking team could be framing the Russians.

 

Michael Buratowski, the senior vice president of cybersecurity services at Fidelis Cybersecurity which studied some of the malicious code, said the evidence pointing to the Russians was so convincing, “it would have had to have been a very elaborate scheme” for it really to have been anyone else.

 

The NSA’s Joyce said that in general it’s very difficult to properly frame someone for a comp lex attack, since too many details have to be exactly right, requiring a tremendous amount of expertise and precision.

 

But Joyce said that before the U.S. government pins blame on anyone for a cyber attack publicly, the evidence has to pass an “extremely high bar.”

 

So when they do come forward, he said, perhaps based on the results of attribution techniques that have not been publicly described, “You should bank on it.”

The U.S. has had a Russian Problem of Espionage for Decades

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What is terrifying and pathetic is the Obama White House and both Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry have been stooges of Putin….groveling for normalcy just as they have with the regime of Iran. This is an administration that is normalizing relations with all terror regimes across the globe that include North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. Hillary said that Bashir al Assad of Syria was a reformer when 400,000 Syrians are dead and 4-5 million have left their homes. Then, we all remember that the Obama White House negotiated with Qatar to released 5 Taliban commanders in exchange for one Army deserter. Talks have been ongoing with the Taliban for years until just recently.

But back to Russia….before the hacking, to sway and or interfere with U.S. elections.

Related reading: Hey FBI, the Investigation into the DNC Hacking is Over Here

No one is admitting that Russian in cadence with WikiLeaks has hacked Hillary’s campaign systems, DCC and the DNC as well as other government systems. Why? Perhaps diplomacy due to talks continued talks with Iran and ending the civil war in Syria. Remember that ‘red-line’ on chemical weapons use.

So, let’s go back a way, like over a decade and up to just a couple of years ago when it came to Russian spies in the United States, shall we? This is for perspective and how the Obama administration including his National Security Council and the State Department continue to ‘omit’ history…

Espionage continues and tactics have not changed for Russia where cyber intrusions have replaced in country operatives, however a look at those operatives’ skills and missions must not be overlooked or dismissed.

Image result for russian spies caught

Let’s begin with Anna Chapman, the Russian spy.

DailyNews: Sultry former Russian secret agent Anna Chapman ended an exchange with NBC News almost before it began when she was pressed about her playful Twitter marriage proposal to NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

Here is the official criminal complaint and summary of how the FBI tracked her actions filed in 2010. The file also includes an additional spy Mikhail Sememko. This actually began in 1990….yes 1990.

But actually there were 8 more Russian spies and this is the criminal complaint for that case. What is fascinating here is the many stopovers in Latin America…..

The spying spree finally came to its end in the summer of 2014, when the trio were propositioned by a self-described investor who wanted to develop casinos in Russia. The scheme immediately drew red flags among the group, with Sporyshev offering that the proposal felt “like some sort of set-up.”
But despite his misgivings, Sporyshev didn’t stop Buryakov from meeting with the supposed investor, who was, in fact, an FBI informant.
For six hours on Aug. 28, Buryakov and the informant met in the anemic gambling metropolis Atlantic City. The informant, who claimed he had a well-placed source in the U.S. government, handed Buryakov documents that were labeled “Internal Treasury Use Only” and contained a list of Russians who were essentially blacklisted from doing business with the United States.
The valuable document earned the informant another meeting that day, when he offered Buryakov another official document that contained “a list of Russian banks… on which to impose sanctions,” according to the criminal complaint. More from DailyBeast.

Then there was a dead Russian, Mikhail Lesin. found in a hotel in Dupont Circle, Washington DC. A story that came and went real fast.

Image result for russian Mikhail Lesin

Mr. Lesin was a major figure in Russian media after the fall of the Soviet Union, first as an advertising executive and later as a top government official and media executive.  

He had deep connections to the Russian state at the time Mr. Putin was reasserting his authority over the country’s rambunctious and freewheeling media. He was a crucial figure in that process, which began with the takeover of Russia’s first independent television channel, NTV, in the early 2000s, and was viewed with bitterness by many Russian journalists at that time.

 

 

Clinton Campaign Refused FBI Request for Computer Logs

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Details, dates and motivations are everything when it comes decisions to cooperate with the FBI or not. Seems the powerbrokers in the Clinton campaign headquarters in Brooklyn did not trust the FBI either but one department within the agency is different from another.

Image result for clinton campaign headquarters brooklyn Reuters Image result for clinton campaign headquarters brooklyn

FBI warned Clinton campaign last spring of cyberattack

Yahoo: The FBI warned the Clinton campaign that it was a target of a cyberattack last March, just weeks before the Democratic National Committee discovered it had been penetrated by hackers it now believes were working for Russian intelligence, two sources who have been briefed on the matter told Yahoo News.

In a meeting with senior officials at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters, FBI agents laid out concerns that cyberhackers had used so-called spear-phishing emails as part of an attempt to penetrate the campaign’s computers, the sources said. One of the sources said agents conducting a national security investigation asked the Clinton campaign to turn over internal computer logs as well as the personal email addresses of senior campaign officials. But the campaign, through its lawyers, declined to provide the data, deciding that the FBI’s request for sensitive personal and campaign information data was too broad and intrusive, the source said.

A second source who had been briefed on the matter and who confirmed the Brooklyn meeting said agents provided no specific information to the campaign about the identity of the cyberhackers or whether they were associated with a foreign government. The source said the campaign was already aware of attempts to penetrate its computers and had taken steps to thwart them, emphasizing that there is still no evidence that the campaign’s computers had actually been successfully penetrated.

Related reading: Also Hacked, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

Related reading: Hey FBI, the Investigation into the DNC Hacking is Over Here

But the potential that the intruders were associated with a foreign government should have come as no surprise to the Clinton campaign, said several sources knowledgeable about the investigation. Chinese intelligence hackers were widely reported to have penetrated both the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008.

The Brooklyn warning also could raise new questions about why the campaign and the DNC didn’t take the matter more seriously. It came just four months after the DNC had also been contacted by FBI agents alerting its information technology specialists about a cyberattack on its computers, the sources told Yahoo News. As with the warning to the Clinton campaign, the FBI initially provided no details to the DNC.

As Yahoo News first reported this week, in early May a DNC consultant who was investigating Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s work for pro-Putin political figures in Ukraine alerted senior committee officials that she had been notified by Yahoo security that her personal email account had been targeted by “state-sponsored actors.” The DNC had already realized that it was the victim of a serious breach, but the red flag from the staffer prompted committee security officials to conclude for the first time that the suspected cyberhackers were likely associated with the Russian government.

By mid-May, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was telling reporters that US. Intelligence officials “already had some indications” of hacks into political campaigns that were likely linked to foreign governments and that “we’ll probably have more.”

In a talk at the Aspen Security Forum Thursday, Clapper said the U.S. government is not “quite ready yet” to “make a public call” on who was behind the cyberassault on the DNC, but he suggested one of “the usual suspects” is likely to blame. “We don’t know enough [yet] to … ascribe a motivation, regardless of who it may have been,” Clapper said.

Related reading: The Covert Russian Influence, Targets Europe/USA

Clapper’s comments come amid a mounting debate within the Obama administration about whether to publicly blame the Russian government for the cyberattack on the DNC. (A senior law enforcement official told Yahoo News that the Russians were “most probably” involved in the cyberattack, but cautioned that the investigation is ongoing.) On Wednesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and California Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, wrote President Obama calling for a stern response, asserting that if the accounts of Russian involvement are true, “It would represent an unprecedented attempt to meddle in American domestic politics.”

But Clapper is reportedly among a number of U.S. intelligence officials who have resisted calls to publicly blame the Russians, viewing it as likely the kind of activity that most intelligence agencies engage in. “[I’m] taken aback a bit by … the hyperventilation over this,” Clapper said during his Aspen appearance, adding in a sarcastic tone, “I’m shocked somebody did some hacking. That’s never happened before.”

The confirmation that the campaign was warned by the FBI as early as March of an attempted breach of its computers is a further indication that the scope of the possible Russian attack may have been far wider and extensive than the official DNC accounts.

The FBI’s request to turn over internal computer logs and personal email information came at an awkward moment for the Clinton campaign, said the source, familiar with the campaign’s internal deliberations. At the time, the FBI was still actively and aggressively conducting a criminal investigation into whether Clinton had compromised national security secrets by sending classified emails through a private computer server in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. There were already press reports, to date unconfirmed, that the investigation might have expanded to include dealings relating to the Clinton Foundation. Campaign officials had reason to fear that any production of campaign computer logs and personal email accounts could be used to further such a probe. At the Brooklyn meeting, FBI agents emphasized that the request for data was unrelated to the separate probe into Clinton’s email server. But after deliberating about the bureau’s request, and in light of the lack of details provided by the FBI and the absence of a subpoena, the Clinton campaign chose to turn down the bureau’s request, the source said.

Documents Recovered in Manbij in Northern Syria, FBI Warning

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FBI director: The terrorism threat out of Syria is ‘an order of magnitude greater than anything we’ve seen before’

BusinessInsider:As a number of ISIS attacks have rocked Europe, it can be difficult to remember that the group is largely on the back foot.

“They are on the run,”US Secretary of State John Kerry said in an interview on CNN last week while addressing the spate of terror attacks by the group. “And I believe what we are seeing are the desperate actions of an entity that sees the noose closing around them.”

Through satellite photos and other data, it’s clear that the terror group has been steadily losing territory in its heartlands of Iraq and Syria.

Even now, major efforts are underway to reclaim Mosul, the largest city under ISIS control.

However, as ISIS does steadily lose ground through conventional warfare in the Middle East, the group’s attacks against civilians around the world will only likely increase — at least for the time being.

“At some point there is going to be a terrorist diaspora out of Syria like we’ve never seen before,” explained FBI Director James B. Comey at a cybersecurity conference at Fordham University on Wednesday, The New York Times reports. “Not all of the Islamic State killers are going to die on the battlefield.”

As the terror group’s territory shrinks, dedicated fighters within the group will travel to find new locations to conduct their operations — most likely in hiding. Comey continued by saying that many of these core fighters would migrate to Western Europe as ISIS loses ground. And there is always the risk that some of them would eventually reach the US. More here.

The intelligence community gathers evidence everyday from countless sources, but when actual documents from Islamic State have been retrieved, the threat level and investigations mount even higher.

US seize haul of 10,000 documents and 4.5 terabytes of information from ISIS fighters in Syria – including clues on ‘foreign fighters’ entering Europe 

US intelligence agents are studying files captured from ISIS in a bid to identify potential terrorists returning to the west. 

The cache includes some 10,000 documents and 4.5 terabytes of information containing the identities and countries of origin of the terror group’s fighters.

Also contained in the intelligence files are details of the routes used to smuggle terrorists in and out of the warzone.

The information was captured in Manbij in Northern Syria after the terror group was pushed back from the city.

Brett McGurk, President Obama’s special envoy confirmed the details of foreign fighters was being shared among coalition allies.

McGurk told the New York Times: ‘We want to make sure that all that information is disseminated in a coherent way among our coalition partners so that we can track the networks from the core and all the way to wherever the dots might connect, whether that is in Europe or in North Africa or Southeast Asia.’

Intelligence agents hope the information will help them identify ISIS terrorist cells while also providing details of the group’s finances and might even lead to military strikes against senior terror leaders.

It is estimated that almost 43,000 terrorists from 12 countries have at least attempted to go to Iraq and Syria.

McGurk added: ‘The operation in Manbij is about shutting down the main corridor from Raqqa and then out, in which some of the attackers that launched the Paris attacks we know traveled through that route. By shutting that down, you make it harder for them to kind of plan the larger-scale, kind of more coordinated attacks.’

However, despite the successful operation against ISIS in the city, the coalition has been criticized over an airstrike which killed innocent civilians on July 19.

Colonel Chris Garver said there was credible evidence to support the complaint.

Manbij is just south of the Turkish border and is used by ISIS to smuggle terrorists in and out of the country  Image result for Manbij isis Image result for Manbij isis Image result for Manbij isis

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 56 civilians, including 11 children, died as they fled from a village near Manbij, a strategic waypoint between Turkey and the jihadist stronghold of Raqa.

A death toll of that magnitude would appear to be the worst in nearly two years of coalition air strikes against ISIS targets.

Garver said Wednesday that death estimates from residents near Manbij ranged from a low of ’10 to 15′ to a high of 73.

Garver had earlier accused ISIS of using civilians as ‘human shields’.

Coalition officials often say theirs is the most precise air campaign in history.

Nearly all coalition air strikes use guided munitions, involving laser or GPS systems, or else missiles. Targets are often viewed at length using surveillance drones before the order to attack is issued.

After the Manbij bombardment, Amnesty International urged the coalition to redouble its efforts to prevent civilian deaths and to investigate possible violations of international humanitarian law.

The London-based nongovernmental organization Airwars has estimated that the roughly 14,000 coalition bombing attacks since August 2014 have claimed at least 1,513 civilian lives.

The coalition has officially acknowledged only a few dozen civilian victims.

After the air strikes of July 19, the main Syrian opposition group, the Istanbul-based National Coalition, called on the US-led forces to suspend bombardments.

The group’s president, Anas al-Abdeh, said civilian casualties could heighten a sense of desperation among Syrians and provide a recruiting tool for extremist groups like ISIS.

Garver said last week that the jihadists had been mounting exceptionally fierce resistance in Manbij.

He added: ‘It’s a fight like we haven’t seen before. More detail, photos and videos here from DailyMail.

Hillary’s Dedication to Women/Girls but Ignores This

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There is an organization that works to stop child-trafficking and performs investigations on predators and holds seminars on this topic called ERASE. Curiously however, not much has come out of government about it outside of the FBI and Hillary has never made mention of it.

For to listen to a podcast on this topic with a top FBI investigator:

also here:

A Call to Action: Ending ‘Sextortion’ in the Digital Age

Author: Thomson Reuters Foundation, Legal Momentum and Orrick, Herrington, & Sutcliffe LLP

Throughout the world, those in power extort vulnerable women and girls by demanding sex, rather than money. “Sextortion” is a pervasive yet under-reported form of corruption involving sexual exploitation: judges demanding sex in exchange for visas or favorable custody decisions, landlords threatening to evict tenants unless they have sex with them, supervisors making job security contingent on sex, and principals conditioning student graduation on sex. Today the crime has become digital and cyber-sextortion is rapidly on the rise.

In 2015, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, in collaboration with the International Association of Women Judges (IAWJ), launched a guide: “Combating Sextortion: A Comparative Study of Laws to Prosecute Corruption Involving Sexual Exploitation.” The study outlined laws and practices relating to the crime in nine jurisdictions, spanning six continents. This new report was borne out of that research, and takes a more specific look at the United States and at how sextortion has evolved.

Despite increasing recognition from law enforcement agencies that sextortion exists and that it is indeed on the rise—the United States lacks adequate legal solutions to ensure justice for victims. This leaves women and young girls vulnerable at the hands of those willing to abuse their power, and—increasingly—online predators.

“A Call to Action: Ending ‘Sextortion’ in the Digital Age” shines a spotlight on the growing threat of sextortion, and highlights how easy it is to infiltrate computers to record and steal sexual imagery. The report calls for public education to help prevent sextortion and provides concrete examples of revisions to existing criminal statutes in order to combat this rapidly developing crime.

The report is an innovative collaboration between Legal Momentum and Orrick, Herrington, & Sutcliffe LLP facilitated by TrustLaw, the global pro bono programme of the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

We hope this study becomes a powerful tool to raise public awareness about sextortion, and to support legislators, advocates and citizens in the fight to end this shameful practice in the United States and beyond.

Read the report: A CALL TO ACTION: Ending “Sextortion” in the Digital Age, JULY 2016

FORWARD

Sextortion. A new word but a very old concept: it is a widespread form of

corruption in which sex, not money, is the currency of the bribe. The perpetrator

asks for sex instead of cash. Today the crime has become digital and cybersextortion

is spreading fast.

In 2015, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, in collaboration with the

International Association of Women Judges (IAWJ), launched a guide:

“Combating Sextortion: A Comparative Study of Laws to Prosecute Corruption

Involving Sexual Exploitation.” The study outlines laws and practices relating

to the crime in nine jurisdictions, spanning six continents. This new report was

borne out of that research, and takes a more specific look at the United States

and at how sextortion has evolved.

Despite increasing recognition from law enforcement agencies that sextortion

exists and that it is indeed on the rise—the United States lacks adequate

legal solutions to ensure justice for victims. This leaves women and young

girls vulnerable at the hands of those willing to abuse their power, and—

increasingly—online predators.

In the United States, in fact, sextortion has proliferated in the digital age.

Traditionally, the crime was perpetrated by abusers who knew their victims, but

today perpetrators hack into personal computers and smart phones to obtain

private information (including sexual images) and then demand sex or more

sexual imagery. Many perpetrators have abused multiple, even hundreds, of

victims. Victims are powerless. When they have not complied, perpetrators have

released sexual images to the victims’ friends, family members, congregations,

teachers, co-workers, and the world at large, via the Internet.

Women and girls are disproportionately impacted by cyber-sextortion.

Predators exploit digitally-savvy children and teenagers, often by pretending

to be peers on social networking sites. Using false identities, offenders

manipulate children and teenagers to give them information or images that

the victims would not want friends, family or their school community to know

about. Predators then use these images to demand sex or more sexual images.

The whole report is here.