Archive for the 'Covert Operations' Category
Western Banks Reaping Billions from Colombian Cocaine Trade
June 6th, 2012Via: Guardian: The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich “consuming” countries – principally across Europe and in the US – rather than war-torn “producing” nations such as Colombia and Mexico, new research has revealed. And its authors claim that financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go […]
Microsoft Update and The Nightmare Scenario
June 5th, 2012Via: F Secure: About 900 million Windows computers get their updates from Microsoft Update. In addition to the DNS root servers, this update system has always been considered one of the weak points of the net. Antivirus people have nightmares about a variant of malware spoofing the update mechanism and replicating via it. Turns out, […]
Castoff NRO Satellites Have Better Telescopes Than Hubble; If Pointed at Earth ‘Can See a Dime Sitting on Top of the Washington Monument’
June 4th, 2012The way it was told to me back in the 1980s, by a guy I thought was nuts, was that, “A dime on the sidewalk was no problem,” for NRO. Well, that’s pretty similar to what was just printed in the Washington Post today: NASA official Michael Moore gave some hint of what a Hubble-class […]
Flame ‘Could only have been written by a large team of highly skilled software engineers’
June 2nd, 2012Via: Ars Technica: At least 20 modules available for the malware bring a menu of highly advanced spying capabilities to the unknown people who control it. One plugin turns on the internal microphone of infected machines so Skype conversations can be secretly monitored in real time. A separate module scans nearby Bluetooth-enabled devices for names […]
U.S. and Israel Created Stuxnet, Lost Control of It
June 1st, 2012Via: Ars Technica: In 2011, the US government rolled out its “International Strategy for Cyberspace,” which reminded us that “interconnected networks link nations more closely, so an attack on one nation’s networks may have impact far beyond its borders.” An in-depth report today from the New York Times confirms the truth of that statement as […]
50,000 Pages of JFK Assassination–Related Documents Still Classified
June 1st, 2012Via: Salon: Next year will be a half-century since the death of JFK. And the Obama Administration thinks we need to keep secret the records on the matter … a little longer yet. Believe it or not, more than 50,000 pages of JFK assassination–related documents are being withheld in full. And an untold number of […]
Torture: The Memo Bush Tried to Destroy
May 31st, 2012Via: Salon: In February of 2006, Philip Zelikow, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, authored a memo opposing the Bush administration’s torture practices (though he employed the infamous obfuscation of “enhanced interrogation techniques”). The White House tried to collect and destroy all copies of the memo, but one survived in the State Department’s bowels […]
Anti-Censorship Tool Used in Syria and Iran Compromised; Logs Keystrokes, Phones Home to Server in U.S.
May 31st, 2012Via: Security Week: Simurgh, a privacy tool used in Iran and Syria to bypass Internet censorship and governmental monitoring, is being circulated with a backdoor. The compromised version has been offered on P2P networks and via web searches. Research conducted by CitizenLab.org has shown that malicious version isn’t available form the original software source, only […]
U.S. Commandos Have Been Parachuting Into North Korea
May 29th, 2012Via: AFP: US and South Korean special forces have been parachuting into North Korea to gather intelligence about underground military installations, a US officer has said in comments carried in US media. Army Brigadier General Neil Tolley, commander of US special forces in South Korea, told a conference held in Florida last week that Pyongyang […]
Flame Virus
May 29th, 2012Via: Reuters: Security experts said on Monday a highly sophisticated computer virus is infecting computers in Iran and other Middle East countries and may have been deployed at least five years ago to engage in state-sponsored cyber espionage. Evidence suggest that the virus, dubbed Flame, may have been built on behalf of the same nation […]
