The design is made by visualizing a section of code from the TRITON attack framework used by the XENOTIME Group.
TRITON is advanced, state-sponsored malware that targets industrial control systems (ICS), developed by an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). APTs are highly skilled and well resources hacking groups that focus on selective targets for a sustained period of time.
Produced by @glitchtextiles for @_openvault's cyber weapons retail pop-up located at 325 Canal St., NYC
Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster accused Moscow of engaging in “disinformation, subversion and espionage.” The comments highlighted a sharp division in the White House on how to talk about Russia’s actions.
Trump’s National Security Chief Calls Russian Interference ‘Incontrovertible’
MUNICH — Just hours after the Justice Department indicted 13 Russians in what it charged was a broad conspiracy to alter the 2016 election, President Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, accused Moscow of engaging in a campaign of “disinformation, subversion and espionage” that he said Washington would continue to expose.
The evidence of a Russian effort to interfere in the election “is now incontrovertible,” General McMaster said at the Munich Security Conference, an annual meeting of European and American diplomats and security experts, including several senior Russian officials. On Friday, just hours before the indictment, the top White House official for cyberissues accused Russia of “the most destructive cyberattack in human history,” against Ukraine last summer.
Taken together, the statements appeared to mark a major turn in the administration’s willingness to directly confront the government of President Vladimir V. Putin. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and C.I.A. Director Mike Pompeo also attended the Munich conference, and while they did not speak publicly, in private meetings with others here they reiterated similar statements.
The comments highlighted a sharp division inside the administration about how to talk about the Russian covert efforts, with only Mr. Trump and a few of his close advisers holding back from acknowledging the Russian role or talking about a larger strategy to deter future attacks.
The indictment characterized the cyberattacks and social media fraud as part of a larger effort by Russia to undermine the United States. A senior administration official called the effort to confront Russia “a significant point of contention” within the administration.
After the indictment on Friday Mr. Trump declared in a Twitter post that “the results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong — no collusion!” He made no mention of Russia as a “revisionist power,” the description used in his own National Security Strategy, or of the elaborate $1.2 million-a-month effort that the indictment indicated Russia’s Internet Research Agency spent in an effort to discredit the election system and ultimately to support his candidacy.
Vice President Mike Pence, speaking this past week in Washington, misstated American intelligence conclusions about the election hacking, arguing “it is the universal conclusion of our intelligence communities that none of those efforts had any effect on the outcome of the 2016 election.” The intelligence chiefs have said they have not, and cannot, reach such a conclusion.
Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, cited Mr. Pence’s comments during the session here Saturday to make the case that Russia did nothing wrong. “So until we see the facts, everything else is just blabber,” he said.
The man who served as the Russian ambassador to the United States during the period covered by the indictments, Sergey I. Kislyak, picked up on a favorite theme of Mr. Trump’s: questioning the credibility of the F.B.I. and intelligence agency assessments.
“I have seen so many indictments and accusations against Russians,” Mr. Kislyak said on Saturday afternoon. “I am not sure I can trust American law enforcement to be the most truthful source against Russians.” He added, “The allegations being mounted against us are simply fantasies.”
Mr. Kislyak, who has been caught up in the investigation because of meetings with Trump campaign officials during his time as ambassador, went on to cite a study, which he said he was keeping in his briefcase, that proved the “main source of computer attacks in the world is not Russia. It is the United States.”
The accusations and counteraccusations about cyber- and social media attacks were the main point of division between the Americans and the Russians, but hardly the only ones expressed at the conference.
Mr. Kislyak argued that the Trump administration’s new nuclear strategy involved the manufacture of low-yield weapons and made nuclear war more probable. The Americans argued they were just matching Russian capabilities and charged that Moscow was in continued violation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement, limiting tactical weapons.
Yet the cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee and others, and the use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to spread propaganda, dominated the discussion and reflected how quickly the use of these techniques has become the new battleground in a very different kind of post-Cold War conflict.
The White House cybercoordinator, Rob Joyce, was particularly direct in his accusations that Russia was behind the broad attack on Ukraine last June, called “NotPetya.” He described the attack as “indiscriminate” and noted that it paralyzed operations far beyond Ukraine, the intended target, and included the Maersk shipping system. He said the United States would retaliate, but did not say how, adding “we will not telegraph these punches.”
Mr. Joyce is no newcomer to offensive cyberoperations; previously he ran the Tailored Access Operations unit of the National Security Agency, overseeing American cyberaction against other counties. “We are going to conduct cyberoperations,” he said. But “we need to do it in a responsible, balanced way.”
General McMaster, in his comments, argued that Russia had bridged the partisan divides in the United States, citing a 98 to 2 vote in the Senate to impose Russian sanctions. He did not mention that the administration has yet to impose those sanctions, saying the threat of them alone has begun to change Russian behavior.
“That sanctions bill has not yet been used as a tool against the Russians,” Christopher Painter, a former coordinator for cyberissues at the State Department, who also attended the conference. “The question now is whether they will actually use it to create consequences. I don’t know.”
General McMaster was questioned by the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of Russian Federation Council, the country’s equivalent of the Senate, about whether the United States was ready to enter into some kind of negotiation with Russia about the use of cyberweapons.
It was not the time for that yet, General McMaster said, adding, “I’m surprised there are any Russian cyberexperts available based on how active they have been in undermining the democracies” of the world.
The World Wide Web’s inventor warns it’s in peril on 28th anniversary
Jon Swartz, USA TODAY, March 11, 2017
Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, now wants to save it.
The computer scientist who wrote the blueprint for what would become the World Wide Web 28 years ago today is alarmed at what has happened to it in the past year.
“Over the past 12 months, I’ve become increasingly worried about three new trends, which I believe we must tackle in order for the web to fulfill its true potential as a tool which serves all of humanity,” he said in a statement issued from London. He cited compromised personal data; fake news that he says has “spread like wildfire”; and the lack of regulation in political advertising, which he says threatens democracy.
“Even in countries where we believe governments have citizens’ best interests at heart, watching everyone, all the time is simply going too far,” he said, in an allusion to WikiLeaks’ disclosure of what documents claim is a vast CIA surveillance operation. “It creates a chilling effect on free speech and stops the web from being used as a space to explore important topics, like sensitive health issues, sexuality or religion.”
Berners-Lee, 61, who was knighted, founded Web Foundation in 2009 to improve the web as part of a five-year plan.
When Berners-Lee submitted his original proposal for the Web, he imagined it as an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries.
But his faith, and those of privacy advocates and cybersecurity experts, has been badly shaken by a series of high-profile hacks and the dissemination of fake news through the use of data science and armies of bots.
Front and center: The WikiLeaks bombshell. The treasure trove of more than 8,000 pages reads like a John Le Carre spy novel overrun with Edward Snowden-like protagonists. The CIA, with sophisticated hacking tools, has been angling to turn popular consumer devices such as iPhones, Samsung TVs and Android smartphones into surveillance devices, the documents indicate.
Imagine that Big Brother scenario extended to the millions of smart devices such as digital thermostats and fire alarms feeding the Internet of Things ecosystem, and you have a problem that could eviscerate the privacy of billions of people, say security experts.
Berners-Lee is just the latest high-profile technologist to share concerns over what former Cisco Systems executive Monique Morrow calls a fundamental assault on privacy and cybersecurity, with critical infrastructure--banking systems, the grid--hanging in the balance. “How do we use technology responsibly?” she asked at a SXSW talk in Austin Saturday.
The scourge of fake news, a topic of several panels here, has prompted plenty of tech types to brainstorm on solutions. One idea is to apply a simple rating system to stories based on their news value and accuracy, says Amar Lalvani, CEO of hotel chain Standard International. “We could apply the same model to stories as we do to travel sites,” he said here Sunday.
Proliferation of cyberweapons pose a significantly greater threat--especially smartphones in the hands of unwitting consumers, and eavesdropping TVs in their living rooms--because they spread at a faster rate than physical weapons, says Phil Reitinger, CEO of the Global Cyber Alliance and a former director of the National Cyber Security Center.
“It’s already happening,” says Sean Smith, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College and author of The Internet of Risky Things. He says many of the same security vulnerabilities exploited in phones, TVs and computers outlined by WikiLeaks apply to IoT devices.
“If the CIA is working on breaking into phones like other hackers, you can bet it’s working on other devices, just like hackers,” Smith says, pointing to malware that was wormed its way into some medical devices at major healthcare providers across the globe. The security breach put tens of thousands of patients records at risk, says TrapX Security.
The same flaws can apply to cars, as proved by a Wired report on how hackers remotely hijacked a Jeep Cherokee’s digital system over the Internet and disabled its brakes at low speeds in 2015, Smith says.
“What WikiLeaks said is Shakespearean when you think about it: It’s much ado about nothing,” says Vince Steckler, CEO of computer-security firm Avast Software, “What was revealed has been an open secret for years in the security community. If anything, (the disclosure) informs the general public how exposed infrastructure really is. And that might be a good thing.”
Wikileaks published a new series of documents labeled “Vault 7,” and are from the inside of the CIA’s “Global Hacking Force.” The first installment, called “Year Zero” contains more pages of information than the first three years of Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks. The big story today is that they appear to have worked with companies to leave holes in the security of devices so that they can get in.…
The design is made by visualizing a section of code from the DANDERSPRITZ post-exploitation framework attributed to the Equation Group (NSA). The code was developed by the NSA and leaked by the Shadow Brokers in 2017.
DANDERSPRITZ is advanced, state-sponsored malware used for espionage by what the industry calls an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). APTs are highly skilled and well resources hacking groups that focus on selective targets for a sustained period of time.
Produced by @glitchtextiles for @_openvault's cyber weapons retail pop-up located at 325 Canal St., NYC
https://open-vault-on-canal.eventbrite.com
The design is made by visualizing a section of code from the CARBON attack framework used by the Turla Group.
CARBON is advanced, state-sponsored malware used for espionage an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). APTs are highly skilled and well resources hacking groups that focus on selective targets for a sustained period of time.
Produced by @glitchtextiles for @_openvault's cyber weapons retail pop-up located at 325 Canal St., NYC
https://open-vault-on-canal.eventbrite.com
