Archive for the 'Covert Operations' Category
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 […]
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 […]
