An insightful piece by @MSnegovaya on #Russia's #media war and on why the #Kremlin is losing it:
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinio...ed/531587.html …
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An insightful piece by @MSnegovaya on #Russia's #media war and on why the #Kremlin is losing it:
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinio...ed/531587.html …
21 violations of ceasefire today: small arms, snipers, RPGs.
+50% to 24hrs yday
http://liveuamap.com/en/2016/6-janua...l-arms-snipers …
pic.twitter.com/zRafMXVK1c
Maryinka
15:30 Shooting, towards the hospital & Kolkhoz
15:50 No change, smtms salvos can be heard
16:35 Battle continues
17:32 Calmed down
OSCE reports increased presence of armed men in occupied Debaltseve
http://www.unian.info/war/1230655-os...ebaltseve.html …
pic.twitter.com/0dXqobf0jA
Recommend highly this site as I use a number of similar OSINT tools......
Automatically Discover Website Connections Through Tracking Codes | Automating OSINT Blog
http://bit.ly/1SzlT5f
UA intelligence servicemen neutralized RU device blocking UA signals at the frontline
pic.twitter.com/9kNtaVfxV5
http://liveuamap.com/en/2016/6-janua...en-neutralized …
There has been strong reporting out of the Baltics about a massive inflow of Russian money into the Russian focused NGOs and that these Russian NGOs have started a not so flattering info war towards the respective Baltic nation state they are based in---the initial precursors of non linear warfare.....the same standard procedure used in eastern Ukraine before actual fighting broke out..Quote:
Originally Posted by Azor
Yet another #CrimeanTatar vanished. They disappear one by one.
https://twitter.com/krymrealii/statu...87745543409665 …
Well...so much for German sanctions on Russia over Crimea......
Volkswagen sales office in #Crimea today.
Germany's #Sanctions in effect.
pic.twitter.com/GQzb9HMdig
Yes but the Donbass wasn't under anyone's conventional or nuclear protection, and Russian cyberwarfare has ebbed and flowed in the Baltics e.g. the massive attacks on Estonia.Quote:
Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
Check the post I left here on the Russian cyber attack that shut down an entire Ukrainian power grid during Christmas--the first proven cyber attack against a critical infrastructure that we often talk about in the US as a "potential".....Quote:
Originally Posted by Azor
The initial Russian GRU moves into eastern Ukraine were led by an extensive info war preparation that conditioned the Ukrainian ethnic Russians to their being "rescued" by their Russian brothers---check about a week or so ago in this thread --I had posted a study done by one of the Baltics that indicated their deep concern about current Russian info war activities focused on them....
Russians Have Learned How to Hack Power Grids
Jan 7, 2016 8:46 AM EST
By Leonid Bershidsky
Quote:
A successful cyber-attack on a power grid is a nightmare that keeps intelligence services and security experts awake at night. Now the threat is no longer theoretical: A grid in Ukraine has been brought down by hackers. The vulnerability they used? As so often with hacking, human stupidity.
The engineered blackout scenario is so scary Ted Koppel, the former Nightline host, recently published a book about it. In "Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath," Koppel claimed the U.S. was unprepared for an attack on one of the three power grids that distribute electricity throughout the country. He wrote:
If an adversary of this country has as its goal inflicting maximum damage and pain on the largest number of Americans, there may not be a more productive target than one of our electric power grids.
Ukraine has an adversary that may be interested in inflicting just such damage and pain: Russia. In November, Ukrainian activists with ties to President Petro Poroshenko's political party cut off the electricity supply to Russian-held Crimea, by blowing up power transmission towers. That forced Moscow to speed up the construction of an undersea "energy bridge" to the peninsula, but the line is still unable to meet all of Crimea's electricity needs and power outages remain common.
Ukraine got a taste of the same disruption on Dec. 23, when power went out for 1.4 million people in and around Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine. Almost immediately, the grid holder for the area, Prykarpattya Oblenergo reported that the outage was caused by "interference by outside persons with the work of telemechanics in the automatic system of control and management of energy equipment." Five days later the Ukrainian intelligence service reported it had prevented "an attempt by Russian special services to attack the computer networks of Ukraine's energy complex" -- meaning there could have been more outages, but the agency had been able to head them off.
More specifics came from the Bratislava-based cyber-security firm ESET. The firm hedged its bets a little -- that's always wise in hacker attack analysis -- but it essentially tied the Ivano-Frankivsk outage to a known piece of malware, the BlackEnergy trojan. In previous cases, it was used to steal sensitive information from infected computers. In 2014, however, the U.S. government's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) discovered a variant of BlackEnergy that could be used to compromise industrial control systems, such as those running power grids.
The trojan is modular, meaning that it can carry different payloads. In the case of the Ukrainian grid hacking, these included a component that stops certain processes in the grid control systems, even as it erases the disk of the infected computer. At the same time it opens a backdoor into the grid control systems that could provide hackers with remote access. ESET wrote:
We can assume with a fairly high amount of certainty that the described toolset was used to cause the power outage in the Ivano-Frankivsk region.
BlackEnergy is probably a Russian-made weapon. CERT-UA, the Ukrainian cybercrime rapid response team, recently published a post describing a BlackEnergy attack on some Ukrainian media. The names of some of the files planted on infected computers by the virus -- ololo.exe and trololo.exe -- are references to Russian Internet memes. ESET researcher Anton Cherepanov has pointed out other such clues.
That this weapon has been honed to turn out the lights for large portions of a country is bad news. If it can be used in Ukraine, it can be employed anywhere in the world. That includes the U.S., where the Islamic State is reportedly already trying to hack the power grid, but failing due to a lack of the necessary technology. In his book, Koppel wrote:
We can take limited comfort in the knowledge that such an attack would require painstaking preparation and a highly sophisticated understanding of how the system works and where its vulnerabilities lie. Less reassuring is the knowledge that several nations already have that expertise, and -- even more unsettling -- that criminal and terrorist organizations are in the process of acquiring it.
If the technology capable of bringing down power grids exists anywhere, it can leak or be intentionally leaked to anyone who might need it. So can the knowledge of specific industrial systems.
Power grid computer systems can't be taken off the internet, because the grids depend on software that constantly monitors the balance of electricity demand and supply. That makes them vulnerable by definition: If you have an Internet-connected system, people have access to it and there's a potential problem.
BlackEnergy infects computers thanks to a simple trick. The Ukrainian company CyS Centrum described it in a recent blog post. People within targeted companies received an email purportedly containing a presidential decree on military mobilization and Excel files containing lists of the company employees to be mobilized and exempted. Having opened one of the files, the user is prompted to turn on macros because "the file had been created with a newer version of Microsoft Office." Once that's done, so is the damage.
Everyone who has ears and a computer has been told hundreds of times not to open mail attachments that arrive without prior warning, even from reliable senders. And yet people all over the world still do it.
Disgruntled employees are another constant source of danger. In Texas in 2009, one allegedly sabotaged the demand and supply monitoring system of a power generation company. He didn't cause a blackout, but with the proper tools, he could have.
The only way to prevent incidents like the hours-long Ivano-Frankivsk blackout is to train energy company employees in the safe use of email (or even make it impossible for them to open attachments); to make sure ex-employees cannot help criminals gain access to the corporate systems; and to promote energy independence to citizens. The more people have solar batteries, the less damage a blackout can do.
17:35 @LuftGanza Quiet in #Makiivka; machine guns and blasts around #Avdiivka; landings betw/ #Opytne & #Severne, like Grad, up to 8 rockets
17:08 #Zalizne, #Novhorodske @LeeZernoganja Intense shooting started, they attack while it's snowing...
16:29 #Donetsk @666_mancer [vk] shots heard at #Abakumova
16:34 #Novhorodske @LeeZernoganja Firing at #Zalizna_Balka started. Not active one
LPR militants fail to fulfill own promise: no captives released for Christmas
http://www.unian.info/war/1230843-lp...christmas.html …
pic.twitter.com/bv6MGpmLiO
Militants "celebrate" Christmas Eve with 51 attacks on ATO forces
http://www.unian.info/war/1230926-mi...to-forces.html …
pic.twitter.com/yuqErSIVy1
Basurin from "DNR": In Mariupol arrived 17 soldiers of pres. U.S. private military company
http://liveuamap.com/en/2016/7-janua...riupol-arrived … pic.twitter.com/ot6kRUhhKo
As Ukraine Celebrates Christmas, Fighting Dramatically Escalates
http://bit.ly/1mIgGvq
pic.twitter.com/HOulQ1LuSd
Ukrainian intel: Russian colonel Dmitry Bondarev is commander of militants near Novoazovs'k
pic.twitter.com/Vxrs6ovzFz
http://liveuamap.com/en/2016/7-janua...mitry-bondarev …
Russian BUK officer from the alleged BUK unit that shot down MH17 is awarded high medal for "what services and where".....?
Russland #MH17 Wofr wird ein Offizier der russischen 53. Fla-Raketenbrigade ausgezeichnet?:
https://informnapalm.org/de/13970-2/ с помощью @deburkonews
Serious question concerning just who owns actual US social media companies as it appears Twitter now official works for the Russian info warriors.....
.@Twitter blocked most of accounts from top of Ukrainian twitter community
http://liveuamap.com/en/2016/8-janua...p-of-ukrainian …
pic.twitter.com/jLDSmEgcVk via @senko
NOTICE NO corresponding blockage of Russian troll accounts......
Cache of weapons was found in Bugas of Donetsk region http://liveuamap.com/en/2016/8-janua...gas-of-donetsk …
pic.twitter.com/TDyr4jHbGV via @HromadskeTV
Numbers-Stations.com @Spy_Stations
11780 kHz 25 m S06s in broadcast band
BreakingReport
The Ukrainian def ministry expects "a massive provocation" with "tanks and artillery systems" soon.
http://www.unian.info/war/1230965-te...s-def-min.html …
SBU detained ppl heading to 'DNR' w/cash money+ bank cards, contraband meat & excise labels
http://www.sbu.gov.ua/sbu/control/uk...5&cat_id=39574 …
pic.twitter.com/2O2I8aqYME
Kremlin Trolls @KremlinTrollsQuote:
Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
Russian trolls get top pro-#Ukraine twitter ac's suspended. Looks like #Russia infiltrated @support.
pic.twitter.com/cGHnUyGIC8
Top Ukrainian users suspended & banned for *old* tweets by RU trolls w/help of @Support #saveUAtwi
pic.twitter.com/Mu8hnWV79T
Donetsk @Li0111111 Many Ural trucks move in different directions, yet nobody saw tracked vehicles so far https://twitter.com/loogunda/status/685416624376180736 …
OSCE SMM cannot get into Kominternove, captured by pro-Russian militants in the neutral area.Quote:
Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
https://twitter.com/ZIK_IA/status/685447503316185088 …
In Kominternovo the situation has not changed - militants had not left, - the speaker of the ATO
http://liveuamap.com/en/2016/8-janua...s-not-changed- …
Twitter is massively banning Ukrainian accounts with thousands followers. Dozens already banned. @SupportQuote:
Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
pic.twitter.com/yXFTxbkFHC
Has #Twitter become a #Kremlin tool for silencing #Putin's regime opponents?
Kremlin Trolls @KremlinTrolls
#JeSuisUkrTwi #SaveUaTwi
@EliotHiggins here is list of baned UA users.It's not full,here only the most popular users.Imagine the scale of it https://twitter.com/rfcnf/status/685408835511648257 …
Ukraine Claims Russian-Backed Fighters Used Heavy Mortars And Tanks In Attacks Yesterday
http://www.interpretermag.com/ukrain...sterday/#11789 …
pic.twitter.com/A9B2ubRUf3
TASS: Power shortage-caused state of emergency in Crimea to last till May 1
http://www.unian.info/economics/1231...ill-may-1.html … pic.twitter.com/ObndcvXufH