Nanoose on 19/11/2017 at 15:36
Ya I seen that and the first thing I thought was Trump probably wants to replace that commander with someone that will blindly carry out his ever whim, Cheers!
Dia on 19/11/2017 at 15:49
That commander isn't the only one (besides most of the rest of the world) worried about that loose-cannon Trump. I tried searching but can't find whatever came of this proposed bill ('Donald Trump would have to seek congressional approval if he wanted to launch a first strike with nuclear weapons, under new legislation introduced in a direct response to his election as president.'): (
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-ban-use-nuclear-weapons-first-use-congressional-declaration-of-war-us-congressman-ted-a7545191.html)
Quote Posted by Nanoose
Ya I seen that and the first thing I thought was Trump probably wants to replace that commander with someone that will blindly carry out his ever whim, Cheers!
Yeah, that seems to be his normal reaction when one of his underlings disagrees with him. I still think the White House should've installed a revolving door after Trump was elected. ;) lol
Tony_Tarantula on 20/11/2017 at 13:22
NSA perspective on the "Russian Hacking"
TLDR: If it had been the Russians, proving it would have been a trivial matter for US intelligence. They have tools embedded in major internet switches that would have traced the network activity directly back to Russian operatives.
(
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2017/11/70011.html)
Quote:
If it were the Russians, NSA would have a trace route to them and not equivocate on who did it. It’s like using “Trace Route” to map the path of all the packets on the network. In the program Treasuremap NSA has hundreds of trace route programs embedded in switches in Europe and hundreds more around the world. So, this set-up should have detected where the packets went and when they went there.
heywood on 20/11/2017 at 14:45
First of all, packet tracing is useless over a network of anonymizing relays, although who knows how many of those have been compromised by the NSA.
Second of all, the Russians would be absolute fools to hack a DNC server directly from a computer in Russia. If the hackers were operating in Russia, they probably would have used a compromised system somewhere else to initiate the hack from, and accessed that compromised system through a chain of other compromised computers and/or an anonymous network, and they could have cleaned any of the compromised systems they used along the way.
Third, if they were really serious about covering their tracks, the hack would have been perpetrated by an agent outside of Russia, accessing the internet from a public wi-fi hotspot, using a laptop with a wireless NIC configured with a spoofed MCA address, and then destroy the laptop afterward. Good luck tracing that.
EDIT: If I had to guess about why they think it's the Russians, I'd guess that it's based on an analysis of "fingerprints" left behind indicating what vulnerabilities were exploited, what tools may have been used, types and locations of compromised system used along the way, time of day, etc. And motive. And matching the pattern to other hacks that are more obviously connected to Russian interference, i.e. perpetrated against former Soviet countries.
Goldmoon Dawn on 20/11/2017 at 17:26
I still want to believe that Trump, Mueller, and Sessions used the "collusion" narrative right from the start, to cover the fact that they have all three been working together to bring down some very evil people. :)
I mean, if you are a *true* narcissist, and you want to do something that you *will* be remembered for:
[video=youtube;lFUuPanOVxQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFUuPanOVxQ[/video]
Campaign becomes concrete:
[video=youtube;S5cnrp5UNnA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5cnrp5UNnA[/video]
Tocky on 21/11/2017 at 02:13
Whatever Goldlooney.
Back to the real world-
Quote Posted by heywood
EDIT: If I had to guess about why they think it's the Russians, I'd guess that it's based on an analysis of "fingerprints" left behind indicating what vulnerabilities were exploited, what tools may have been used, types and locations of compromised system used along the way, time of day, etc. And motive. And matching the pattern to other hacks that are more obviously connected to Russian interference, i.e. perpetrated against former Soviet countries.
My guess would be an old fashioned mole or listening device. Spooks, man.
Tony_Tarantula on 21/11/2017 at 03:09
Quote Posted by Tocky
Whatever Goldlooney.
Back to the real world-
My guess would be an old fashioned mole or listening device. Spooks, man.
Some of that information has been released already. It's inconclusive at best.
(
https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/12/russia-malware-ip-hack/)
Quote:
The IP addresses that DHS provided may have been used for an attack by a state actor like Russia. But they
don't appear to provide any association with Russia. They are probably used by a wide range of other malicious actors, especially the 15% of IP addresses that are Tor exit nodes.
The malware sample is old, widely used and appears to be Ukrainian.
It has no apparent relationship with Russian intelligence and it would be an indicator of compromise for any website.You can find a public repository containing the data used in this report on github.
Given that this story is coming to us from the same people who insisted that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, that "torture" at black sites was a liberal conspiracy theory, that they don't perform surveillance of our electronic communications, and Benghazi was caused by a video (a list of lies that cuts across all partisan lines), I think it's reasonable to set the bar for persuasion somewhat higher than "because anonymous officials said so".
Sidenote:
Quote:
First of all, packet tracing is useless over a network of anonymizing relays, although who knows how many of those have been compromised by the NSA.
Read some of the earlier disclosures. The correct answer is "all of them". The routers come with pre-installed vulnerabilities bespoke for CIA/NSA usage.
heywood on 21/11/2017 at 15:11
Quote Posted by Tocky
My guess would be an old fashioned mole or listening device. Spooks, man.
Human intelligence is always the best.
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
Some of that information has been released already. It's inconclusive at best.
(
https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/12/russia-malware-ip-hack/)
Given that this story is coming to us from the same people who insisted that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, that "torture" at black sites was a liberal conspiracy theory, that they don't perform surveillance of our electronic communications, and Benghazi was caused by a video (a list of lies that cuts across all partisan lines), I think it's reasonable to set the bar for persuasion somewhat higher than "because anonymous officials said so".
If they have conclusive evidence, they're not likely to release it publicly because somebody will make the case that it reveals intelligence sources and methods. If they do have it, it's probably because the perpetrators were not trying to be particularly secretive, or they were just amateurs. But personally, I think it's more likely that they are just matching characteristics of the attacks with known patterns.
Quote:
Read some of the earlier disclosures. The correct answer is "all of them". The routers come with pre-installed vulnerabilities bespoke for CIA/NSA usage.
The CIA/NSA don't control the software on all networking equipment. They may "own" Cisco and a few other big American names, but a large proportion of networking equipment is coming from China with presumably Chinese back doors rather than American ones. Another point is that having a built-in vulnerability sitting in a router for the NSA to exploit doesn't mean the NSA is actively collecting data from it. And in the cases where they are collecting data, it's mainly logs. Mass collection of packet data from commercial routers spread around the world isn't really practical because you need the connections and bandwidth to carry all of that traffic back, which would increase the bandwidth needs of the internet by an order of magnitude, and it would be VERY obvious. Instead, Snowden and others revealed that the NSA has black programs with the major American ISPs to mass collect packet traffic through their entry/exit points as well as bulk collecting their customer's emails and the URLs they visit. Supposing that other Western intelligence agencies are doing the same with other Western ISPs and backbone providers, and sharing data with each other, that allows traffic analysis over a fair bit of the world but far from all of it. Traffic analysis only gets you so far.
Let's say for the sake of argument that you could capture every packet between every node of an anonymous relay network. That still doesn't mean you can associate a packet exiting the network with an entry point. The relays are general purpose computers, usually running Linux, with the anonymous relay software running on them. Each host may be configured differently, some more secure than others. But gaining root access to the host running the relay software doesn't help much because the smarts are in the relay software. If you treat the relay software as a black box, you can use time stamps in packet logs to correlate an input packet with M possible output packets exiting the relay within a time window after the input packet arrives, or an output packet with M input packets. But if the packet is traversing N nodes in the network, the number of possibilities is M^N. This very quickly becomes an intractable problem except on a very small network with low traffic. It's basically like trying to break strong encryption via brute force. I think that in order to monitor an anonymous relay system, you need crack the anonymous relay software itself. I'm willing to believe that the NSA has the Tor project covered, just follow the money on that one. But I'm sure that every major intelligence agency on the planet has their own equivalent, installed on boxes they control which are spread all over the place.
Goldmoon Dawn on 21/11/2017 at 18:47
Quote Posted by Tocky
Whatever Goldlooney.
So, was it your... "black nanny" who taught you to treat people like that?
Rather than dismiss me so cleverly, why not explain please what exactly is so "loony" about what I said. The concept is not loony. In fact not only is it not impossible (solemnly awaiting for your refutes of course), it would actually be BRILLIANT.