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CIA Leak: “Russian Election Hackers” May Work In Langley
Attribution of cyber-intrusions and attacks is nearly impossible. A well executed attack can not be traced back to its culprit. If there are some trails that seem attributable one should be very cautions following them. They are likely faked.
Hundreds if not thousands of reports show that this lesson has not been learned. Any attack is attributed to one of a handful of declared "enemies" without any evidence that would prove their actual involvement. Examples:
In June 2016 we warned The Next "Russian Government Cyber Attack" May Be A Gulf of Tonkin Fake:
All one might see in a [cyber-]breach, if anything, is some pattern of action that may seem typical for one adversary. But anyone else can imitate such a pattern as soon as it is known. That is why there is NEVER a clear attribution in such cases. Anyone claiming otherwise is lying or has no idea what s/he is speaking of.
There is now public proof that this lecture in basic IT forensic is correct.
Wikileaks acquired and published a large stash of documents from the CIA's internal hacking organization. Part of the CIA hacking organization is a subgroup named UMBRAGE:
The CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.
With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.
UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.
Hacking methods are seldom newly developed. They are taken from public examples and malware, from attacks some other organization once committed, they get bought and sold by commercial entities. Many attacks use a recombined mix of tools from older hacks. Once the NSA's STUXNET attack on Iran became public the tools used in it were copied and modified by other such services as well as by commercial hackers. Any new breach that may look like STUXNET could be done by anyone with the appropriate knowledge. To assert that the NSA must have done the new attack just because the NSA did STUXNET would be stupid.
The CIA, as well as other services, have whole databases of such 'stolen' tools. They may combine them in a way that looks attributable to China, compile the source code at local office time in Beijing or "forget to remove" the name of some famous Chinese emperor in the code. The CIA could use this to fake a "Chinese hacking attack" on South Korea to raise fear of China and to, in the end, sell more U.S. weapons.
Russia did not hack and leak the DNC emails, Iran did not hack American casinos and North Korea did not hack Sony.
As we wrote: "there is NEVER a clear attribution". Don't fall for it when someone tries to sell one.
(PS: There is a lot more in the new Wikileaks CIA stash. It seems indeed bigger than the few items published from the Snowden NSA leak.)
on the masterful writer’s review of violence
The police alone are sufficiently militarized to crush any uprising, and the response to any sufficiently serious uprising would not end with the police.
i certainly agree with that take.
We have made great progress, in this country, confining political violence to the place beyond the pale. In ordinary discourse, it is beyond even the uncivil and unwise; there is no recourse that provokes more ready condemnation. But this only heightens its significance. If violence is an extraordinary recourse, then its use signifies extraordinary circumstances, affirming the abnormality and urgency of its conditions.
so which is the extraordinary circumstance, and who percieves is as such? the knee-jerk answer is that it is tee-rump that is the extraordinary circumstance in the perception of the decent people of the usofa …
In the name of global security, drones whistle their impersonal homicides in the skies above Pakistan. Federal marshals return runaway slaves. Strikebreakers fire down the mountain at miners.
but i don’t think so. i think it is the loss of power by the people who were sure they had seen ‘the end of politics’ and the collapse of their own apotheosis that was the extraordinary circumstance, in their perception, and that the imagined consequences of their loss of control of … everything … for they need to control everything, especially the ‘ordinary discourse’ … because they’ve become liars, murderers, and war criminals in this new american century and will reap the desserts of their crimes when they lose control of everything … they are the ones inciting, hiring, sanctioning violence …
But sanctioned brutality is the constant ambience of our republic and our empire. It is with us all the time.
… and now they are merely bringing their imperial solution back home.
Somewhere between sanctioned and unsanctioned brutality, there is a liminal kind, officially condemned but operating in the service of sanctioned power.
The liminal violence of the right exists within a framework of the permissible: a nation that implies through its rhetoric and its legal habits that while it isn’t saying this is allowed, take care not to get caught, or be too obvious, and you stand a good chance of getting off.
… of getting off … and of getting paid, if you’re a cop, a drone maker, a spy, a drone assassin …
Neither unsanctioned nor sanctioned, this liminal violence is a third kind, the unsanctioned violence of pure will. Its actors see a world slipping away or changing, a state insufficiently committed to their preferences. Their violence is political, but it is not for or against official power. It is for their own power, of which there is never enough.
… he’s a masterful writer all right, takes us around in a circle. at least he quotes a real master of writing …
“There were two ‘Reigns of Terror,’” Mark Twain wrote of the French Revolution.
“The one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror.”
i do think that even the cops alone are enough now to kill us all … enough of us to break our incipient union. so we’d be fools to purposefully set out on the violent path. even – especially – when we’re offered money to do so. i think we must work methodically to seize power, effect real change, and to deal with the response when it comes, whatever it is. we must master ourselves from the very start, gather ourselves together now … we certainly won’t be able to do so later on if we don’t do it now.
Posted by: jfl | Mar 8 2017 13:15 utc | 57
Mr. Trump can put this BS to bed. So, why doesn’t he? ben at 42. (with ref. to an Intercept article.)
It appears to me that the attack against Trump is multi-pronged: Color revol. stuff instigated, organised, by the Dems, Soros, that kind of crowd, > *pink hats*, etc. Other, such as personal vilification (grabbing whatever, he is racist, …), note, is abandoned for now. I’m leaving all that aside.
What we see here is the ‘elites’ / ‘the PTB’, insiders who have enormous control, attacking Trump on anything that can be put forward to the public by so-called experts or authorities that smack of Trump treason, or at a lower level, putative un-American stances, attitudes, actions.
These attacks concentrate on Trump admin. links with Russia (note the deathly silence about what is going on in Syria), as Russia is the enemy du jour, for many reasons, one of them being merely that it is far off and does not involve complex oppositions or ties (compare Israel, KSA, China ..)
Hacking – mysterious to most of the populace – ‘wire-tapping’ – legally complex and confusing in many ways – provides a good opportunity. The aim is to get the public on board, furnish them with talking points, ‘beliefs, hearfelt arguments’; to force Trump into an uncoordinated, outraged and defensive position where he will make mistakes— which has apparently succeeded to some degree —, and generally create a shit-storm around an issue that is pretty empty of content (see b., thx for the round up.)
Distraction! While the Night of the Long Knives, errr, weeks not night, takes place behind the scenes. Who hacked whom and how is not crucial, rather, who holds what information bomb in their VAULT and how they might, or not, use it, or could be prevented from doing so, and so on. For the public, media-hype against Trump (MSM sub-set of PTB, say) has to be kept up under any pretext, anything will serve.
Posted by: Noirette | Mar 8 2017 18:04 utc | 70
@ Posted by: Curtis | Mar 8, 2017 2:04:12 PM | 77
This cache is completely separate to that divulged by Snowden and the ‘Parts’ are supposedly sourced from multiple leakers:
Over the last three years the United States intelligence sector, which consists of government agencies such as the CIA and NSA and their contractors, such as Booze Allan Hamilton, has been subject to unprecedented series of data exfiltrations by its own workers.
A number of intelligence community members not yet publicly named have been arrested or subject to federal criminal investigations in separate incidents.
Most visibly, on February 8, 2017 a U.S. federal grand jury indicted Harold T. Martin III with 20 counts of mishandling classified information. The Department of Justice alleged that it seized some 50,000 gigabytes of information from Harold T. Martin III that he had obtained from classified programs at NSA and CIA, including the source code for numerous hacking tools.
Some of the exploits divulged will have already been studied by hackers/criminals and already being employed ‘in the wild’ as we speak, where they weren’t known or already in use. With just a superficial perusal, ‘Part 1’ material is massive, elements of exploits/vulnerabilities could be attempted almost immediately by script kiddies and individuals with only a modicum of knowledge …
The exposure of the actual internal policies, procedures, evolution, methodologies & preferred techniques, as well as the organizations cultural ‘thinking/train of thought’ re decisions made, are invaluable to other State actors.
Given contractors, existing & former, had this material and distributed it widely up to 18(?) months ago, it’s guaranteed other State actors had it then and subsequent, too. No question, IMV.
Re Shadow Brokers, the limited tools(only) ‘cache’ released/offered for ‘auction’ were from ‘Equation group’, which is now confirmed as, elements at least, NSA TAO, so that’s yet another different source again circa 2013, however, there is some limited overlap with specific tools used by NSA and CIA Cyber as well as Israeli Unit 8200.
Q. Are they corrupt, inept, or both? A. BOTH!
re Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, Intel, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, etc, they do whatever the Feds tell ’em and anything else stated publicly is just total PR bullshit … know this from associated personal involvement over many years pre 2000 … meta-data, phone records, internet logs, utilities records (ie electricity), banking data, were being provided upon mere request (no warrants) from the very first days of the ‘net, pre circa 2000 … ‘No questions asked’ … NSA, CIA, FBI, DIA, DEA, Immigration, State Police, etc … the internal ‘Intelligence’ units would have dedicated sections/staff with direct, person-to-person, access/channels to the nominated liaison officers within the various corporations. The collection of such for ‘Intelligence’ is conducted completely separate to that re criminal investigations (faux ‘Chinese Firewall’). Yet often used to flesh-out the ‘picture’, then covertly passed on as a briefing and then the ‘Formal’ processes are followed to merely confirm what’s already known/gathered (illegally) in order to lawfully(?) prosecute/railroad. Routine. Since 9/11 ? Exponential growth, on steroids.
Posted by: Outraged | Mar 8 2017 19:57 utc | 90
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