A bored RAF pilot flying nearly 200 service personnel to Afghanistan sent his passenger jet into a nosedive when a camera he had been playing with jammed the flight controls, a court martial heard.It seems that a number of passengers were injured by flying cargo while they were pinned to the airliner's ceiling. The co-pilot (who was not in the cockpit at the time) suffered a fractured back.
As the Voyager aircraft plummeted 4,400ft in seconds, passengers were pinned to the ceiling and left thinking they were going to die.
But after Flt Lt Andrew Townshend regained control of the 197ft wingspan aircraft, he allegedly lied in both a technical log and service inquiry and insisted the incident had been caused by a technical fault.
It's nice to see strong bi-partisan support for the 4th Amendment. And there's more where that came from:A bill aimed at modernizing the United States's aging law covering law enforcement access to emails and other stored files passed the House Monday night.The current law, known as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, allows law enforcement to access any stored files without a warrant if such material is left on a third-party server for more than 180 days. But that law was passed in 1986 — three years before the invention of the internet — when computer owners did not have the same systems as modern users, such as cloud hosting, webmail and online photo galleries.The Email Privacy Act, which passed under suspension of the rules Monday, alters the previous rule to universally require warrants for such information.
It's a twofer of bi-partisan security sanity from the House of Representatives! More, please.The House Judiciary Committee wants to help police track terrorists and criminals who hide using encrypted communication tools this Congress, but undermining encryption is a nonstarter, Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said Wednesday.A bipartisan joint report from the Judiciary and Energy and Commerce committees in December urged against any legislative effort to weaken the encryption that protects internet activity from prying eyes but endorsed various workarounds to help the FBI and police officers track terrorists and criminals.
A Dutch woman doctor who drugged an elderly woman and then asked her family to hold her down as she fought desperately not to be killed did not break the law, according to medical experts citing the country's euthanasia legislation.Euthanasia is not just legal, but seems to be enthusiastically embraced. I posted on this once before, in a surprisingly gentle rant about a similar situation in Belgium. This case is much worse. It's horrifying:
The doctor secretly placed a soporific in her coffee to calm her, and then had started to give her a lethal injection.
Yet while injecting the woman she woke up, and fought the doctor. The paperwork showed that the only way the doctor could complete the injection was by getting family members to help restrain her.
It also revealed that the patient said several times 'I don't want to die' in the days before she was put to death, and that the doctor had not spoken to her about what was planned because she did not want to cause unnecessary extra distress. She also did not tell her about what was in her coffee as it was also likely to cause further disruptions to the planned euthanasia process.
The Review Committee concluded that the doctor 'has crossed the line' by giving her the first sleeping medicine, and also should have stopped when the woman resisted.There's simply no way to look at this as other than pre-meditated murder encouraged by the State. A bureaucratic committee issued a bland "mistakes were made" statement, but it's clear from reading the article that nobody is really very sorry.
The mentally ill are terribly, terribly vulnerable. That illness is a scourge on them, and on their families. I can understand why some would be willing to take drastic measures to put an end to that scourge, even desperate measures. But there's only one word that describes a State that would not just stand by and let that happen, but which would officially sanction it.On this side of The Pond, I like to think that people would still have a sense of shame. Johnny Cash sings of this, a man who regrets an impulsive murder that had consequences in a society that still had a sense of justice.
Evil.
Early one morning
With time to kill
I borrowed Jebb's rifle
And sat on a hill
I saw a lone rider
Crossing the plain
I drew a bead on him
To practice my aim
My brother's rifle
Went off in my hand
A shot rang out
Across the land
The horse, he kept running
The rider was dead
I hung my head
I hung my head
I set off running
To wake from the dream
My brother's rifle
Went into the sheen
I kept on running
Into the south lands
That's where they found me
My head in my hands
The sheriff he asked me
Why had I run
And then it come to me
Just what I had done
And all for no reason
Just one piece of lead
I hung my head
I hung my head
Here in the court house
The whole town was there
I see the judge
High up in the chair
Explain to the court room
What went through your mind
And we'll ask the jury
What verdict they find
I felt the power
Of death over life
I orphaned his children
I widowed his wife
I begged their forgiveness
I wish I was dead
I hung my head
I hung my head
I hung my head
I hung my head
Early one morning
With time to kill
I see the gallows
Up on a hill
And out in the distance
A trick of the brain
I see a lone rider
Crossing the plain
And he'd come to fetch me
To see what they'd done
And we'll ride together
To kingdom come
I prayed for God's mercy
'Cause soon I'd be dead
I hung my head
I hung my head
Hat tip to American Digest for finding this whole disgraceful story.
I hung my head
I hung my head
He sees the only solution as being regulation. Ugh.At a recent hacker conference, a security researcher analyzed 30 home routers and was able to break into half of them, including some of the most popular and common brands. The denial-of-service attacks that forced popular websites like Reddit and Twitter off the internet last October were enabled by vulnerabilities in devices like webcams and digital video recorders. In August, two security researchers demonstrated a ransomware attack on a smart thermostat.Even worse, most of these devices don't have any way to be patched. Companies like Microsoft and Apple continuously deliver security patches to your computers. Some home routers are technically patchable, but in a complicated way that only an expert would attempt. And the only way for you to update the firmware in your hackable DVR is to throw it away and buy a new one.The market can't fix this because neither the buyer nor the seller cares. The owners of the webcams and DVRs used in the denial-of-service attacks don't care. Their devices were cheap to buy, they still work, and they don't know any of the victims of the attacks. The sellers of those devices don't care: They're now selling newer and better models, and the original buyers only cared about price and features. There is no market solution, because the insecurity is what economists call an externality: It's an effect of the purchasing decision that affects other people. Think of it kind of like invisible pollution.
We can't. The FBI won't stop trying to get crypto backdoors and the NSA won't stop collecting everyone's metadata. See the Iron Law for why. And so adding a new Three Letter Agency to try to solve the problem will not lead to a solution. It won't address the problem of trust, it will almost certainly make the problem worse.Over the past couple of decades, we've seen examples of getting internet-security policy badly wrong. I'm thinking of the FBI's "going dark" debate about its insistence that computer devices be designed to facilitate government access, the "vulnerability equities process" about when the government should disclose and fix a vulnerability versus when it should use it to attack other systems, the debacle over paperless touch-screen voting machines, and the DMCA that I discussed above. If you watched any of these policy debates unfold, you saw policy-makers and technologists talking past each other.Our world-size robot will exacerbate these problems. The historical divide between Washington and Silicon Valley - the mistrust of governments by tech companies and the mistrust of tech companies by governments - is dangerous.We have to fix this.
Now if we can get Maryland ...The bill, set for approval in Virginia’s House of Delegates after it advanced Monday to a final vote, would make a violation a $250 fine.“Simply put, a penalty behind it that shows that we understand the seriousness of this problem and that we’re going to be serious about actually enforcing it,” said Del. Israel O’Quinn, a Republican who represents Washington County....O’Quinn said Monday the change would address “a particularly pervasive and ever-growing problem” of cars going “grossly under the speed limit in the left lane.” He hoped the new penalty could encourage more drivers to move over and cut down on road rage from drivers who come up behind slowpokes.
There's quite a lot of Compare And Contrast at the link, if you're interested.Before this list was released, the Antiplanner was far from thrilled with what little we know of Trump’s infrastructure plan, which calls for giving tax credits to private investors who spend money on infrastructure. When compared with the Democrats’ plan, however, it has some solid virtues:
- While the Democrats take a top-down approach dictating where the money will go, Trump leaves the setting of priorities to state and local governments;
- Where the Democrats would commit the federal government to spend an arbitrary amount of money whether it needs to be spent or not, Trump lets state & local governments decide how much to spend and how they will pay for it;
- Where Democrats would add $1 trillion to the deficit, Trump relies on a tax credit program that will cost the feds no more than $167 billion per trillion in spending (less, obviously, if less than $1 trillion is spent);
- Where a lot of the Democrats money would go down a rat hole, at least some of federal tax credits that Trump’s plan would issue will be offset by the reduced use of tax-free municipal bonds and taxes paid by companies and workers earning the money.
Silver wings shining in the sunlight
Roaring engines headed somewhere in flight
They're taking you away, leaving me lonely
Silver wings slowly fading out of sight
Don't leave me I cry
Don't take that airplane ride
But I you did not lock me out of your mind
But left me standing here behind
Silver wings shining in the sunlight
Roaring engines headed somewhere in flight
They're taking you away, leaving me lonely
Silver wings slowly fading out of sight
Silver wings shining in the sunlight
Roaring engines headed somewhere in flight
They're taking you away, leaving me lonely
Silver wings slowly fading out of sight
IOWA CITY, Iowa — Two people have been arrested after a FexEx delivery man intervened a protest flag burning in Iowa City on Thursday, Jan. 26.
Around noon, a small number of people gathered at a rally in front of the pedestrian mall to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, and a variety of other issues, reports KCRG. As they were burning an American flag, bystanders caught video of a FedEx employee jumping in and grabbing the flags, putting out the flames with a fire extinguisher.[Pauses to let the cheers die down]
Internet security. pic.twitter.com/6y8bA7eyte— You Had One Job (@_youhadonejob1) January 27, 2017
You may be a Democrat if you believe that cops are mostly corrupt and violent and racist, but you also believe that they're the only people who should be allowed to have guns.
US President Donald Trump's pick for his Attorney General and head of the FBI will have security specialists nervous, since both believe breaking encryption is a good idea.
Senator Jefferson Beauregard "Jeff" Sessions III (R‑AL) is Trump's pick for the top legal job in the US. In congressional testimony, he outed himself as a committed backdoor man when it comes to encryption. In the written testimony [PDF] to Senator Patrick Leahy, (D‑VT) he laid out his position.
"Encryption serves many valuable and important purposes," Sessions wrote. "It is also critical, however, that national security and criminal investigators be able to overcome encryption, under lawful authority, when necessary to the furtherance of national security and criminal investigations."
The Federales have been pushing for crypto backdoors since the early 1990s (remember the Clipper chip?) and it has always floundered on the rock of "there's no way to keep the bad guys from learning the backdoor".That's going to be bad news for people who favor strong encryption. The finest minds in cryptography have repeatedly pointed out the impossibility of building a backdoor for law enforcement into secure encryption, since there's no way to stop others from finding and exploiting the Feds-only access.
During World War II, Lt. Col Masters flew 28 B-17 bombing missions and 25 fighter scout missions, in which he flew a P-51 fighter plane to scout targets for bombers. He flew for the 551st Squadron of the 8th Army Air Corps and the 385th Bomb Group. He reached the rank of lieutenant colonel and was awarded numerous medals for his service in the war which include the Distinguished Flying Cross, Silver Star, and the French Legion of Honor medal.That's quite a man. Rest in peace.
After the war, he returned to his native California and entered medical school at Stanford University. Dr. Masters moved to Athens in the early 1970’s and helped form the women’s clinic at UGA. He retired from UGA in the mid 1990’s and then continued to work part time for the nest 10 years for the Clark County Health Department.
This is a (typically) long and thoughtful exposition of class bigotry as currently practiced in the "classless" US of A. Highly recommended.As Donald Trump becomes the forty-fifth president of the United States and begins to push the agenda that got him into the White House, it may be useful to have a convenient way to sort through the mix of signals and noise from the opposition. When you hear people raising reasoned objections to Trump’s policies and appointments, odds are that you’re listening to the sort of thoughtful dissent that’s essential to any semblance of democracy, and it may be worth taking seriously. When you hear people criticizing Trump and his appointees for doing the same thing his rivals would have done, or his predecessors did, odds are that you’re getting the normal hypocrisy of partisan politics, and you can roll your eyes and stroll on.But when you hear people shrieking that Donald Trump is the illegitimate result of a one-night stand between Ming the Merciless and Cruella de Vil, that he cackles in Russian while barbecuing babies on a bonfire, that everyone who voted for him must be a card-carrying Nazi who hates the human race, or whatever other bit of over-the-top hate speech happens to be fashionable among the chattering classes at the moment—why, then, dear reader, you’re hearing a phenomenon as omnipresent and unmentionable in today’s America as sex was in Victorian England. You’re hearing the voice of class bigotry: the hate that dare not speak its name.
For those who are unfamiliar with the term, technocracy is, in essence, rule by technical elites. For instance, your media would be run by trained, credentialed journalism experts. Politicians would be groomed and educated to be leaders from an early age. You could not, for instance, be President if you did not attend the proper schools, earn the proper certifications, and demonstrate a certain set of requirements, like IQ, or perhaps an impressive set of grades in your debating classes.Climate scientists would run the departments dealing with weather and climate change. Rocket scientists would own NASA, and determine how it should be funded in consultation with the banking experts. The bankers, of course, would run the monetary system and determine appropriate levels of taxation and redistribution....
Man, that's a simple way to put things.Naturally, none of these technical elites would need to consult with you and I on these matters. If you are not one of the elite, you would need to be quiet and accept the rulings of your superiors.The flaws in technocracy are very obvious, to any who care to see them. First and foremost is the matter of trust. Even if we were to concede that the trained, technically-minded elites were better than the hoi polloi, how could one be assured that they were not pulling the wool over the people and taking advantage of them? After all, just because you’re intelligent doesn’t mean you’re honest.
Other than the minor detail of the gun not working, this solution is awesome.“Good intentions don’t necessarily make good inventions,” said Stephen Sanetti, president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. They’re the main trade group for companies that make and sell guns.
Sanetti expressed concern about the reliability of any firearm that depends on battery power.
“The firearm has to work. And a firearm is not the same as a cell phone,” Sanetti said. “The consequences of a cell phone not working are inconvenience. The consequences of a firearm not working could be someone’s life.”Kloepfer said his gun is “relatively reliable.”“I know, like, when I’m using it, when I’m testing it, it functions almost every single time,” Kloepfer said.
But not every time, as we saw firsthand when Kloepfer’s prototype -- a modified Glock .22 – failed.
The security industry's ongoing efforts to educate users about strong passwords appears to be for naught, with a new study finding the most popular passwords last year were 123456 and 123456789.
Keeper Security wonks perused breached data dumps for the most popular passwords when they made the despondent discovery.
Dad used to say that the reason that history repeats itself is that nobody listens the first time.Some 1.7 million accounts used the password "123456", or 17 per cent of the 10 million hacked accounts the firm studied.
 |
| Image via Rolling Stone |
Right now we both know
We're Marina Del Ray
Planes gonna fly away
And you'll be on it
And by this time tomorrow
I'll be singing yesterday
The sunshine's gonna fade
And we can't stop it
So before we turn in
I can't make you love meLet's be brown eyed girl sweet Caroline
Free fall small town Saturday night
Before you lose that loving feeling
Let's go dancing on the ceiling
Keep on living that teenage dream
Paradise city where the grass is green
Pretty soon I'll be so lonesome I could cry
But that's a song for another timeJust for one more day what do you say
Baby be my pretty woman
'Cause we know Sunday morning's coming down
Let's take a drive you and I down some old country road
Talk about growing old in one of those pink houses
Yeah we might be a candle in the wind
But let's pretend we're
Brown eyed girl sweet Caroline
Free fall small town Saturday night
Before you lose that loving feeling
Let's go dancing on the ceiling
Keep on living that teenage dream,
Paradise city where the grass is green
Pretty soon you will be always on my mind
But that's a song for another timeSo before we're singing I will always love you
Let's singBrown eyed girl sweet Caroline
Free fall small town Saturday night
Before you lose that loving feeling
Let's go dancing on the ceiling
Keep on living that teenage dream,
Paradise city where the grass is green
Pretty soon I'll be so lonesome I could cry
But that's a song for another time
Yeah, that's a song for another time (brown eyed girl sweet Caroline)
Yeah, that's a song for another time (free fall small town Saturday night)
Yeah, that's a song for another time
Which is exactly what happened today during CW6 in the morning when Jim Patton and Lynda Martin were talking about a child who accidentally bought a dollhouse and four pounds of cookies
“I love the little girl, saying ‘Alexa ordered me a dollhouse,’” said Patton.
I can see spammers using malware executing .WAV files to have Alexa order stuff. If you want to take a walk on the bleeding edge of technology with Alexa, forewarned is forearmed.As soon as Patton said that, viewers all over San Diego started complaining their echo devices had tried to order doll houses.
Back in April we told you about Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, who said he would pay every single one of his employees $70,000 annually.
Every single one, from the lowest skilled workers on up.
Now, as expected, Price has fallen on hard times financially, even having to rent out his own home.
In other news today, water is wet and it's dark at night. Pictures at 11.Employees who work for Gravity are now leaving the company, “spurred in part by their view that it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises.”
For Hillary we have a Hacker in custody who said he [hacked] it, where there is evidence he did it, where a law enforcement agency caught him in the act and where he was hauled in by the FBI. He said it was a trivial hack technique based on knowing personal details to make a custom dictionary (names, family and pet names, addresses, place of birth, etc.) then using it in a Dictionary Attack on some folks or in a “I forgot my password / Tell me your last name and DOB and I’ll send it to you.” spoof. There is also evidence (weak, but extant) that many TLAs (Three Letter Agencies) and other actors had hacked into her home brew server by other means.Given what I’ve heard of the set-up, it would be a nearly open book to anyone with skilz. First off, it was built on PRISM infested equipment (so the NSA was in, and potentially the CIA), second, it was Microsoft, so if you didn’t patch daily, you were hacked with known zero-days, and if you DID patch daily, you were hacked by ‘non-fixable’ hacks.
...
So at this point, we can largely dispose of Hillary’s Hack. It was an open book to all comers and at least one was Romanian (and sharing with friends) and not Russia. However, I’d say it was almost certain that at some time a Russian intrusion happened. The name of the server was obvious. The location insecure. The operating system and protective layers a joke. Frankly, I’d expect them to be “in” the same day they first looked at it. Which means something like 8 years ago. So why didn’t things leak then?
So the starting point is that the systems were compromised, and almost certainly compromised by several different intruders, all of whom but one (Guccifer) remain unnamed in the unclassified report claiming that the Russians did it. In other words, there is no uncertainty as to the compromise other than who did it, and enormous uncertainty as to that.Because the Russians Are Not Stupid. A fundamental of spycraft is you don’t expose sources and methods, you use them to collect intel for your use, not publication. I suspect they enjoyed a near real time email feed from the Secretary Of State for years, in silence. This argues for email dump to be someone other than them. My personal muse would be an NSA guy, aghast at what was in evidence. Like a Snowden, but not willing to give up the $1/4 Million salary… He (or she…) would have all the requisite skilz to pull it off and leave no finger prints, access to PRISM, and lots of neat toys to work with. Though more likely would be the underpaid I.T. guy Hillary had set it up who was making a backup one day and dropped a load… But I digress.The bottom line on Hillary is we know she kept a full copy (found on Huma’s Laptop with the Wiener…) and that it was around until she had her lawyers erase it. We know it surfaced in full at the time the laptop went to the FBI, and in parts before that. We know at least one of her hackers was found (though he had likely not leaked it) and that he said he had a doomsday copy for safety. He wasn’t a very good hacker, so that shows lots of good ones walked right in and snagged copies. Assigning source of any Hillary leaks is going to be an exercise is “ME ME MEE!!! PICK MEEE!” with a dozen hands up in the room…For the DNC:We know Podesta fell for a phish. That, alone, is enough. Yet we also have evidence that the box wasn’t that well run and secured, and ample evidence that the privilege escalation path once in was easy. Privilege escalation is when you get in with weak powers, you find ways to raise your powers. Moving from “user” to “admin” to “root”.How many others fell for a phish? How many other bugs, holes, unpatched zero-days? Was it PRISM? Were they on Microsoft? (Almost certainly…though I haven’t bothered to verify).Once you are this far into the pants-down party, you know you will never know which of the hundreds of actors trying to get in, made it in. You may never even know how many made it.
Now there may be classified evidence that is compelling but which is suppressed to protect sources and methods. These wouldn't be IP address metadata from NSA, because the hop into Russia will almost certainly not be the final leg (indeed, it might be a hop before one to China,or Israel, both of whom have excellent cyber exploit capabilities). It might be CIA intel from inside the Russian government, but that is unlikely to have detailed information on GRU technical operations (or maybe it does, in which case it's very classified and nobody will tell us about this, maybe ever).Really good hackers get in with a set of warz, immediately start changing any log files and IDS systems to erase evidence of the attack, and exfiltrate what is highly interesting, erase those logs, then lay low with long duration backdoor kit. If possible, picking up additional bits over long periods of time. This is a skill set that takes years to understand, so I’m not going into it here. If you want to know more, attend one of the many hacker conferencesfor a few years.Excellent hackers leave indirection evidence that is hard to find (so either you don’t find it and don’t know you were hacked or if you DO find it, since it was hard to find, think yourself sooo smart it must be real…) and deflect any search elsewhere. IMHO, that’s the hardest to properly find. All the real evidence was erased, and what you are working from is the McGuffin. (Thing in a story line everyone is searching to find, that may not be real. See The Maltese Falcon as example.)So what we know publicly about the investigation is that it was a postmortem, it found some forensic evidence, that evidence was an old Russian warz, and thus the conclusion is:
“Russia Did It!”The flaws in this are many.The BIGGEST flaw:You don’t know how many hacks happened. It may well be that the Russians hacked in 6 or 8 years ago and have been sniffing data ever since. That does not at all prevent an Admin dumping a tape and leaking it. It does not at all prevent a Chinese team sucking out the data and erasing their tracks. It does not at all prevent an NSA guy from dropping a USB drive on Wikileaks. It does not at all prevent the local ISP Night Shift Operator, who is bored silly, from piping a router feed of email to their laptop as it goes by and collecting a set (though good ISPs have systems to prevent that). It does not at all prove that only Russia is to blame for the hack / leak, and not some Fat Bastard in the basement of his Mom’s house using downloaded Russian warz (commonly available) to do the hack.Assigning the Data Public Dump to the Russian Hack is a leap of faith.Assigning the hack with Russian Warz to Russia proper is a leap of faith.Assigning the Data Exfiltration to the Russian Warz is a reasonable, but still, leap of faith.
There's a man who leads a life of danger
To everyone he meets he stays a stranger
With every move he makes another chance he takes
Odds are he won't live to see tomorrowSecret agent man, secret agent man
They've given you a number, I know they've take away your nameBeware of pretty faces that you find
A pretty face can hide an evil mind
Ah, be careful what you say
Or you'll give yourself away
Odds are you won't live to see tomorrowSecret agent man, secret agent man
They've given you a number, I know they've take away your nameSecret agent man, secret agent man
They've given you a number, oh they've taken away your nameSwingin' on the Riviera one day
And then layin' in the Bombay alley next day
Oh, don't you let you let the wrong word slip
While kissing persuasive lips
Odds are you won't live to see tomorrowSecret agent man, secret agent man
They've given you a number, oh they've take away your nameSecret agent man
[The Administration] had the DHS and US-CERT issue the "GRIZZLY-STEPPE" report "attributing those compromises to Russian malicious cyber activity". It does nothing of the sort. It's full of garbage. It contains signatures of viruses that are publicly available, used by hackers around the world, not just Russia. It contains a long list of IP addresses from perfectly normal services, like Tor, Google, Dropbox, Yahoo, and so forth.The summing up:
Yes, hackers use Yahoo for phishing and malvertising. It doesn't mean every access of Yahoo is an "Indicator of Compromise".
For example, I checked my web browser [chrome://net-internals/#dns] and found that last year on November 20th, it accessed two IP addresses that are on the Grizzley-Steppe list:No, this doesn't mean I've been hacked. It means I just had a normal interaction with Yahoo. It means the Grizzley-Steppe IoCs are garbage.
If your intent was to show technical information to experts to confirm Russia's involvement, you've done the precise opposite. Grizzley-Steppe proves such enormous incompetence that we doubt all the technical details you might have. I mean, it's possible that you classified the important details and de-classified the junk, but even then, that junk isn't worth publishing.In the other corner, the "Russia uses non-state hackers all the time" argument:
My take is that both of these are plausible. The Russian government has at least loose connections to a whole community of Black Hats who live on their soil (as do other governments, especially China, Iran, and Israel). Influence is absolutely plausible, though the Grizzley-Steppe report is unconvincing here. Motivations vary from country to country - China and Iran likely would have preferred Hillary, Israel almost certainly would have preferred Trump.That source, who won’t be named here because it would compromise his current position and create legal problems for him, said he routinely saw Russian intelligence services recruiting hackers on cybercrime forums — particularly for research into potential vulnerabilities in the software and hardware that powers various national power grids and other energy infrastructure.“All these guys had interest in hacking government resources, including Russian [targets],” my source told me. “Several years ago I got to know one of these hackers who worked for Russian government, [and] he operated his [cybercrime] forum as a government honeypot for hiring hackers. They were hiring hackers to work in official government organizations.”Initially, he said, the hackers targeted U.S. military installations and U.S. news media outlets, but eventually they turned their attention to collecting government and corporate secrets full-time. The source said the teams routinely used botnets for foreign intelligence gathering and counterintelligence, and frequently sought to infiltrate botnets that were suspected of being co-opted for the same purposes by other countries.
It's larded with basic n00b errors:Sadly, the JAR, as the Joint Analysis Report is called, does little to end the debate. Instead of providing smoking guns that the Russian government was behind specific hacks, it largely restates previous private-sector claims without providing any support for their validity. Even worse, it provides an effective bait and switch by promising newly declassified intelligence into Russian hackers' "tradecraft and techniques" and instead delivering generic methods carried out by just about all state-sponsored hacking groups."This ultimately seems like a very rushed report put together by multiple teams working different data sets and motivations," Robert M. Lee, CEO and Founder of the security company Dragos, wrote in a critique published Friday. "It is my opinion and speculation that there were some really good government analysts and operators contributing to this data and then report reviews, leadership approval processes, and sanitation processes stripped out most of the value and left behind a very confusing report trying to cover too much while saying too little."
The sloppiness, Lee noted, included the report's conflation of Russian hacking groups APT28 and APT29—also known as CozyBear, Sandworm, Sednit, and Sofacy, among others—with malware names such as BlackEnergy and Havex, and even hacking capabilities such as "Powershell Backdoor." The mix up of such basic classifications does little to inspire confidence that the report was carefully or methodically prepared. And that only sows more reasons for President elect Donald Trump and his supporters to cast doubt on the intelligence community's analysis on a matter that, if true, poses a major national security threat.It also doesn't discuss that while there are many linkages between these groups and the Russian government, the links are loose.
As Errata Security CEO Rob Graham pointed out in a blog post, one of the signatures detects the presence of "PAS TOOL WEB KIT," a tool that's widely used by literally hundreds, and possibly thousands, of hackers in Russia and Ukraine, most of whom are otherwise unaffiliated and have no connection to the Russian government.All in all, this does not seem at all convincing. It's not clear what exactly was hacked, it's very unclear who was behind the hack(s), and it is murky indeed whether this was state sponsored or just run of the mill Black Hat activity.
