Archive for the 'Covert Operations' Category
Gauss: Another Cyber-Espionage Toolkit Based on Flame Platform
August 9th, 2012Via: Kaspersky Lab: While analyzing the Flame malware that we detected in May 2012, Kaspersky Lab experts identified some distinguishing features of Flame’s modules. Based on those features, we discovered that in 2009, the first variant of the Stuxnet worm included a module that was created based on the Flame platform. This indicates that there […]
Blackwater Pays Millions in Arms Smuggling Case
August 9th, 2012Via: Wired: Depending on how you look at it, the world’s most notorious mercenary firm just got away with misleading the government about arming and training foreign governments — or the company agreed to pay millions, only to defer a potential prosecution on those charges. The firm formerly known as Blackwater has agreed to fork […]
Kremlin Wiretaps Dissident Blogger — Who Tweets the Bug
August 9th, 2012Via: Wired: Alexei Navalny showed up to work in Moscow on Monday to discover he was being bugged. He called the police, like many perhaps would, but not before tweeting photos and video of himself and his colleagues taking the Kremlin’s monitoring devices apart. It’s not hard to figure out why Navalny was bugged. He’s […]
Huawei: The Company that Spooked the World
August 6th, 2012Via: The Economist: BANBURY, a little English town best known for a walk-on part in a nursery rhyme and as the eponymous origin of a fruitcake, is an unlikely fulcrum for the balance of power in the world of telecoms. But the “Cyber Security Evaluation Centre” set up there by Huawei, a Chinese telecoms giant, […]
Facebook: ‘Dark Profiles’
August 6th, 2012Via: Washington Post: Another time, Losse cringed when she learned that a team of Facebook engineers was developing what they called “dark profiles” — pages for people who had not signed up for the service but who had been identified in posts by Facebook users. The dark profiles were not to be visible to ordinary […]
Vast International Child Abuse Network
August 6th, 2012Don’t casually click through to this one. This is a bad one. If you take care of children, and you want to know what’s lurking out there, by all means, read it. My goal, however, is not to traumatize you when you show up here for something to read as you drink your coffee. So […]
Sikh Temple Shooter Served in U.S. Army Psychological Operations Unit
August 6th, 2012Wade Michael Page Was White Supremacist Via: CBS News: Before he strode into a Sikh temple with a 9mm handgun and multiple magazines of ammunition, Wade Michael Page played in white supremacist heavy metal bands with names such as Definite Hate and End Apathy. The bald, heavily tattooed bassist was a 40-year-old Army veteran who […]
Carole Waugh
August 5th, 2012Was the body locked in a gym bag? Via: NBC: A body found in a lock-up garage in New Malden, southwest London, was identified as that of missing oil executive Carole Waugh, the Scotland Yard said Friday. Waugh, 50, who had previously worked in the oil industry in London and Libya, had not been seen […]
Body Blow to New Zealand: Pacific Fibre Dead
August 2nd, 2012I honestly thought we were seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. It turned out to be the train. Telecom wins again, the rest of New Zealand loses. Via: interest.co.nz: A Kiwi project to lay another undersea internet cable between New Zealand, Australia and the United States was scuppered by American concerns about […]
Obama Authorizes Secret U.S. Support for Syrian Rebels
August 2nd, 2012If you want to read detailed, voluminous accounts of how the U.S. covertly and illegally provides weapons to any state or group it pleases, see, Spider’s Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq by Alan Friedman and, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA by Terry Reed. —Obama Administration Moves to […]
