Monthly Archives: April 2017

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Trump made the announcement during a press conference on Wednesday with North Atlantic Trade Organization (NATO) Secretary General Jans Stoltenberg, as reported by Military Times.

The U.S. has been at war in Afghanistan since 2001, after the September 11 attacks by radical Islamic terrorists on U.S. soil that killed 3,000 people.

The U.S. has some 8,400 troops in Afghanistan, with an additional 5,000 deployed from NATO allies, Business Insider reported. Army Gen. John Nicholson told Congress in February he needed a few thousand more troops in order to break what he called a stalemate with the Taliban terrorists.

Of about400 districts in Afghanistan,the Taliban controls, contests, or influences 171of them, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Business Insider reported.

Voice of America (VOA) reported last month that the U.S. military in Afghanistan is ratcheting up theoffense against the growing Islamic State branch in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.

Since he took office, President Donald Trump has been ramping up military operations against both the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, as well as al-Qaeda, particularly in Yemen, VOA reported.

We stand confident that the new U.S. administration under President Trump will remain strategically engaged and continue its support, Afghanistans Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani said at an appearance at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

American Navy Capt. Bill Salvin, the spokesperson and director of public affairs for the U.S./NATO-led coalition in Kabul, told VOA that our goal in 2017 is to defeat ISIS-K in Afghanistan.

Green Beret Staff Sgt. Mark De Alencar, 37, of Edgewood, Maryland, was killed earlier this month fighting jihadists in the eastern part of Afghanistan near the Pakistani border.

The fatality brings the total number of U.S. military deaths since the war started more than 15 years ago to at least 2,249, most of which occurred under former President Barack Obamas watch, according toPentagon data.

This marks the first time the bomb, known as the GBU-43, or Massive Ordnance Air Blast, (MOAB) was used in combat. Its yield is11 tons of TNTand has been nicknamed theMother of All Bombs.

It remains uncertain so far if the bombing was planned under the Obama administration or the Trump administration.

Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump said the plan has been in place for a few months, and that the weapon had been in Afghanistan for some time.

The final test of the MOAB took place on March 11, 2003 and was delivered into theater on April 1, 2003.

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Trump Sending NSA McMaster to Afghanistan on Heels of MOAB Bombing on Islamic State - Breitbart News

Mysterious group posts more alleged NSA hacking tools; Russia link suspected Wichita Eagle One document appeared to show that NSA spyware had been placed on servers in South Korea, Russia, Japan, China, Mexico, Taiwan, Spain, Venezuela and Thailand, among other countries. The dump included details of how the NSA purportedly had ...

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Mysterious group posts more alleged NSA hacking tools; Russia link suspected - Wichita Eagle

On April 8, as part of a long, awkwardly worded rant about President Donald Trump's betrayal of his "base," the individual or individuals known as the Shadow Brokers posted the password to an encrypted archive containing what appear to be components of a toolkit associated with the National Security Agency's alleged Equation Group hacking campaign. But those hoping for even more spectacular exploits than those leaked earlier by the Shadow Brokers willlikely be disappointed. However, the files do include a number of tools that may still be usable, as well as significant amounts of information about systems that appear to have been hacked by the NSA.

Many information security analysts were unimpressed.

The archive, which the Shadow Brokers previously attempted to auction off, contains just over 300MB of files. It does not appear to contain the entire archive of Equation Group tools. Many of the tools apparently date back to the 1990s, targeting platforms like the Digital Equipment Corp., Alpha, Sun Solaris 2, the defunct Chinese Red Flag Linux, and other older Linux distributions. Other tools are apparently focused on telecom targets, including tools for getting into GSM cellular networks and breaking DES encryption.

The dates rangebetween August of 2000 and August of 2010, referencing code names including Incision, Orangutan, Reticulum, Jackladder, and Patchicillin.Based on the files, a majority of the systems targeted appear to be Sun Solaris systems running on SPARC architecture.

The post from Shadow Brokers, entitled "Don't Forget Your Base," is (like previous posts) in strangely wordedEnglish and delivers a white-supremacist, isolationist, anti-"globalist" message, offering "constructive criticism" on Trump's recent policy moves, including the strike on Syria, and offering the password to the encrypted archive previously upfor auction as "our form of protest."

Ars is continuing to examine the contents of the files and will post a more complete report soon.

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In slap at Trump, Shadow Brokers release NSA EquationGroup files - Ars Technica

The National Security Agency is amping up its game when it comes to challenging young, college-age students in military academies on their cyber skills.

The agency is hosting its 17th annual Cyber Defense Exercise (CDX), but with a few new twists.

The exercise challenges students at the U.S. Military, Naval, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine academies, as well as undergraduate and graduate students from the Royal Military College of Canada.

Their mission is to defend networks they have created from a red team comprised of U.S., Canadian and industry cyber warriors.

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Along with defending the network, the teams have certain challenges they need to secure as well.

What this does is challenges them to look into forensics and see where malware lies and where things happen, said James Titcomb technical lead for CDX said April 12.

The challenges consist of reverse engineering and malware analysis, network forensics, offensive ethical hacking and control of a simulated drone.

The graduate students are testing two new challenges that involve securing a space satellite and an unmanned ground vehicle.

This year whats new is we have two cadets from the Air Force academy participating in the red team, said Shirley McMonigle, CDX program lead. This is also the first year the undergraduates will participate in the drone challenge.

This year teams will have to deal with ransomeware as well. The teams can either pay points to get out of the hack or try to fix it.

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Teams are scored on network confidentiality, usability, integrity and on the challenges.

NSA uses a red team to interfere with students networks and their ability to complete the challenges. Much of the intrusions find their way into the students networks through a gray team, which acts as a network user.

The gray team may fall for social engineering tactics.

Most of our access is done through the gray cell. We call it the user that clicks on everything. What we do is we purposely throw things and have the gray cell open those links so that we can own their work stations. [The teams] have to go in and mitigate that, Titcomb said.

The red teams are a way for those in the military to keep their skills sharp too.

Air Reservist Lt. Tim Li said he works in cybersecurity for J.P. Morgan. He said acting as a hacker helps him understand the other side of the cybersecurity coin.

Its fun, its the opposite for me of what I do on the outside. Its learning what the attacker would do, so it will definitely be beneficial for me once I return to my civilian job, Li said.

The students embedded this year with the red team said they were taking in a lot from the experience.

Nick Co, a 22-year-old midshipman, said he could see himself working for U.S. Cyber Command or the NSA at some point in the future.

Thats good news for the military, which is strapped for people with cyber talent in the service.

I think for us some of it is trying to understand the basics first. We are still hugely learning, but we know that the field is really growing and we definitely know they could use some officers out there, Co said. These guys are the real professionals so its fun to really learn from them and take this back and hopefully when we graduate implement this.

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NSA gives military students a leg up on cyber with real-time exercise ... - FederalNewsRadio.com

April 12, 2017

Agencies felt databases would provide up-to-the-minute information at the fingertips of analysts, technical personnel, and executives.

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is the least famous, least exciting, and most prevalent form of intelligence, covering any sources that are theoretically open to anyone, such as newspaper articles, published books, or social media posts. With the ubiquity of the internet, the use of such commercial databases is beyond routine for both the Intelligence Community and the government at large, but there was a time, however, where the mere interest was not only cutting edge, but problematic.

By June 1985, the NSA had been looking at the issue and decided to reach out to CIA about it. The NSA memo, originally marked For Official Use Only, was sent from the NSA Director directly to the CIA Director, proposed that they work with the Intelligence Handling Committee to find a way to exploit open-source, commercial databases. Unsurprisingly, NSA volunteered to take the lead in exploring the issue. To the NSA, the benefits were obvious. The savings in time and manpower have long been recognized. They could give up-to-the-minute information at the fingertips of analysts, technical personnel, and executives.

Given this, it was only natural that the NSA would want to use this open-source information by integrating commercial database-derived information into a variety of internal support programs.

The NSA saw several obstacles, including costs and security. Significantly, in addition to accessing the information, they would have to devise ways to integrate it, and allow users to assimilate the information before they would be able to successfully exploit it. These challenges wouldnt be unique to any of the agencies in the Intelligence Community, or even the rest of the government, which led the NSA to conclude that no one agency should have to deal with these issues alone.

Security would be the major issue, as it included not only the still-emerging issues of cybersecurity, but also deniability. How could the NSA and other agencies access these databases without giving away their interests? NSAs Information Resources Management Organization had begun looking into alternatives for rapid secure access to commercial databases, including data downloading, transmission through a secure gateway computer or physical data transfers.

For its part, CIA agreed and was already working on some integrating some commercial databases into its work. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) was charged with collecting information from foreign public media, which the Agency felt included accessing foreign commercial databases. According to a formerly SECRET memo prepared for the CIA Director, the project had first begun in 1984.

The pilot project was fairly ambitious, especially for the time. Not only did it allow the Agency to collect information more quickly, the pilot project proved that the Agency could collect new bibliographic and documentary information [that was] not normally available through regular means of acquisition. By sampling some 50 online databases contained in the French Telesystemes-QUESTEL network, the project had found scientific, technical and economic information that met FBIS requirements.

FOIA requests have been filed to learn more about these efforts from the NSA and CIA.

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Image via Flashbak

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CIA and NSA first sought to exploit commercial databases in mid-80s - MuckRock

Donald Trump and his team have been having difficulties adapting to the White House. (SAUL LOEB/AFP)

Former National Security Agency analyst John Schindler has become well known for his commentary about ties between the Russian government and members of the Trump administration, and this week he pounced on revelations that Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page was under surveillance by the FBI for allegedly being a foreign agent of the Russian government.

Reacting to news that the FBI took out a FISA warrant on Page, Schindler called Page a slimy little traitor who was a fully witting agent of Russian intelligence agencies.

He then drew a broader connection to the rest of the White House by saying that several members of the administration were similarly compromised by ties to the Russian government.

George Washington was all about counterintelligence, he said. He would have had at least half the Trump WH shot as traitors, without tears or doubts.

Schindler, a political conservative who has in the past also expressed disdain for the Obama administration, also encouraged more Republicans to embrace zero tolerance for lies and corruption especially involving foreign spies.

Read the whole tweet storm below.

All the while Page was a fully witting agent of the SVR.

Fuck this slimy little traitor.https://t.co/MJD1QjUct7

John Schindler (@20committee) April 12, 2017

Reject ideology. Embrace zero-tolerance 4 lies+corruption esp involving foreign spies. That'll make Washington smile & save our Republic.

John Schindler (@20committee) April 12, 2017

George Washington was all about counterintelligence. He would have had at least half the Trump WH shot as traitors, without tears or doubts.

John Schindler (@20committee) April 12, 2017

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Ex-NSA analyst: George Washington 'would have had at least half ... - Raw Story