Archive for the 'Covert Operations' Category
Could U.S. Cyberspies Have Moles Inside Microsoft?
June 16th, 2012Another possibility is that this is blowback from Microsoft’s recent collaboration with NSA. Via: PCPro: US government officials could be working under cover at Microsoft to help the country’s cyber-espionage programme, according to one leading security expert. The warning comes in the wake of the Flame virus that targeted key computers in the Middle East, […]
What Facebook Knows
June 14th, 2012Via: MIT / Technology Review: If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world. It would far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens. Private conversations, family […]
U.S. Bolsters Ties to Fighters in Syria
June 14th, 2012In other news: Syria: Clinton Admits U.S. On Same Side As Al Qaeda To Destabilize Assad Government. Via: Wall Street Journal: U.S. intelligence operatives and diplomats have stepped up their contacts with Syrian rebels in part to help organize their burgeoning military operations against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, according to senior U.S. officials. As part […]
Russia Is Sending Syria Attack Helicopters
June 12th, 2012Here it is, in black and white: The Real Reason to Intervene in Syria: Cutting Iran’s link to the Mediterranean Sea is a strategic prize worth the risk. We’re not done with the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran. Given that the current round of negotiations with the world’s major powers will not fundamentally […]
In-Q-Tel
June 12th, 2012I haven’t posted any stories about in-Q-Tel in a while. Via: Mercury News: Silicon Valley in years past has supplied surveillance satellites, missiles and electronic warfare gadgets to the government. But more recently, a dazzling array of other innovations has grabbed the interest of the country’s covert operatives. Nearly a third of the 87 companies […]
Flame and Stuxnet Share Common Origin
June 12th, 2012Via: Threat Post: Researchers digging through the code of the recently discovered Flame worm say they have come across a wealth of evidence that suggests Flame and the now-famous Stuxnet worm share a common origin. Researchers from Kaspersky Lab say that a critical module that the Flame worm used to spread is identical to a […]
Vatican Bank’s Former President Has, ‘Prepared a Series of Dossiers to be Sent to Named Individuals in the Event of His sudden Death’
June 11th, 2012Via: Guardian: The ousted head of the Vatican bank came under a withering counter-attack at the weekend as his former top official accused him of negligence and leaked documents were published casting doubt on his mental health. The Vatican meanwhile warned Italian prosecutors against using information in papers seized last week from the bank’s ex-president, […]
Gunwalking: House Committee Schedules Contempt Vote Against Holder
June 11th, 2012Via: CBS: CBS News has learned the House Oversight Committee will vote next week on whether to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. It’s the fourth time in 30 years that Congress has launched a contempt action against an executive branch member. This time, the dispute stems from Holder failing to turn […]
Flame Operators Command Software to Remove Itself from Infected Machines to Make Further Analysis More Difficult
June 8th, 2012Via: CIO: The creators of the Flame cyber-espionage threat ordered infected computers still under their control to download and execute a component designed to remove all traces of the malware and prevent forensic analysis, security researchers from Symantec said on Wednesday. Flame has a built-in feature called SUICIDE that can be used to uninstall the […]
Cryptanalist Discovers New MD5 Attack Variant in Flame
June 7th, 2012Via: CWI: Using our forensic tool, we have indeed verified that a chosen-prefix collision attack against MD5 has been used for Flame. More interestingly, the results have shown that not our published chosen-prefix collision attack was used, but an entirely new and unknown variant. Therefore it is not unreasonable to assume that the particular chosen-prefix […]
