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The Government Is Lying to Us About Cybersecurity

November 15, 2017

The Government Is Lying to Us About Cybersecurity

The Department of Justice is full of excuses for wanting back doors into encryption systems, but they’re just that: excuses.

In a press conference, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein stated that the “absolutist position” that strong encryption should be, by definition, unbreakable is “unreasonable.”

The DOJ is lying about three things:

First

The US government works against the security of businesses. Just this week, I had to tell Apple that my iPhone app did not have certain kinds of encryption that the U.S. government has export control on. Encryption export controls cripple the security and innovation of software products made by American businesses.

Furthermore, the U.S. government hoards software exploits so it can hack into your computer rather than publish them that so companies can patch their products. The NSA intentionally sneaks weaknesses into protocols and bribes businesses to add holes to security products so it can steal the data of their customers.

The only “cybersecurity” that the government cares about is its ability to conduct surveillance and attacks on political targets.

When businesses want to improve the security of their products, they offer rewards for exploits – Microsoft pays up to $250,000 per exploit, Facebook has paid $40,000, and so on. The NSA purchases millions of dollars of exploits from hackers and uses them to spy on the entire world, including U.S. citizens. Unfortunately, the NSA is incompetent at keeping secrets, so it lost their exploit database and caused millions of computers to be infected and hijacked with the exploits they hoarded.The hardware and software pieces of both the Internet and individual user’s computers are made by private companies. There is nothing the U.S. government can do to improve “cybersecurity” other than prosecuting criminal behavior. However, the U.S. government prosecutes a minuscule proportion of cybercrime.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

WikiLeaks Publishes CIA Hacking Tool Designed To “Impersonate” Russia’s Kaspersky Lab

November 9, 2017

WikiLeaks Publishes CIA Hacking Tool Designed To “Impersonate” Russia’s Kaspersky Lab

On September 18th, the US Senate voted to ban the use of products from the Moscow-based cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab by the federal government, citing national security risk. The vote was included as an amendment to an annual defense policy spending bill approved by the Senate on the same day and was written to bar the use of Kaspersky Lab software in government civilian and military agencies.

Alas, according to a new revelation from WikiLeaks this morning, any perceived “national security risk” from Kaspersky could have resulted from the fact that the CIA specifically designed hacking software, code-named ‘Hive’, which intentionally “impersonated” the Russian cyber security firm so that “if the target organization looks at the network traffic coming out of its network, it is likely to misattribute the CIA exfiltration of data to uninvolved entities whose identities have been impersonated.”

Here’s a summary of the hacking tool posted by WikiLeaks:

Today, 9 November 2017, WikiLeaks publishes the source code and development logs to Hive, a major component of the CIA infrastructure to control its malware.

Hive solves a critical problem for the malware operators at the CIA. Even the most sophisticated malware implant on a target computer is useless if there is no way for it to communicate with its operators in a secure manner that does not draw attention. Using Hive even if an implant is discovered on a target computer, attributing it to the CIA is difficult by just looking at the communication of the malware with other servers on the internet. Hive provides a covert communications platform for a whole range of CIA malware to send exfiltrated information to CIA servers and to receive new instructions from operators at the CIA.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Massive WiFi Flaw Affects All Connected Devices: ‘You Have To Wonder If It Was Corrupted On Purpose’

October 17, 2017

Massive WiFi Flaw Affects All Connected Devices: ‘You Have To Wonder If It Was Corrupted On Purpose’

wifi

The security protocol used to protect the vast majority of WiFi connections has been broken. This will expose wireless internet traffic to malicious attack, according to the researcher who discovered this weakness.

It doesn’t bode well that the mainstream media is also ignoring this problem completely because it’s a very big deal. Anytime the mainstream media brushes something off, most start asking questions. Unfortunately, none of the answers we have so far to those questions are of comfort.

Considering every single cellphone now has WiFi in it and this major “weakness” could affect almost everyone. According to ARS Technica, researchers have disclosed a serious weakness in the WPA2 protocol that allows attackers within range of vulnerable device or access point to intercept passwords, e-mails, and other data presumed to be encrypted, and in some cases, to inject ransomware or other malicious content into a website a client is visiting.

The proof-of-concept exploit is called KRACK, short for Key Reinstallation Attacks. The research has been a closely guarded secret for weeks ahead of a coordinated disclosure that was scheduled for 8am Monday, East Coast time. A website disclosing the vulnerability said it affects the core WPA2 protocol itself and is effective against devices running the Android, Linux, macOS, Windows, and OpenBSD operating systems, as well as MediaTek Linksys, and other types of devices. The site warned attackers can exploit it to decrypt a wealth of sensitive data that’s normally encrypted by the nearly ubiquitous Wi-Fi encryption protocol. –ARS Technica

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Yahoo Hacking Highlights Cyber Risk and Increasing Importance of Physical Gold

October 8, 2017

Yahoo Hacking Highlights Cyber Risk and Increasing Importance of Physical Gold

– Yahoo admits every single one of 3 billion accounts hacked in 2013 data theft
– Equifax hacking and security breach exposes half of the U.S. population
– Some 143 million people vulnerable to identity theft
– Deloitte hack compromised sensitive emails and client data
– JP Morgan hacked and New York Fed hacked and robbed
– International hacking group steals $300 million
– Global digital banking and financial system not secure

Imagine there was a chemical disaster at a factory. The surrounding water and air supply are affected over hundreds of miles. Thousands of people, if not more, are affected.

There would be a national response. Governments would step in to ask why this had happened, how it was going to be dealt with and how it would be prevented.

More importantly, those affected would be notified with immediate effect. The responsible company would not set up a website inviting potential victims to log on with personal details in order to find out if and how badly they have been affected.

And if the company did do this then people and the government wouldn’t stand for it.

Imagine that another disaster happens a few months later, at another company. But it turns out the dangerous chemicals have been leaking into the environment for possibly the previous three months.

No-one knows the extent of the damage.

There would be uproar.

Yet there seems to be little reaction when the equivalent happens in the cyber world. Just this week, less than a month after the Equifax announcement, Yahoo have admitted all 3 billion accounts were compromised four years ago … four years ago …

This is just another example of repeated data breaches that have compromised the personal data and lives of billions of people.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Julian Assange Says He Can Prove The Russian Narrative Is False

October 2, 2017

Julian Assange Says He Can Prove The Russian Narrative Is False

assane

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange says that he can prove that the Russian election meddling narrative pushed by Democrats for almost a year now, is completely false. And he’s willing to turn over all evidence, in exchange for a pardon.

Most of already knew that the Russian narrative was nothing more than evidence-less propaganda. But Julian Assange says that he can prove it and all he wants is a pardon in return. As of Saturday, it appeared that president Donald Trump hadn’t heard of Assange’s deal.

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One America News ✔@OANN

Wikileaks Founder Ready to Provide Evidence Russian Collusion is False: http://youtu.be/vQf0sDuRGp8?a via @YouTube

11:04 AM – Sep 27, 2017

According to PJ Media, Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California, told The Daily Caller that Trump is being blocked from knowing about the potential deal with Assange. “I think the president’s answer indicates that there is a wall around him that is being created by people who do not want to expose this fraud that there was collusion between our intelligence community and the leaders of the Democratic Party,” Rohrabacher said.

Rohrabacher spoke to chief-of-staff John Kelly two weeks ago about the potential deal with Assange. The Wall Street Journal reported that Kelly told Rohrabacher to bring the information to the intelligence community. “This would have to be a cooperative effort between his own staff and the leadership in the intelligence communities to try to prevent the president from making the decision as to whether or not he wants to take the steps necessary to expose this horrendous lie that was shoved down the American people’s throats so incredibly earlier this year,” Rohrabacher said. Rohrabacher called the collusion narrative “a massive propaganda campaign” and “historic con job” meant to conceal the ideological conspiracy between the intelligence community and the Democrat party.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Are You Ready to Die?

October 2, 2017

Are You Ready to Die?

Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept exposes the fake news put out by the US Department of Homeland Security (an euphemistic name for a Big Brother operation that spies on US citizens) that Russia hacked 21 US state elections, news that was instantly spread around the world by the presstitute media. The propagandists running Homeland Security were contradicted by the state governments, forcing Homeland Security to retract its fake news claims. https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/yet-another-major-russia-story-falls-apart-is-skepticism-permissible-yet/

The unasked/unanswered question is why did Homeland Security put out a FAKE NEWS story?

Greenwald explains that the US media is so conditioned by the National Security State to see Russian President Putin lurking behind and masterminding attacks on America that it is “now religious dogma”—a requirement—to find Russian perfidy everywhere. The result Greenwald correctly says is that “an incredibly reckless, anything-goes climate prevails when it comes to claims about Russia. Media outlets will publish literally any official assertion as Truth without the slightest regard for evidentiary standards.”

In other words, the United States no longer has a media. It has a propaganda ministry for the military/security complex, the neoconservatives, and the Israel Lobby. And the idiot Americans sit in front of the TV and absorb the propaganda, and they read the New York Times and think that they are sophisticated and in the know.

What Greenwald doesn’t address is the effect of the massive amount of fake news on Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Russia knows that Washington knows that the accusations against Russia are false. So why is Washington making false accusations against Russia?

This is a serious question, not only for Russia but for the entire world. All previous false accusations from the Clinton regime criminals, the Bush/Cheney regime criminals, and the Obama regime criminals ended in miiltary attacks on the falsely demonized targets.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cyber Experts Prove the American Power Grid Has Been Hacked

September 13, 2017

Cyber Experts Prove the American Power Grid Has Been Hacked

A report by internet security experts, Symantec, says that a hacking group called Dragonfly 2.0 has gained access to 20 power company networks. The American power grid has been hacked, but for some reason, the culprits restrained themselves from taking down the power like they did in Ukraine recently.

The targets were in the United States, Turkey, and Switzerland. According to Symantec, the hackers did gain access to the interface they would need to control the power equipment, with which they could cause a widespread blackout. Eric Chien, a Symantec security analyst, told Wired:

“There’s a difference between being a step away from conducting sabotage and actually being in a position to conduct sabotage … being able to flip the switch on power generation. We’re now talking about on-the-ground technical evidence this could happen in the US, and there’s nothing left standing in the way except the motivation of some actor out in the world.” (source)

While we were all focused on the natural disasters like wildfires and hurricanes looming over us, this report went all but unnoticed by the mainstream and alternative media alike.

A power grid attack could shut down commerce and destroy our already precarious financial system. It could take down our medical system. If the damage was long-lasting, chaos would erupt and it wouldn’t take long for the death toll to skyrocket, so dependent are we on power at the flip of a switch.

How did the hackers get in?

Remember how John Podesta ended up being the victim of a phishing scheme that allowed the Clinton campaign to be hacked? This was pretty much the same thing. The Symantec report explains that this has been going on for a couple of years now, but that activity has sharply increased this year:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Hackers Break Into Equifax – Big Time!

September 11, 2017

Hackers Break Into Equifax – Big Time!

Welcome to the reality of the Digital World and there are those in government who want to eliminate cash and force everyone into electronic deposits. Well the new data breach at credit bureau Equifax appears to have affected up to 143 million people. On top of that, Equifax has been slow to deal with the issue. This is reminiscent of the real Insider Trading from the 1930s when directors realized the company was bankrupt so they sold their stock before any announcement. Here we have the company’s chief financial officer and two other senior executives cashing in on almost $2 million of Equifax stock once they learned about the hack, according to Business Insider’s Mohammed Hadi and Bryan Logan.

The Equifax data breach may have really profound lasting effects . Because they may have access to your information on consumers’ credit reports, including their Social Security numbers, credit card numbers and driver’s license numbers, they could open credit accounts in consumers’ names. They then could file an income tax return and get a refund before you even file your taxes. The Federal Trade Commission warned consumers last Friday to file their taxes early — “as soon as you have the tax information you need, before a scammer can.”

The IRS doesn’t initiate any contact with taxpayers by email, text message or social-media channels requesting any information. If anyone is contacted, be very concerned and do not answer any questions or validate anything. Call an accountant ASAP.

Worst US Consumer Data Hack Ever? Equifax Confesses

September 8, 2017

Worst US Consumer Data Hack Ever? Equifax Confesses

Your data was likely stolen. Here’s what you can do to protect yourself even after the hack, and Equifax doesn’t want you to do it.

Equifax, as a consumer credit bureau, collects financial, credit, and other data on every US consumer. It has names, birth dates, social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, mortgage data, and payment history data, including to utilities, wireless service providers, and the like. It collects data on bank balances, loan balances, credit card balances, credit card purchases, and myriad personal details. It has massive digital dossiers on every consumer in the US and in some other countries. And it sells this data to other companies, such as banks, credit card companies, car dealerships, retailers, and others, as a routine part of its business model. That’s how it makes money.

But when someone breaks in and steals this data without paying Equifax for it, well, that’s a huge deal. And it is.

Turns out, Equifax got hacked – um, no, not today. Today it disclosed that it had discovered on July 29 – six weeks ago – that it had been hacked sometime between “mid-May through July,” and that key data on 143 million US consumers was stolen. There was no need to notify consumers right away. They’re screwed anyway. But it gave executives enough time to sell 2 million shares between the discovery of the hack and today, when they crashed 13% in late trading.

Given the quantity and sensitivity of the stolen data, it may well be the biggest and worst breach in US history.

That stolen data “primarily includes”:

Names
Social Security numbers
Birth dates
Addresses
“In some instances,” driver’s license numbers.

In addition, the stolen data includes:

Credit card numbers of around 209,000 US consumers
“Certain dispute documents with personal identifying information” of around 182,000 US consumers.
“Limited personal information for certain UK and Canadian residents.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

CNN Caught Faking News Again: Qatar Says News Agency Hacking Linked To Middle East, Not Russia

June 20, 2017

CNN Caught Faking News Again: Qatar Says News Agency Hacking Linked To Middle East, Not Russia

A couple of weeks ago we expressed some level of ‘amazement’ at just how sophisticated, efficient and pervasive the ‘Russian hacking’ community had become after CNN reported that they had managed to hack into a Qatari News Agency and post a ‘fake’ news story all in an apparent attempt to drive a wedge between the U.S., Qatar and some of it’s Gulf Arab neighbors.

Think about that for a minute. Set aside, if you will, the hacking event itself for just a moment and imagine how good the Russians had to be to know exactly what news story needed to be planted inside the Qatari news agency to provoke an immediate severing of diplomatic ties by numerous Arab neighboring states…it truly is mind boggling how it all played out exactly the way the Russians planned…these ‘Russian hackers’ are certainly not a bunch of amateurs.

And while that may sound like a joke, it is, quite unfortunately, not…at least it wasn’t at CNN anyway. Here are the details, as they were previously reported by CNN:

The FBI recently sent a team of investigators to Doha to help the Qatari government investigate the alleged hacking incident, Qatari and US government officials say.

Intelligence gathered by the US security agencies indicates that Russian hackers were behind the intrusion first reported by the Qatari government two weeks ago, US officials say. Qatar hosts one of the largest US military bases in the region.

The alleged involvement of Russian hackers intensifies concerns by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies that Russia continues to try some of the same cyber-hacking measures on US allies that intelligence agencies believe it used to meddle in the 2016 elections.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Emphasis on Offensive Capabilities is Dangerous, Idiotic and Authoritarian

April 1, 2017

The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Emphasis on Offensive Capabilities is Dangerous, Idiotic and Authoritarian

Earlier today, Edward Snowden posted the following tweet calling attention to a very important article published at Reuters.

View image on Twitter

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Edward Snowden ✔@Snowden

Huge: USG confirms cyber offense funded at 9x rate of defense. Wonder why we can’t stop foreign hacks? This is why. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyber-defense-idUSKBN17013U …

7:34 AM – 30 Mar 2017

The article highlights the fact that U.S. intelligence agencies spend 90% of their budgets on offensive capabilities as opposed to defense. The disastrous results of such an emphasis should be obvious to everyone, all you have to do is look at what this attitude has done to U.S. foreign policy, as well as domestic police departments. When you focus all your spending and energy on developing new weapons, the urge is to find an excuse to use them. Disastrous consequences typically follow (unnecessary SWAT raids and the wholesale destruction of countries).

When it comes to intelligence agencies, the focus on offense results in two horrible outcomes. Less cybersecurity for everyone and an ability for the government to spy on, and hence blackmail, the whole world.

Reuters reports:

When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange disclosed earlier this month that his anti-secrecy group had obtained CIA tools for hacking into technology products made by U.S. companies, security engineers at Cisco Systems swung into action.

That a major U.S. company had to rely on WikiLeaks to learn about security problems well-known to U.S. intelligence agencies underscores concerns expressed by dozens of current and former U.S. intelligence and security officials about the government’s approach to cybersecurity.

That policy overwhelmingly emphasizes offensive cyber-security capabilities over defensive measures, these people told Reuters, even as an increasing number of U.S. organizations have been hit by hacks attributed to foreign governments.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Germany’s Chief Prosecutor To Start Probe Into Wikileaks-Exposed Frankfurt Cyber-Spy Hub

March 8, 2017

Germany’s Chief Prosecutor To Start Probe Into Wikileaks-Exposed Frankfurt Cyber-Spy Hub

The Germans are once again angry at the Americans over spying. Just a few years after Obama’s infamous apology for hacking Merkel’s phone, Germany’s chief federal prosecutor announced plans to carefully examine documents from Wikileaks (related to a secret CIA cyber-spy hub in Frankfurt), and will launch an investigation if it sees concrete indications of wrongdoing.

As VOA News reports, a spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry on Wednesday said Berlin was in close touch with Washington about the documents, which Wikileaks said showed that the CIA used the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt as a major remote hacking base.

“We will initiate an investigation if we see evidence of concrete criminal acts or specific perpetrators,” a spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office told Reuters.

“We’re looking at it very carefully.”

He said Germany needed to verify the authenticity of the documents, which, as DW.com reports, purportedly revealed that a top secret CIA unit used the German city of Frankfurt am Main as the starting point for numerous hacking attacks on Europe, China and the Middle East.

WikiLeaks reported that the group developed trojans and other malicious software in the American Consulate General Office, the largest US consulate in the world. The programs focused on targets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The documents revealed that CIA experts worked in the building under cover and included advice for life in Germany.

“Do not leave anything electronic or sensitive unattended in your room,” it told employees, also advising them to enjoy Lufthansa’s free alcohol “in moderation.”

The Frankfurt hackers, part of the Center for Cyber Intelligence Europe, were said to be given diplomatic passports and a State Department identity. It instructed employees how to safely enter Germany. A WikiLeaks tweet published an section of the Frankfurt information.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Unbelievable How Mainstream Media Has Become Just Liars

February 23, 2017

Unbelievable How Mainstream Media Has Become Just Liars

Video Player

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times demonstrates why mainstream media is just becoming so bought and paid for. You have to wonder if they should not be in prison for attempting to overthrow the government and start a revolution. Here he is still ranting about how Russia hacked the election and asserting that this is somehow a Pearl Harbor and 911 event. I suppose this is implying we should start world war III because Hillary lost.

The Homeland Security and the FBI both said that Russia’s hack of the DNC did not involve altering the vote. In fact, it was his own paper that reported on November 25, 2016: “The Obama administration said on Friday that despite Russian attempts to undermine the presidential election, it has concluded that the results “accurately reflect the will of the American people.”

The constant lies and manipulations seem intent upon creating war exactly as took place with the Spanish American War. We have returned to yellow journalism which is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration. Pulitzer and Hearst went head to head. I remember grade school history class blaming the Spanish American War on fake news. There is one such story that male Spanish officials were strip searching American woman tourists in Cuba looking for claimed messages from rebels. This was the front page of Hearst’s newspaper showing what has become known as “yellow journalism” whereby the illustration was by Frederic Remington published in the New York Journal, February 12th, 1897.

Hearst’s New York Journal was called out for this fake news by its rival Joseph Pulitzer’s, New York World, reporting that this story was erroneous and its graphically illustrated strip-search of a woman aboard U.S. passenger steamer was fake.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Did the Russians Really Hack the DNC?

January 14, 2017

Did the Russians Really Hack the DNC?

Russia, we are told, breached the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), swiped emails and other documents, and released them to the public, to alter the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.

How substantial is the evidence backing these assertions?

Hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate unusual network activity, the security firm Crowdstrike discovered two separate intrusions on DNC servers. Crowdstrike named the two intruders Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, in an allusion to what it felt were Russian sources. According to Crowdstrike, “Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none,” and “both groups were constantly going back into the environment” to change code and methods and switch command and control channels.

On what basis did Crowdstrike attribute these breaches to Russian intelligence services? The security firm claims that the techniques used were similar to those deployed in past security hacking operations that have been attributed to the same actors, while the profile of previous victims “closely mirrors the strategic interests of the Russian government. Furthermore, it appeared that the intruders were unaware of each other’s presence in the DNC system. “While you would virtually never see Western intelligence agencies going after the same target without de-confliction for fear of compromising each other’s operations,” Crowdstrike reports, “in Russia this is not an uncommon scenario.” [1]

Those may be indicators of Russian government culpability. But then again, perhaps not. Regarding the point about separate intruders, each operating independently of the other, that would seem to more likely indicate that the sources have nothing in common.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Did the Russians Really Hack the DNC?

January 13, 2017

Did the Russians Really Hack the DNC?

Photo by Cliff | CC BY 2.0

How substantial is the evidence backing these assertions?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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