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A Harbinger of Things to Come: Nazi Hacking Group Takes Credit for Taking Down CIA Web Site

 

COMMENT: In AFA #37 (How the Unit­ed States Lost the Sec­ond World War), we chron­i­cled the impor­ta­tion of the Nazi nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment and its fusion with its U.S. coun­ter­part. The cen­tral point of this mas­sive broad­cast con­cerns the fact that the Nazi chain of com­mand was still in effect at the end of World War II and the imports graft­ed onto the U.S. intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary estab­lish­ments con­sti­tut­ed a Tro­jan Horse–a Third Reich fifth col­umn that, ulti­mate­ly would turn on, and destroy, this coun­try.

For the U.S. right wing and those of its adher­ents in the nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment, anti-com­mu­nism was some­thing of a sec­u­lar reli­gion. For the Ger­mans upon whom they relied for intel­li­gence on the for­mer U.S.S.R., anti-com­mu­nism was a vehi­cle for conquest–Germany has always demon­strat­ed a will­ing­ness to work with com­mu­nism, from the Impe­r­i­al Ger­man Gen­er­al Staff’s ship­ping of Lenin into Rus­sia to foment the Bol­she­vik Rev­o­lu­tion to the Hitler Stal­in Pact of 1939.

In this regard, the Third Reich was sim­ply man­i­fest­ing tra­di­tion­al Ger­man Ost­poli­tik, as well as lur­ing the U.S. into squan­der­ing much of its nation­al trea­sure and even more of its good rep­u­ta­tion as a defend­er of democ­ra­cy on the Cold War.

Dur­ing the Cold War, the racist right and non-racist right were more or less on the same page. After the Cold War, how­ev­er, the racist right turned on the U.S. with a vengeance, act­ing in accord with their Under­ground Reich mas­ters.

A recent [appar­ent] Nazi hack­ing attack on the CIA’s offi­cial web­site augurs things to come, in our opin­ion.

A Nazi hack­ing col­lec­tive known as UG Nazi has claimed cred­it for tak­ing down cia.gov.

In our opin­ion, one of the most strik­ing aspects of this event con­cerns the clever, pop­ulist rhetoric employed by UG Nazi in a Twit­ter announce­ment of its take­down.

Focus­ing on mon­eyed cor­po­rate inter­ests and their allied gov­ern­ment ele­ments, the UG Nazi group employed rhetoric that will cer­tain­ly appeal to the younger, less mature and/or less sophis­ti­cat­ed. The orig­i­nal Nazis por­trayed them­selves as Nation­al Social­ists, win­ning con­verts among the Strassserite wing of the ear­ly NSDAP. (The Strasserites were left-of-cen­ter Nazis who saw the cor­po­rate land­scape as con­trolled by Jews, believ­ing that neu­tral­iz­ing them would auto­mat­i­cal­ly bring about mean­ing­ful polit­i­cal reform. They were liq­ui­dat­ed dur­ing the Night of the Long Knives, after they served their purpose–paving the way for the very mon­eyed inter­ests they thought they were oppos­ing.)

The clever rhetoric employed by the UG Nazi group is sim­i­lar to the pop­ulist rhetoric used by the Anony­mous hack­ing col­lec­tive. Per­haps there is a degree of over­lap. 

In both FTR #732 and FTR #745, we not­ed that the Anony­mous group might well be thought of as “cyber-Wandervogel”–online equiv­a­lents of the anarcho/Utopians who ulti­mate­ly became Nazis.

One can but won­der what the Anony­mous folks think of the Islam­ic fas­cist gov­ern­ment they helped bring about in Egypt. As we said at the time of the so-called “Arab Spring,” they have been thor­ough­ly had.

“CIA.gov Goes Down, UG Nazi Claims Respon­si­bil­i­ty” by Jes­si­ca Roy; betabeat.com; 12/20/2012.

EXCERPT: CIA.gov, the U.S. Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency’s offi­cial web por­tal, went down this after­noon and con­tin­ues to be inac­ces­si­ble, accord­ing to Down For Every­body or Just Me. Osama the God, “leader of #UGNazi,” a hack­tivist crew, has tak­en respon­si­bil­i­ty on Twit­ter.

“#Tan­goDown #UGNazi #OpAntiGov http://cia.gov,” he tweet­ed, fol­low­ing that mes­sage up with sev­er­al retweets that cred­it UGNazi for the attack. The move is part of #OpAntiGov, a long­stand­ing UG Nazi oper­a­tion.

“Our goal is to show the gov­ern­ment of the world we will not be cen­sored by filthy gov­ern­ment offi­cials and mon­ey hun­gry com­pa­nies,” the group said of #OpAntiGov back in May. “The world gov­ern­ment and mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar com­pa­nies have been try­ing to stop the move­ment of free­dom since the day free­dom was even invent­ed.” . . . .

Discussion

17 comments for “A Harbinger of Things to Come: Nazi Hacking Group Takes Credit for Taking Down CIA Web Site”

  1. Spot on Dave.

    Ref the Nazi chain of com­mand still being in effect, its worth con­sid­er­ing from the Brit per­spec­tive.

    When faced with Ger­man inva­sion dur­ing the Bat­tle of Britain, the British gov­ern­ment had a plan B if British troops were unable to repel the inva­sion.

    After ini­tial force failed (hold­ing just long enough to get cer­tain people/funds etc out of the coun­try), a sig­nal would be sent out to halt hos­til­i­ties to pre­vent total destruc­tion. The now infa­mous poster “Keep Calm & Car­ry On” would be put up, and cer­tain goven­ment employ­ees would sign sur­ren­der terms, allow­ing Britain to still run its own affairs to a point, under Ger­man juris­dic­tion (the Ger­mans always pre­ferred quis­ling to overt Ger­man con­trol, to ensure com­pli­ant pop­u­la­tion).

    Churchill, the King etc, would all evac­u­ate to Cana­da, until such time as the Com­mon­wealth could sup­port tak­ing back the coun­try. They would be the British ‘gov­ern­ment in exile’.

    The Ger­mans planned exact­ly the same thing. The bat­tle for Berlin would hold out long enough to get peo­ple like Bor­mann out of the city in the chaos, and then a sig­nal would be sent to switch to the post-war plan of co-oper­a­tion.

    The sig­nal “Oper­a­tion Clause­witz” was sent when things were deemed hope­less (clause­witz of course being total war — mov­ing to the polit­i­cal foot­ing).

    The Nazis in S‑America were not plot­ting to take back pow­er like many claim. They did­n’t real­ly need to. They were the Ger­man ‘gov­ern­ment in exile’, and still ran the coun­try, just indi­rect­ly.

    The Nazi plan­ners just took all the Nazi beliefs/systems, and broke them into their con­stituent parts, so thou­sands of new move­ments post-war seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed to Nazism, were cre­at­ed — each one just a small part of the big­ger pic­ture. Like flat-pack fur­ni­ture, each indi­vid­ual move­ment could then oper­ate open­ly with­in tar­get coun­tries with seem­ing­ly no link to Nazi beliefs. But put them togeth­er like the flat-pack fur­ni­ture, and they become the same move­ment, just with­out the Swasti­ka. By break­ing the par­ty beliefs into con­stituent parts, it made it very easy to export Nazism. All coun­tries were to be Naz­i­fied by stealth.

    By push­ing the cold war, it was per­fect as these move­ments were often sup­port­ed as anti-Sovi­et.

    The only rule was to not open­ly link groups to anti-Semi­tism. They seem to have giv­en up on that rule since the 1990s.

    And ref­er­ence the Ger­man will­ing­ness to work with Com­mu­nism, where do both Com­mu­nism and Nazism come from? Ger­many.

    Com­mu­nism is just Ger­man sub­ver­sion writ large. Wil­helm Stieber, the god­fa­ther of Ger­man sub­ver­sion, was close to Marx. I would bet that Stieber hired Marx and shipped him off to Lon­don to sub­vert Britain. That kept him out of Ger­many and made Marx some­one else’s prob­lem.

    These hack­ing groups all sprout Nation­al Social­ist the­o­ries, even if most of them have no idea that is what they are doing. Its framed as anti-big busi­ness. But its real­ly about killing free mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism for the Ger­man’s love of State con­trol of mar­kets. Only a coun­try with aggres­sive aims needs the State to have so much con­trol, to effec­tive­ly organ­ise the sup­ply of mate­ri­als for war pro­duc­tion. That is what Ger­many is using the EU for — organ­is­ing the whole Euro­pean con­ti­nent for effi­cient pro­duc­tion as one Ger­man-con­trolled enti­ty.

    Keep Calm & Car­ry On.

    Posted by GW | January 4, 2013, 7:18 am
  2. Posted by Qevets | January 4, 2013, 1:16 pm
  3. https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2013-featured-story-archive/declassified-reporting-at-convention.html

    Dave,

    Read the last para­graph from this CIA web site. It says the CIA was accu­rate­ly report­ing the col­lapse of the Sovi­et Union. Obvi­ous­ly not con­clu­sive from this press release based on Mark Kramer’s state­ments. He is direc­tor of the Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Cold War Stud­ies Pro­gram and a Senior Fel­low at Harvard’s Davis Cen­ter for Russ­ian and Eurasian Stud­ies. What do you think?

    Declas­si­fied Cold War Report­ing Fea­tured at Con­ven­tion
    CIA’s His­tor­i­cal Col­lec­tions Divi­sion (HCD) recent­ly pre­sent­ed declas­si­fied infor­ma­tion on hot-but­ton Cold War events at the 44th Annu­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Slav­ic, East Euro­pean, and Eurasian Stud­ies (ASEEES) con­ven­tion in New Orleans, Louisiana. Par­tic­i­pat­ing in aca­d­e­m­ic con­fer­ences is one way CIA show­cas­es its con­tri­bu­tions to nation­al secu­ri­ty and shares insight into the work­ings of gov­ern­ment.

    Ses­sion chair A. Ross John­son, a research fel­low at the Hoover Insti­tu­tion and a senior schol­ar at the Woodrow Wil­son Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter for Schol­ars, iden­ti­fied cri­te­ria for eval­u­at­ing his­tor­i­cal intel­li­gence reports: “What do they add to what we know? How pre­scient were these at the time? And, most impor­tant­ly, how well did they inform the pol­i­cy­mak­ers?”

    Those ques­tions formed the back­bone of the dis­cus­sions that fol­lowed, as each CIA case study was brought to life by an ana­lyst who had con­tributed to the orig­i­nal report­ing:

    Peter Nyren, a 25-year Sovi­et and Russ­ian intel­li­gence ana­lyst, described the role intel­li­gence played in form­ing Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan’s pol­i­cy toward the USSR. Con­trary to urban leg­end, said Nyren, Rea­gan was an avid con­sumer of intel­li­gence. He was also the first pres­i­dent to receive CIA-pro­duced video brief­in­gs, which includ­ed intel­li­gence about the Sovi­et space pro­gram and the Cher­nobyl dis­as­ter [exter­nal link dis­claimer].

    John Bird, a 32-year vet­er­an ana­lyst of Sovi­et mil­i­tary issues at the CIA, explained the dif­fi­cul­ties the Agency faced in the late 1950s gaug­ing the num­ber of inter­con­ti­nen­tal bal­lis­tic mis­siles the Sovi­et Union had. “We lived in an infor­ma­tion void,” he said, cit­ing the lack of inter­nal Sovi­et sources and the unre­li­a­bil­i­ty of avail­able analy­ses. The cre­ation of satel­lite recon­nais­sance enabled the Agency to dis­pel con­cerns over the Sovi­et Union’s report­ed­ly supe­ri­or mis­sile capac­i­ty. Bird said the per­cep­tion of a ”mis­sile gap,” as it was called, exist­ed in part because “Khrushchev had been bluff­ing!”

    One of the best sources of intel­li­gence report­ing about the Sovi­et Union dur­ing the Cold War came from Pol­ish mil­i­tary offi­cer Colonel Ryszard Kuk­lin­s­ki. He passed to the CIA approx­i­mate­ly 40,000 doc­u­ments over 9 years. “He had access to almost all Sovi­et Pact intel­li­gence,” said Ter­ry Ben­der, a for­mer CIA intel­li­gence ana­lyst who spe­cial­ized in East Euro­pean issues for 30 years. “This was an unabashed suc­cess sto­ry.” Ben­der also dis­cussed the chal­lenges in deter­min­ing the like­li­hood of Poland imple­ment­ing mar­tial law, which was ulti­mate­ly done on Decem­ber 13, 1981.

    Pan­elist Mark Kramer, direc­tor of the Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Cold War Stud­ies Pro­gram and a Senior Fel­low at Harvard’s Davis Cen­ter for Russ­ian and Eurasian Stud­ies, addressed the charge that the CIA failed to pre­dict the col­lapse of the Sovi­et Union, a claim Nyren said is not borne out by the grow­ing body of declas­si­fied reports reveal­ing what the CIA was telling pol­i­cy­mak­ers about the state of the Sovi­et Union.

    “The CIA pro­vid­ed an excel­lent pic­ture of what was going on in the Sovi­et Union. The Agency didn’t have a Kuk­lin­s­ki in the Sovi­et Union, but it did make great use of infor­ma­tion from var­i­ous sources,” said Kramer.

    Post­ed: Jan 03, 2013 10:22 AM
    Last Updat­ed: Jan 03, 2013 10:22 AM
    Last Reviewed: Jan 03, 2013 10:22 AM

    Posted by Charles | January 4, 2013, 1:59 pm
  4. Speak­ing of Nazis, check this out. 30 pages of garbage over at Rig­or­ous Intu­ition in which the denizens, chumps and gate­keep­ers of that cesspool go on for 30 pages about Black­Opz, quotes from Lau­ra Knight J.(was wife of a guy tied from Poland who came to the USA and worked for Darpa) and weblinks to the cabal of Pak­istani, Russ­ian, Turk­ish and Amer­i­can dis­in­fo agents over at VeteransToday.com. Get the pic­ture?

    Now Pter­rafractyl here has drawn the more obvi­ous conclusion....that the USA is under­go­ing some type of desta­bi­liza­tion pro­gram by rightwing fas­cists seek­ing to under­mine the gov­ern­ment. Do you think that line of con­ver­sa­tion ever makes its rounds at RI? No. It Does­n’t. Do you think you might under­stand why?

    Go to the link below... read 30 pages of garbage from the Gate­keep­ers and Khaos and Kon­fu­sion pimps over at Rig­or­ous Intu­ition:
    http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=35841

    Posted by Grumbly | January 4, 2013, 5:28 pm
  5. @Charles–

    A self-serv­ing analy­sis in that last para­graph. In fact, CIA was ped­dling the myth of the 10-foot tall Russ­ian right up to the end of the USSR.

    Note Hen­ry Kissinger’s pres­ence at Har­vard and his inter­ac­tion with Gehlen Nazis as oper­a­tives.

    George Kennan–architect of Amer­i­ca’s post­war strat­e­gy toward the Sovi­et Union–opined short­ly before his death that the U.S. had fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stood the USSR.

    You might want to stretch out with AFA #37–“How the Unit­ed States Lost the Sec­ond World War.” It’s long but worth the effort required to absorb it. Not inci­den­tal­ly, the title is NOT meant to be fig­u­ra­tive. This coun­try quite lit­er­al­ly lost the war, fail­ing to take into account the teach­ings of Von Clause­witz and his con­cept of “post­war” as essen­tial to the suc­cess­ful pros­e­cu­tion of Total War.

    It’s long, but will give you a real­ly good per­spec­tive on how the CIA was pimped off to a Third Reich gone under­ground.

    Best,

    Dave Emory

    Posted by Dave Emory | January 4, 2013, 5:29 pm
  6. Hel­lo folks,

    I had to take a break for a while but now I’m fine and I’m ready to con­tin­ue the fight. This post falls right into some­thing that I want to share with you. You see, I am redis­cov­er­ing the James Bond movies these days and I got to tell you, these scripts were not writ­ten by some Joe the Plum­mer (no offense to that fel­low here). These films are care­ful­ly craft­ed “fic­tions” in which the wide pub­lic has a chance to take a glance at clas­si­fied stuff, in block­buster for­mat, with the excuse of name­ly “fic­tion” to make it look unre­al. For exam­ple, in the old­er James Bond movies with Sean Con­nery (the bests accord­ing to me) a secret orga­ni­za­tion, called Spec­tre, tries to con­quer the world by con­trol­ling world events. Sounds famil­iar? In a more recent movie, Quan­tum of Solace, it is called Quan­tum and has as its main goal to con­trol the world’s nat­ur­al resources.

    To give an idea to what extent Ian Flem­ing and the pro­duc­ers of these films were can­did about acknowl­edg­ing the exis­tence of the Under­ground Reich, just think of the movie From Rus­sia with Love. In this film, an agent of the GRU, Sovi­et Mil­i­tary Intel­li­gence, is in fact a Spec­tor dou­ble agent. It is right in your face. The Under­ground Reich, with its abil­i­ty to infil­trate even the most pro­tect­ed intel­li­gence appar­tus pos­sess­es a strike force that is quite unmatched. And the way the events are going, it is not one James Bond that we would need but thou­sands of them.

    In clos­ing, I am won­der­ing to what degree, and please don’t take it per­son­al­ly, the rep­u­ta­tion of the Amer­i­cans in terms of deal­ing, gath­er­ing, appre­ci­at­ing and assess­ing intel­li­gence is not over­rat­ed. The way I see it, oth­er nations do bet­ter in this domain, like the Cana­di­ans, the Israelis, the Ger­mans, the Pak­ista­nis, the British, the Chi­nese and of course the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. Amer­i­cans should see to it because oth­er­wise it is true that the Under­ground Reich will suc­ceed to sub­vert it, the same way it sub­vert­ed Iran and the Sovi­et Union for its own prof­it.

    It is a time to be strong.

    Posted by Claude | January 5, 2013, 8:02 pm
  7. @GW: Most­ly good, but there’s just one prob­lem: the Nazis LOVED unreg­u­lat­ed “free mar­ket” cap­i­tal­ism gone wild. Their ene­mies, peo­ple like the Marx­ists, Social Democ­rats, etc. want­ed it to be reigned in and kept under con­trol. Why else do you think Hitler went after these peo­ple from the onset? Because they stood in the way of his pow­er trip.....and today, dozens of mem­bers of entire polit­i­cal par­ties are going in the same direc­tion he did.....such as the Teabag­gers here in Amer­i­ca, Job­bik in Hun­gary, the Nation­al Front in France, the BNP in Britain, and the var­i­ous far-right orga­ni­za­tions in Ger­many today.

    Posted by Steven L. | January 5, 2013, 10:55 pm
  8. @CLAUDE

    Quite right, the CIA uses Ger­man assets and reports on much of the Mid­dle East. Same as East­ern Europe (how Nato was tricked into break­ing up Yugoslavia for Ger­many’s ben­e­fit).

    Since the mid 2000s, the CIA rarely recruit their own infor­mants, rely­ing instead on ‘friend­ly’ reports — many of which come from Ger­many.

    Read the quotes here;

    US intel­li­gence agent as say­ing: “No West­ern intel­li­gence ser­vice has as good sources in Syr­ia as the BND does.” (They nev­er won­dered why??)

    http://www.germanywatch.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/what-links-arab-spring-dr-david-kelly.html

    Posted by GW | January 6, 2013, 5:47 am
  9. I am real­ly hap­py to know that you are bet­ter. nazis may know how to be a world pest and have a long work­able plan to take over the world, but they are nev­er going to be able t main­tain con­trol for long because they are far too few to keep track of every­one, no man­ner what high tech they use to get inside our heads. as you once said, a high tech machine to con­trol your mind could be smashed with rock. as for this nazi hack­ing group, two could play the same game by hack­ing the hack­ers. by the way, DCWG.org is a good site to use to check your com­put­er along with stopbadware,org and I am sure read­ers know of oth­er sites.

    Posted by David | January 6, 2013, 3:14 pm
  10. One of the most fas­ci­nat­ing aspects about Anony­mous is that the pri­ma­ry cost of entry is the abil­i­ty to take down some­thing like a CIA web­site and do it anony­mous­ly. For all we know and there could be a vari­ety of “white hat”, “black hat”, and many shades of “grey hats” all anony­mous­ly com­min­gling under a sin­gle ban­ner. It all depends on how anony­mous Anony­mous is to Anony­mous.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 8, 2013, 9:20 am
  11. @StevenL

    No. Nazis HATED free mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism. They thought it was a Jew­ish Con­spir­a­cy to enslave them, same as Bol­she­vism.

    Nazis want­ed a com­mand econ­o­my in Europe.

    Posted by GW | January 8, 2013, 9:48 am
  12. @GW and Steven L: Kevin Coogan’s Dream­er of the Day depict­ed a post-war far-right under­ground that was all over the map in terms of the socioe­co­nom­ic par­a­digms that desired. So we might expect to see exact­ly what we see with our con­tem­po­rary far-right move­ment: a fas­cist GOP push­ing a Koch-broth­ers-style “free market”/“privatizing the government”/“pollute the world” form of fas­cism in the US jux­ta­posed to the euro­zone-style fas­cism where we find a sort of Franken­stein’s mon­ster of economies at vary­ing degrees between “free mar­kets” and “social­ism” cob­bled togeth­er under an increas­ing­ly opaque unelect­ed zone-wide pow­er struc­ture. In both cas­es we find a fix­a­tion on “low­er­ing trade bar­ri­ers”, “reduc­ing oner­ous labor reg­u­la­tions”, and var­i­ous oth­er forms of direct and indi­rect aus­ter­i­ty and I think that’s a key lesson....no mat­ter what the form of the eco­nom­ic “par­a­digm”, aus­ter­i­ty for the mass­es appears to be the pri­ma­ry goal.

    On a tan­gen­tial note, the far-right’s clear dri­ve for mass aus­ter­i­ty is also why we def­i­nite­ly do not want to allow the far-right’s past pro­cliv­i­ties for “eco-fas­cism” to blind our­selves of the very seri­ous envi­ron­men­tal real­i­ties. If there’s a sin­gle trend that will almost guar­an­tee the jack boot of author­i­tar­i­an aus­ter­i­ty stomp­ing on the face of human­i­ty for a LONG time it’s ongo­ing cli­mate change and envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion. Since cli­mate change has already poten­tial­ly passed a tip­ping point and may not be reversible, it also means we need to start think­ing about the most humane forms of non-author­i­tar­i­an real aus­ter­i­ty that human­i­ty can adopt (as opposed to joke reverse-Robin Hood finan­cial aus­ter­i­ty). Glob­al eco-col­lapse is kind of a new thing, at least in record­ed his­to­ry, so some new ideas and par­a­digms are need­ed and we can be sure the far-right has plen­ty of poten­tial future par­a­digms to sug­gest. So we had bet­ter fig­ure out a fair and work­able sys­tem that the next few gen­er­a­tions would want to vol­un­tar­i­ly imple­ment (because, hope­ful­ly, it’s a sys­tem that’s bla­tant­ly fair and work­able) because some form of aus­ter­i­ty involv­ing vital nature resources is kind of a giv­en at this point for the next cen­tu­ry. The “free mar­ket” approach is obvi­ous­ly not going to do the trick and nei­ther will author­i­tar­i­an com­mand economies. Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed and rea­son­ably-reg­u­lat­ed soci­eties pop­u­lat­ed by well-informed and empow­ered cit­i­zens that are seri­ous­ly about acknowl­edg­ing and address­ing the severe envi­ron­men­tal con­straints of our own cre­ation seems like a rea­son­able par­a­digm. So, for­tu­nate­ly, we don’t have to think too hard about what those new par­a­digms would be because they’re pret­ty much the same old par­a­digms humans have been try­ing to suc­cess­ful­ly imple­ment for a long time.

    @Claude: Wel­come back!

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 9, 2013, 10:14 am
  13. Since it seems like every gov­ern­ment and group with seri­ous hack­ing skills is hack­ing every oth­er gov­ern­ment and group out there you have to won­der what kind of dynam­ic emerges when vast vol­umes of state secrets from across the globe are just sort of “out there”, float­ing around in unknown hands. It looks like an infor­ma­tion-based ver­sion of M.A.D. could be a part of our future:

    PC Mag­a­zine
    ‘Red Octo­ber’ Cyber Espi­onage Cam­paign Uncov­ered
    By Chloe Albane­sius
    Jan­u­ary 14, 2013 12:38pm EST

    Researchers at Kasper­sky Lab have uncov­ered an “advanced cyber espi­onage net­work” — dubbed Red Octo­ber — that has been active for at least five years and is tar­get­ing diplo­mat­ic and gov­ern­ment agen­cies.

    At the request of an unnamed part­ner, Kasper­sky inves­ti­gat­ed and uncov­ered Red Octo­ber (or Rocra) in Octo­ber. Since at least 2007, it has tar­get­ed orga­ni­za­tions most­ly in East­ern Europe, for­mer USSR mem­bers, and coun­tries in Cen­tral Asia, but the mal­ware has also showed up in West­ern Europe and North Amer­i­ca.

    Kasper­sky has iden­ti­fied hun­dreds of infec­tions world­wide, with most — about 35 — hit­ting those in Rus­sia. About 21 infec­tions were in Kaza­khstan, while Azer­bai­jan and Bel­gium both saw 15. In the U.S., Kasper­sky has logged six infec­tions.

    Kasper­sky found that those behind Rocra reuse col­lect­ed data in lat­er attacks. “For exam­ple, stolen cre­den­tials were com­piled in a list and used when the attack­ers need­ed to guess pass­words and net­work cre­den­tials in oth­er loca­tions,” the com­pa­ny said.

    ...

    Kasper­sky said the data is has col­lect­ed does not sug­gest a “nation-spon­sored attack.” The Flame and Stuxnet virus­es, for exam­ple, were report­ed­ly a joint U.S.-Israeli oper­a­tion intend­ed to stop Iran from expand­ing its nuclear pro­gram.

    With Rocra, how­ev­er, Kasper­sky sug­gest­ed that the exploits were the work of Chi­nese hack­ers, while the Rocra mal­ware mod­ules — which scan net­works and col­lect data — appear to have been cre­at­ed by Russ­ian-speak­ing oper­a­tives.

    The main pur­pose of the oper­a­tion appears to be the gath­er­ing of clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion and geopo­lit­i­cal intel­li­gence, although it seems that the infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing scope is quite wide,” Kasper­sky said. “Dur­ing the past five years, the attack­ers col­lect­ed infor­ma­tion from hun­dreds of high pro­file vic­tims although it’s unknown how the infor­ma­tion was used. It is pos­si­ble that the infor­ma­tion was sold on the black mar­ket, or used direct­ly.”

    At this point, Rocra is “still active,” and data is being sent to mul­ti­ple com­mand-and-con­trol servers, which “rivals in com­plex­i­ty the infra­struc­ture of the Flame mal­ware.” Still, Kasper­sky could not find any con­nec­tion between Rocra and Flame.

    Com­pared to Flame and Gauss, which are high­ly auto­mat­ed cyberes­pi­onage cam­paigns, Rocra is a lot more ‘per­son­al’ and fine­ly tuned for the vic­tims,” Kasper­sky con­clud­ed.

    For more, see part one of Kasper­sky’s full paper on Red Octo­ber. Part two, with detailed tech­ni­cal analy­sis of the mod­ules involved in Rocra, will be pub­lished in the next few days.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 14, 2013, 12:24 pm
  14. “In both FTR #732 and FTR #745, we not­ed that the Anony­mous group might well be thought of as ‘cyber-Wandervogel’–online equiv­a­lents of the anarcho/Utopians who ulti­mately became Nazis.”

    One can but won­der what the Anony­mous folks think of the Islam­ic fas­cist gov­ern­ment they helped bring about in Egypt. As we said at the time of the so-called ‘Arab Spring,’ they have been thor­oughly had.”

    Nailed it right there !

    The only thing I could pos­si­bly add is I think “they” are already ...

    As for Kasper­sky — He’s inter­est­ing
    http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/ff_kaspersky

    Posted by Steve Winters | January 25, 2013, 12:04 pm
  15. Otto Strass­er was a dis­senter against the racial poli­cies of the NSDAP, accord­ing to a few sources I’ve seen. That might not mean nec­es­sar­i­ly that he was in dis­agree­ment with the Nazi myth that Jews con­trol the heights of the cap­i­tal­ist order (more accu­rate­ly just the finan­cial sector–as many Lib­er­tar­i­ans believe today). Otto Strass­er went into exile in Cana­da in 1942 and was allowed to return to Ger­many in 1955, where he was some­what active until his death in 1974. Strass­er had an influ­ence on the for­ma­tion of the so-called “Nation­al Bol­she­vism” of the anti­semite Edvard Limonov. Limonov and his close ally, the even more rabid anti­semite Vladimir Zhiri­novsky, share a love of Great-Russ­ian nation­al­ism but not of Lenin’s Bol­she­vism, of which they have not the slight­est knowl­edge what­ev­er. Accord­ing to friends of mine who WERE Bol­she­viks vis­it­ing Rus­sia dur­ing the ear­ly Yeltsin era (one of whom was mur­dered in her bed by some of Yeltsin’s fas­cist sup­port­ers), most of those at that time claim­ing the “com­mu­nist” man­tle were anti­semites.

    @GW sug­gest­ed that com­mu­nism came from Ger­many. If that were the case, it would prob­a­bly be called “Gemeindism” (Gm. Gemeinde “com­mune”). J Edgar Hoover wrote in his Goebbel­sian clas­sic, Mas­ters of Deceit, that com­mu­nism orig­i­nat­ed in France, and for once he was right. ‘Com­mu­nisme’ is a French word that harks back to the Parisian ori­gins of the first urban work­ers’ move­ments of con­se­quence in Europe. Com­mu­nism was intro­duced to the rest of Europe by the Ital­ian Philippe Buonar­roti, who res­cued from the Napoleon­ic coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tion the doc­trine of François Babeuf and Syl­vain Maréchal’s Con­spir­a­cy of Equals, in which he was a co-con­spir­a­tor. Bakhunin and Marx got the basis of their the­o­ries from what Buonar­roti taught.

    The Sol­i­darność over­throw of Stal­in­ist Poland was the work of Ger­man banks, with the help of the Vat­i­can and labor-fak­er­ing fas­cists with­in the AFL-CIO. But the take­down of the econ­o­my of the USSR (far from a sim­ple col­lapse) seems to have been the work of Amer­i­can and Arab Nazis, and per­haps relat­ed to the 9/11 attacks, if this sce­nario is cor­rect (and it seems to make emi­nent sense):
    https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Collateral_Damage_911#The_War_Chest

    Posted by Atlanta Bill | December 2, 2013, 2:46 am
  16. Oh dear. A sophis­ti­cat­ed hack­er group has appar­ent­ly suc­cess­ful­ly hacked into an unspec­i­fied indus­tri­al con­trol sys­tem using a rather unso­phis­ti­cat­ed hack­ing tech­nique: brute force:

    Hack­ers Launched Cyber­at­tack on U.S. Pub­lic Util­i­ty, Gov­ern­ment Says
    First pub­lished May 20th 2014, 6:05 pm
    Reuters

    A sophis­ti­cat­ed hack­ing group recent­ly attacked a U.S. pub­lic util­i­ty and com­pro­mised its con­trol sys­tem net­work, but there was no evi­dence that the util­i­ty’s oper­a­tions were affect­ed, accord­ing to the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty.

    DHS did not iden­ti­fy the util­i­ty in a report that was issued this week by the agen­cy’s Indus­tri­al Con­trol Sys­tems Cyber Emer­gency Response Team, or ICS-CERT.

    While unau­tho­rized access was iden­ti­fied, ICS-CERT was able to work with the affect­ed enti­ty to put in place mit­i­ga­tion strate­gies and ensure the secu­ri­ty of their con­trol sys­tems before there was any impact to oper­a­tions,” a DHS offi­cial told Reuters on Tues­day.

    Such cyber­at­tacks are rarely dis­closed by ICS-CERT, which typ­i­cal­ly keeps details about its inves­ti­ga­tions secret to encour­age busi­ness­es to share infor­ma­tion with the gov­ern­ment. Com­pa­nies are often reluc­tant to go pub­lic about attacks to avoid poten­tial­ly neg­a­tive pub­lic­i­ty.

    ICS-CERT said in the report post­ed on its web­site that inves­ti­ga­tors had deter­mined the util­i­ty had like­ly been the vic­tim of pre­vi­ous intru­sions. It did not elab­o­rate.

    The agency said the hack­ers may have launched the lat­est attack through an Inter­net por­tal that enabled work­ers to access the util­i­ty’s con­trol sys­tems. It said the sys­tem used a sim­ple pass­word mech­a­nism that could be com­pro­mised using a tech­nique known as “brute forc­ing,” where hack­ers dig­i­tal­ly force their way in by try­ing var­i­ous pass­word com­bi­na­tions.

    Justin W. Clarke, an indus­tri­al con­trol secu­ri­ty con­sul­tant with secu­ri­ty firm Cylance Inc, said it is rare for such breach­es to be iden­ti­fied by util­i­ties and even more rare for the gov­ern­ment to dis­close them.

    In most cas­es, sys­tems that are so anti­quat­ed to be sus­cep­ti­ble to such brute forc­ing tech­nolo­gies would not have the detailed log­ging required to aid in an inves­ti­ga­tion like this,” Clarke said.

    DHS also report­ed anoth­er hack­ing inci­dent involv­ing a con­trol sys­tem serv­er con­nect­ed to “a mechan­i­cal device.” The agency pro­vid­ed few details about that case, except to say the attack­er had access over an extend­ed peri­od of time, though no attempts were made to manip­u­late the sys­tem.

    Last year ICS-CERT respond­ed to 256 cyber inci­dent reports, more than half of them in the ener­gy sec­tor. While that is near­ly dou­ble the agen­cy’s 2012 case load, there was not a sin­gle inci­dent that caused a major dis­rup­tion.

    Ah, an indus­tri­al con­trol sys­tem that can be hacked over the inter­net by brute forc­ing the pass­word. What could pos­si­bly go wrong?

    Siemens: Stuxnet worm hit indus­tri­al sys­tems
    By Robert McMil­lan
    Sep­tem­ber 14, 2010 01:17 PM ET

    IDG News Ser­vice — A sophis­ti­cat­ed worm designed to steal indus­tri­al secrets and dis­rupt oper­a­tions has infect­ed at least 14 plants, accord­ing to Siemens.

    Called Stuxnet, the worm was dis­cov­ered in July when researchers at Virus­BlokA­da found it on com­put­ers in Iran. It is one of the most sophis­ti­cat­ed and unusu­al pieces of mali­cious soft­ware ever cre­at­ed — the worm lever­aged a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown Win­dows vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty (now patched) that allowed it to spread from com­put­er to com­put­er, typ­i­cal­ly via USB sticks.

    The worm, designed to attack Siemens indus­tri­al con­trol sys­tems, has not spread wide­ly. How­ev­er, it has affect­ed a num­ber of Siemens plants, accord­ing to com­pa­ny spokesman Simon Wieland. “We detect­ed the virus in the SCADA [super­vi­so­ry con­trol and data acqui­si­tion] sys­tems of 14 plants in oper­a­tion but with­out any mal­func­tion of process and pro­duc­tion and with­out any dam­age,” he said in an e‑mail mes­sage.

    This is wor­ri­some news because accord­ing to a new paper on the worm, set to be deliv­ered at this mon­th’s Virus Bul­letin con­fer­ence in Van­cou­ver, Stuxnet could be used to cause a sig­nif­i­cant amount of dam­age if it is not prop­er­ly removed.

    Researchers at Syman­tec have cracked Stuxnet’s cryp­to­graph­ic sys­tem, and they say it is the first worm built not only to spy on indus­tri­al sys­tems, but also to repro­gram them.

    Once installed on a PC, Stuxnet uses Siemens’ default pass­words to seek out and try to gain access to sys­tems that run the WinCC and PCS 7 pro­grams — so-called PLC (pro­gram­ma­ble log­ic con­troller) pro­grams that are used to man­age large-scale indus­tri­al sys­tems on fac­to­ry floors and in mil­i­tary instal­la­tions and chem­i­cal and pow­er plants.

    The soft­ware oper­ates in two stages fol­low­ing infec­tion, accord­ing to Syman­tec Secu­ri­ty Response Super­vi­sor Liam O’Murchu. First it uploads con­fig­u­ra­tion infor­ma­tion about the Siemens sys­tem to a com­mand-and-con­trol serv­er. Then the attack­ers are able to pick a tar­get and actu­al­ly repro­gram the way it works. “They decide how they want the PLCs to work for them, and then they send code to the infect­ed machines that will change how the PLCs work,” O’Murchu said.

    As Wieland not­ed, there are no known cas­es of plant oper­a­tions actu­al­ly being affect­ed.

    How­ev­er, that’s cer­tain­ly a pos­si­bil­i­ty, accord­ing to O’Murchu. Stuxnet comes with a rootk­it, deigned to hide any com­mands it down­loads from oper­a­tors of the Siemens sys­tems. Because of that, Syman­tec warns that even if the wor­m’s Win­dows com­po­nents are removed, the Siemens soft­ware might still con­tain hid­den com­mands. Syman­tec advis­es com­pa­nies that have been infect­ed to thor­ough­ly audit the code on their PLCs or restore the sys­tem from a secure back­up, in order to be safe.
    ...

    This is a reminder to nev­er use the default pass­words. It’s a les­son that’s going to be increas­ing­ly impor­tant going for­ward. We don’t want to have a “Stuxnets of things” attack. Real­ly. We don’t.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | May 21, 2014, 7:12 am
  17. If you thought the US’s cost-ben­e­fit ratio of the pro­posed Key­stone XL pipeline was hor­re­nous before, now con­sid­er the fact that the pipeline had bet­ter be hack­er-proof:

    Bloomberg
    Mys­te­ri­ous ’08 Turkey Pipeline Blast Opened New Cyber­war Era
    By Jor­dan Robert­son and Michael Riley Dec 10, 2014 4:00 AM CT

    The pipeline was out­fit­ted with sen­sors and cam­eras to mon­i­tor every step of its 1,099 miles from the Caspi­an Sea to the Mediter­ranean. The blast that blew it out of com­mis­sion didn’t trig­ger a sin­gle dis­tress sig­nal.

    That was bewil­der­ing, as was the cam­eras’ fail­ure to cap­ture the com­bus­tion in east­ern Turkey. But inves­ti­ga­tors shared their find­ings with­in a tight cir­cle. The Turk­ish gov­ern­ment pub­licly blamed a mal­func­tion, Kur­dish sep­a­ratists claimed cred­it and BP Plc (BP/) had the line run­ning again in three weeks. The explo­sion that lit up the night sky over Refahiye, a town known for its hon­ey farms, seemed to be for­got­ten.

    It wasn’t. For west­ern intel­li­gence agen­cies, the blowout was a water­shed event. Hack­ers had shut down alarms, cut off com­mu­ni­ca­tions and super-pres­sur­ized the crude oil in the line, accord­ing to four peo­ple famil­iar with the inci­dent who asked not to be iden­ti­fied because details of the inves­ti­ga­tion are con­fi­den­tial. The main weapon at valve sta­tion 30 on Aug. 5, 2008, was a key­board.

    The rev­e­la­tion “rewrites the his­to­ry of cyber­war,” said Derek Reveron, a pro­fes­sor of nation­al secu­ri­ty affairs at the U.S. Naval War Col­lege in New­port, Rhode Island.

    Coun­tries have been lay­ing the ground­work for cyber­war oper­a­tions for years, and com­pa­nies have been hit recent­ly with dig­i­tal broad­sides bear­ing hall­marks of gov­ern­ment spon­sor­ship. Sony Corp.’s net­work was raid­ed by hack­ers believed to be aligned with North Korea, and sources have said JPMor­gan Chase & Co. blamed an August assault on Russ­ian cyber­spies. Secu­ri­ty researchers just uncov­ered what they said was a cam­paign by Iran­ian hack­ers that tar­get­ed com­mer­cial air­lines, look­ing for vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties that could be used in phys­i­cal attacks.

    Ener­gy Pol­i­tics

    The Refahiye explo­sion occurred two years before Stuxnet, the com­put­er worm that in 2010 crip­pled Iran’s nuclear-enrich­ment pro­gram, wide­ly believed to have been deployed by Israel and the U.S. It turns out the Baku-Tbil­isi-Cey­han pipeline hack­ers were ahead of them. The chief sus­pect, accord­ing to U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cials, is Rus­sia.

    The sab­o­tage of the BTC line — which fol­lows a route through the for­mer Sovi­et Union that the U.S. mapped out over Russ­ian objec­tions — marked anoth­er chap­ter in the bel­liger­ent ener­gy pol­i­tics of Eura­sia. Days after the explo­sion, Russ­ian fight­er jets dropped bombs near the line in neigh­bor­ing Geor­gia. Alexan­der Dug­in, an influ­en­tial advo­cate of Russ­ian expan­sion­ism and at the time an advis­er to the Russ­ian par­lia­ment, was quot­ed in a Turk­ish news­pa­per declar­ing the BTC was “dead.”

    Kinet­ic Effects

    The obit­u­ary was pre­ma­ture, but the attack proved to U.S. offi­cials that they were right to be con­cerned about the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of pipelines that snake for hun­dreds of thou­sands of miles across Europe and North Amer­i­ca. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency experts had been warn­ing the lines could be blown up from a dis­tance, with­out the both­er of con­ven­tion­al weapons. The attack was evi­dence oth­er nations had the tech­nol­o­gy to wage a new kind of war, three cur­rent and for­mer U.S. offi­cials said.

    “The tim­ing real­ly is the sig­nif­i­cance,” said Chris Blask, chair­man of the Indus­tri­al Con­trol Sys­tem Infor­ma­tion Shar­ing and Analy­sis Cen­ter, which works with util­i­ties and pipeline com­pa­nies. “Stuxnet was dis­cov­ered in 2010 and this was obvi­ous­ly deployed before that. This is anoth­er point on the time­line” in the young his­to­ry of cyber­war.

    U.S. intel­li­gence agen­cies believe the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment was behind the Refahiye explo­sion, accord­ing to two of the peo­ple briefed on the inves­ti­ga­tion. The evi­dence is cir­cum­stan­tial, they said, based on the pos­si­ble motive and the lev­el of sophis­ti­ca­tion. The attack­ers also left behind a tan­ta­liz­ing clue.

    Infrared Cam­era

    Although as many as 60 hours of sur­veil­lance video were erased by the hack­ers, a sin­gle infrared cam­era not con­nect­ed to the same net­work cap­tured images of two men with lap­top com­put­ers walk­ing near the pipeline days before the explo­sion, accord­ing to one of the peo­ple, who has reviewed the video. The men wore black mil­i­tary-style uni­forms with­out insignias, sim­i­lar to the garb worn by spe­cial forces troops.

    “Giv­en Russia’s strate­gic inter­est, there will always be the ques­tion of whether the coun­try had a hand in it,” said Emi­ly Stromquist, an ener­gy ana­lyst for Eura­sia Group, a polit­i­cal risk firm based in Wash­ing­ton.

    Niko­lay Lyaschenko, a spokesman for the Russ­ian Embassy in Wash­ing­ton, didn’t respond to two e‑mails and a phone call.

    Eleven com­pa­nies — includ­ing major­i­ty-own­er BP, a sub­sidiary of the State Oil Com­pa­ny of Azer­bai­jan, Chevron Corp. and Norway’s Sta­toil ASA (STL) — built the line, which has car­ried more than two bil­lion bar­rels of crude since open­ing in 2006.

    Cir­cum­vent­ing Rus­sia

    It starts in Azer­bai­jan, tra­vers­es Geor­gia and then enters Turkey, end­ing at the port city of Cey­han. It was rout­ed south to cir­cum­vent Rus­sia, a blow to that country’s aims to reassert con­trol over Cen­tral Asia, a major pipeline delib­er­ate­ly built out­side Russ­ian ter­ri­to­ry to car­ry crude from the Caspi­an.

    Tra­vers­ing strate­gic, polit­i­cal­ly unset­tled ter­rain, the line was built to be one of the most secure in the world. The 3‑foot 6‑inch diam­e­ter pipe is buried under­ground and punc­tu­at­ed by fenced valve sta­tions designed to iso­late sec­tions in case of emer­gency and to con­tain leaks.

    Accord­ing to inves­ti­ga­tors, every mile was mon­i­tored by sen­sors. Pres­sure, oil flow and oth­er crit­i­cal indi­ca­tors were fed to a cen­tral con­trol room via a wire­less mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem. In an extra mea­sure, they were also sent by satel­lite.

    The explo­sion, at around 11 p.m. on a warm sum­mer night, was spec­tac­u­lar. Res­i­dents described feel­ing the heat a half mile away, and patients at a near­by hos­pi­tal report­ed hear­ing a thun­der­ous boom.

    First Mys­tery

    Almost imme­di­ate­ly, the Kur­dis­tan Work­ers’ Par­ty, or PKK, an armed sep­a­ratist group in Turkey, claimed cred­it. It made sense because of the PKK’s his­to­ry of bomb­ing pipelines. The Turk­ish government’s claim of mechan­i­cal fail­ure, on the oth­er hand, was wide­ly dis­put­ed in media reports. Hil­mi Guler, then Turkey’s ener­gy min­is­ter, said at the time there was no evi­dence of sab­o­tage. Nei­ther he nor offi­cials at the Ener­gy Min­istry respond­ed to requests for com­ment.

    Huseyin Sagir, a spokesman for Botas Inter­na­tion­al Ltd., the state-run com­pa­ny that oper­ates the pipeline in Turkey, said the line’s com­put­er sys­tems hadn’t been tam­pered with. “We have nev­er expe­ri­enced any kind of sig­nal jam­ming attack or tam­per­ing on the com­mu­ni­ca­tion lines, or com­put­er sys­tems,” Sagir said in an e‑mail. He didn’t respond to ques­tions about what caused the explo­sion. BP spokesman Toby Odone referred ques­tions to Botas.

    The BTC was shut down because of what BP referred to in its 2008 annu­al report sim­ply as a fire.

    Mali­cious Pro­gram

    The inves­ti­ga­tors — from Turkey, the U.K., Azer­bai­jan and oth­er coun­tries — went qui­et­ly about their busi­ness. The first mys­tery they set out to solve was why the elab­o­rate sys­tem in place to detect leaks of oil or a fire didn’t work as planned.

    Instead of receiv­ing dig­i­tal alerts from sen­sors placed along the line, the con­trol room didn’t learn about the blast until 40 min­utes after it hap­pened, from a secu­ri­ty work­er who saw the flames, accord­ing to a per­son who worked on the probe.

    As inves­ti­ga­tors fol­lowed the trail of the failed alarm sys­tem, they found the hack­ers’ point of entry was an unex­pect­ed one: the sur­veil­lance cam­eras them­selves.

    The cam­eras’ com­mu­ni­ca­tion soft­ware had vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties the hack­ers used to gain entry and move deep into the inter­nal net­work, accord­ing to the peo­ple briefed on the mat­ter.

    Once inside, the attack­ers found a com­put­er run­ning on a Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem that was in charge of the alarm-man­age­ment net­work, and placed a mali­cious pro­gram on it. That gave them the abil­i­ty to sneak back in when­ev­er they want­ed.

    Exten­sive Recon­nais­sance

    The cen­tral ele­ment of the attack was gain­ing access to the oper­a­tional con­trols to increase the pres­sure with­out set­ting off alarms. Because of the line’s design, the hack­ers could manip­u­late the pres­sure by crack­ing into small indus­tri­al com­put­ers at a few valve sta­tions with­out hav­ing to hack the main con­trol room.

    The pres­ence of the attack­ers at the site could mean the sab­o­tage was a blend­ed attack, using a com­bi­na­tion of phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal tech­niques. The super-high pres­sure may have been enough on its own to cre­ate the explo­sion, accord­ing to two of the peo­ple famil­iar with the inci­dent. No evi­dence of a phys­i­cal bomb was found.

    Hav­ing per­formed exten­sive recon­nais­sance on the com­put­er net­work, the infil­tra­tors tam­pered with the units used to send alerts about mal­func­tions and leaks back to the con­trol room. The back-up satel­lite sig­nals failed, which sug­gest­ed to the inves­ti­ga­tors that the attack­ers used sophis­ti­cat­ed jam­ming equip­ment, accord­ing to the peo­ple famil­iar with the probe.

    Inves­ti­ga­tors com­pared the time-stamp on the infrared image of the two peo­ple with lap­tops to data logs that showed the com­put­er sys­tem had been probed by an out­sider. It was an exact match, accord­ing to the peo­ple famil­iar with the inves­ti­ga­tion.

    ‘Ter­ror­ism Act’

    Years lat­er, BP claimed in doc­u­ments filed in a legal dis­pute that it wasn’t able to meet ship­ping con­tracts after the blast due to “an act of ter­ror­ism.”

    The explo­sion caused more than 30,000 bar­rels of oil to spill in an area above a water aquifer and cost BP and its part­ners $5 mil­lion a day in tran­sit tar­iffs dur­ing the clo­sure, accord­ing to com­mu­ni­ca­tions between BP and its bankers cit­ed in “The Oil Road,” a book about the pipeline.

    Some of the worst dam­age was felt by the State Oil Fund of the Repub­lic of Azer­bai­jan, which lost $1 bil­lion in export rev­enue while the line was shut down, accord­ing to Jamala Aliye­va, a spokes­woman for the fund.

    A pipeline bomb­ing may fit the pro­file of the PKK, which spe­cial­izes in extor­tion, drug smug­gling and assaults on for­eign com­pa­nies, said Didem Akyel Collinsworth, an Istan­bul-based ana­lyst for the Inter­na­tion­al Cri­sis Group. But she said the PKK doesn’t have advanced hack­ing capa­bil­i­ties. “That’s not their modus operan­di,” she said. “It’s always been very phys­i­cal, very basic insur­gency stuff.”

    Poten­tial Rivals

    U.S. spy agen­cies probed the BTC blast inde­pen­dent­ly, gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion from for­eign com­mu­ni­ca­tions inter­cepts and oth­er sources, accord­ing to one of the peo­ple famil­iar with the inquiry. Amer­i­can intel­li­gence offi­cials believe the PKK — which accord­ing to leaked State Depart­ment cables has received arms and intel­li­gence from Rus­sia — may have arranged in advance with the attack­ers to take cred­it, the per­son said.

    The U.S. was inter­est­ed in more than just motive. The Pen­ta­gon at the time was assess­ing the cyber capa­bil­i­ties of poten­tial rivals, as well as weak­ness­es in its own defens­es. Since that attack, both Iran and Chi­na have hacked into U.S. pipeline com­pa­nies and gas util­i­ties, appar­ent­ly to iden­ti­fy vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties that could be exploit­ed lat­er.

    ...

    “The explo­sion caused more than 30,000 bar­rels of oil to spill in an area above a water aquifer...” Great.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 10, 2014, 12:58 pm

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