Alex Jones heads Infowars an ultra right wing conspiracy blogsite which uses often Russian propaganda/fake news taken from Russia Today and Sputnik...
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones backs off "Pizzagate" claims
http://wapo.st/2ogxtqy
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Alex Jones heads Infowars an ultra right wing conspiracy blogsite which uses often Russian propaganda/fake news taken from Russia Today and Sputnik...
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones backs off "Pizzagate" claims
http://wapo.st/2ogxtqy
For the last two years on the Ukrainian and Syrian threads I have been beating this drum....
I have since the release of the Russian military doctrine non linear warfare which is used as the vehicle for Russian political warfare been stating the two key corner stones of that doctrine are...
1. cyber warfare
2. information warfare or what some call the weaponization of information.
The CIA has said it...as well as NATO and EU and now NSA officially states it....
BUT WAIT what is the attitude of our President...Bannon and Miller....they use it via Infowars and Breotbart.com and all the other ultra right
blogsites supported by massive Russian twittier botnets..Russia Today and Sputnik International...as well as roving bands of Russian hacking criminals...AND then claim it does not exist.
AND it is happening in Bulgarian..Moldavia..France..Holland....Germany and UK...
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politi...cid=spartanntpQuote:
Asked whether the NSA had any inkling that the Kremlin was going to orchestrate the release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails last July, he demurred. “I actually don’t want to talk about that.”
At the same time, he said, what Moscow did was “no strategic surprise.” Rather, “what may have been a tactical surprise was that they would do it the way they did.”
Campaigns of propaganda and disinformation, dating back to the Soviet Union, have long been a staple of the Kremlin’s foreign policy. Now, however, it is making effective use of its hacking prowess to weaponize information and combine it with its influence operations, or what intelligence officials call “active measures.”
“In general, if you’re responding to nation-state actions like that, you have to find out what are the levers that will move the nation-state actors and are you able and willing to pull those levers?” said Ledgett when asked how the United States should respond.
WH demotes someone for being a jerk to media? That would be a first. Seems more like a Russia connection issue.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/u...-iphone-share#
Have seen Russian darknet chatter on this Chinese attack method....
Hackers Using Fake Cellphone Towers to Spread Android Banking Trojan
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Swati Khandelwal
Quote:
Chinese Hackers have taken Smishing attack to the next level, using rogue cell phone towers to distribute Android banking malware via spoofed SMS messages.
SMiShing — phishing attacks sent via SMS — is a type of attack wherein fraudsters use number spoofing attack to send convincing bogus messages to trick mobile users into downloading a malware app onto their smartphones or lures victims into giving up sensitive information.
Security researchers at Check Point Software Technologies have uncovered that Chinese hackers are using fake base transceiver stations (BTS towers) to distribute "Swearing Trojan," an Android banking malware that once appeared neutralized after its authors were arrested in a police raid.
This is the first ever reported real-world case in which criminals played smart in such a way that they used BTS — a piece of equipment usually installed on cellular telephone towers — to spread malware.
The phishing SMS, which masquerades itself as the one coming from Chinese telecom service providers China Mobile and China Unicom, contains very convincing text with a link to download malicious Android APK.
Since Google Play Store is blocked in China, the SMS easily tricks users into installing the APK from an untrusted source.
"Using a BTS to send fake messages is quite sophisticated, and the SMS content is very deceptive. The message tricks users into clicking a malicious URL which installs malware," the researchers said in the blog post.
Once installed, the Swearing malware distributes itself by sending automated phishing SMSes to a victim's contacts.
However the maximum range of a BTS antenna may be as low as 10-22 miles, the technique is very successful and sophisticated in targeted attacks.
Discovered last year by Tencent Security researchers, the Swearing Trojan has the capability to steal bank credentials and other sensitive information from victim Android devices and to bypass two-factor authentication by replacing a user's legit SMS app with a malicious version that intercepts incoming SMS messages.
What's more interesting? To avoid detection of any malicious activity, the Swearing trojan doesn't connect to any remote command-and-control (C&C) server. Instead, it uses SMS or emails to send stolen data back to the hackers.
"This provides the malware with good cover for its communications and hinders attempts to trace any malicious activity."
While this particular malware campaign has usually targeted Chinese users, Check Point researchers warned in a blog post that the threat could quickly spread worldwide when adopted by Western malware.
The malware scheme seems to be larger than previously thought, as according to researchers, only 21cn.com email addresses were used in the initial malware campaign, while new attacks used other popular Chinese email service providers, such as 163.com, sina.cn, and qq.com, and Alibaba Cloud and other cloud service hosted email accounts as well.
Check Point also points out the nasty HummingBad malware trojan that was also discovered in the Chinese mobile market, and "turned out to be early birds which continued to spread worldwide" if adopted by western malware.
Russian government hacking Russian oppositionists....
Russian website monitoring police detentions at protests @OvdInfo is down due to a reported DDoS attack.
https://meduza.io/news/2017/03/26/sa...za-ddos-ataki#
DDoS attack is coming from inside Russia not outside....
The FBI Says It Can't Find Hackers to Hire Because They All Smoke Pot
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...rce=vicefbanz#
Man indicted for using @Twitter as a deadly weapon: May mean landmark case in cyberstalking
http://www.salon.com/2017/03/27/man-...andmark-case/#
Finally.....the courts understand .........
Dirty Foreign Money’s Existential Threat to Democracy by Neil Barnett http://buff.ly/2n77zEC
Moderator adds: Above link did not work in UK. This one did, note "one free article per month":http://www.the-american-interest.com...-to-democracy/
Russian disinformation on the use of "deep state" a favorite ultra right wing conspiracy theory especially Infowars and Breitbart.com
Hilarious. James George Jatras explain how "US deep-state fabricated Trump-Russia link"
On same page: "Carter Page lecture in Moscow."
Right now there is little difference between Russian propaganda/fake news and ultra right wing propaganda/disinformation/fake news
Brilliant piece by @NickCohen4 on the right-wing BS that is reshaping our world disastrously
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...inster-attack#
…
Russia’s Cyberattacks Put Transatlantic Security in ‘a Whole Different Light’
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs...XB0q8.twitter#
STRATCOMCOE @STRATCOMCOE
.@DFRLab fact checked the Russian Foreign Ministry’s @mfa_russia “fakes” page
http://bit.ly/2onuZGS
Recently there had been a massive DDoS attack on Swedish MSM outlets knocking them offline for two days..part and parcel of a number of recent DDoS attacks on Ukraine..Poland and Sweden.
The Swedish Security Service blamed the attack on Russian state sponsoring as the media outlets are proNATO...and had been carrying a number of articles stating Sweden should join NATO...
I particularly like this US security analyst but he even missed the Swedish connection in these arrests...not hough his fault as he does not cover European hacking activities...much less Ukraine...
Another example of Russian intel services using hacking criminals as a "cut out"....
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/03/...al/#more-38712
Quote:
Alleged vDOS Owners Poised to Stand Trial
Police in Israel are recommending that the state attorney’s office#indict and prosecute two 18-year-olds suspected of operating vDOS, until recently the most popular attack service#for knocking Web sites offline.
On Sept. 8, 2016, KrebsOnSecurity published a story about the hacking of vDOS, a service that attracted tens of thousands of paying customers and facilitated countless distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the four year period it was in business. That story named two young Israelis — Yarden Bidani and Itay Huri — as the likely owners and operators of vDOS, and within hours of its publication the two were arrested by Israeli police, placed on house arrest for 10 days, and forbidden from using the Internet for a month.
After those restrictions came and went, some readers expressed surprise that there were no formal charges announced against either of the young men. This week, however, Israeli police sent letters to lawyers for both men stating that the official investigation was nearing completion and that they planned to urge government prosecutors to pursue criminal charges.
The police are preparing to recommend#prosecutors charge the men with computer fraud and extortion, alleging#they caused more than six million shekels worth of damage (approximately USD $1.65 million).
Bidani’s attorney Perach Aroch told KrebsOnSecurity that her client has not yet been officially charged with any crime. But she said once the investigation is complete the defense will have 30 days to review the evidence and to make arguments as to why the case should be dismissed.
“They have to give us 30 days to see all the evidence and to try to convince them why they should not take this case to court,” Aroch said. “After that, [the prosecutors will] decide if it should go to trial.”
18-year-old Yarden Bidani.
The arrest of Bidani and Huri came after the police received information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). But the United States apparently isn’t the only country weighing in on this case: According to a story published Sunday by Israeli news outlet TheMarker.com, the government of Sweden also is urging Israeli prosecutors to pursue formal charges.
It’s unclear exactly why the Swedish government is so interested in this case, but the vDOS service has been implicated in a series high-profile attacks that#brought down some of the country’s largest news media Web sites last year.
Shortly after those attacks in March 2016, Somerville, Mass.-based security intelligence firm Recorded Future published an analysis linking the assaults against Swedish media sites to vDOS and to “applej4ck,” the hacker nickname allegedly used by Bidani.
In publicizing the news of vDOS’s hack last year, KrebsOnSecurity also published several months of attack logs from the vDOS service. However, those logs only dated back to May 2016.
Itay Huri’s lawyer declined to comment for this story, but TheMarker’s Amitai Ziv obtained a statement from Huri’s attorney, who accused Israeli police of applying pressure and terror through the media instead of looking for the truth.
Ziv said sources he’s spoken to believe the case will almost certainly go to trial.
“Professionals involved in the case said the likelihood of indictments in the affair is very high,” he wrote.
According to Bidani’s lawyer Aroch, the two former friends are now pointing the finger of blame at each other and are no longer speaking to one another.
“They each now accuse each other in things, so it’s a little bit of a problem,” Aroch said.
“They each now accuse each other in things, so it’s a little bit of a problem,” Aroch said.
Aroch said both Bidani and Huri are free to travel and even leave the country, although both men have had their bank and PayPal accounts frozen.
Bidani and Huri allegedly started vDOS when they were 14 years old. By the time the service was shut down last September, it had attracted tens of thousands of customers who paid for attacks in PayPal (when vDOS’s PayPal accounts were shut down, the service briefly shifted to accepting payment via Bitcoin).
My Sept. 2016 investigation into the hacking of vDOS revealed that in just two of the four years the service was in operation, it brought in revenues of more than $600,000.
It’s unclear how many digital sieges#were launched by vDOS, but it was likely several million. The aforementioned user logs stolen from vDOS and leaked to KrebsOnSecurity show that in just the span of less than three months last year the service was responsible for more than 150,000 attacks.
KrebsOnSecurity paid a heavy price for breaking the story on vDOS’s hacking and the subsequent arrest of its alleged proprietors. Less than two weeks after those stories were published in September 2016, this site came under one of the largest DDoS attacks the Internet has ever witnessed.
That series of attacks ultimately knocked this site offline for nearly four days. According to follow-up reporting published in January 2017, the attacks were paid for#by a cybercriminal who was upset and/or inconvenienced by my exposé on vDOS.
Lawyers for Bidani and Huri have said their clients were merely operating a defensive “stresser” service sold to companies that wished to test whether their sites could withstand large cyberattacks. The owners of these stresser services#have sought to hide behind wordy “terms of service” agreements which all customers must agree to, arguing that these agreements#absolve them of any sort of liability for how their customers use the service.
Law enforcement officials both in the United States and abroad say stresser services enable illegal activity, and they’ve recently begun arresting both owners and users of these services.
In December 2016, federal investigators in the U.S. and Europe arrested nearly three-dozen people suspected of patronizing stresser services (also known as “booter” services).#That crackdown was billed as part of an effort by authorities to weaken demand for these services, and to impress upon customers that hiring someone to launch cyberattacks on your behalf can land you in jail. In October 2016, the U.S. Justice Department charged two 19-year-old men alleged to have operated a stresser service affiliated with the hacking group known as the Lizard Squad.
Amazing how many pro-Russian disinformations accounts reveal themselves by retweeting other disinformations accounts over and over again.
Kremlin Trolls CI @KremlinTrolls
"When you encounter rabid anti-Putin activists, there’s a solid chance some of them are secretly working for the Russians" -
Russian Citizen Pleads Guilty for Involvement in Global Botnet Conspiracy
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/russi...et-conspiracy#
The information war is just beginning, argues Mike Rogers, ex-chair of the House Intelligence Committee
https://www.wsj.com/articles/america...re-1490655558#
Young IDP from Donetsk created Android app, which hacked 2500 phones of aggressor:
https://informnapalm.org/en/young-id...es-aggressor/#
Taken from the Ukrainian thread..
Trump adds Fiona Hill as a National Security Council director
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world....36e83cc06ab2#
Hill on Rus cyber-ops in Feb:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?422780...ssian-hacking#
It's two weeks since the Russian MFA's fake-busting page reported any "fakes".
Guess the Western media aren't that unreliable after all...
In a first, Finnish Security Intelligence Service's annual report mentions APT28/Sofacy campaign by name.
A leading Finnish journalist has been warned that he is on a Sofacy espionage listing of those to be attacked....
APT28 is behind the US election hacking and is Russian state sponsored...