The Chinese Sent an Uninvited Spy Ship to the Military Exercises with Russia

Russia recently concluded the 2018 edition of the massive Vostok exercise series that included Chinese forces for the first time. At Moscow’s invitation, Beijing sent People’s Liberation Army soldiers, helicopters, tanks – and one uninvited Chinese surveillance ship.

A PLA Navy Dongdiao-class auxiliary general intelligence (AGI) shadowed Russian Navy assets for the length of the at-sea portion of the exercise while Chinese and Mongolian troops exercised ashore, a U.S. official confirmed to USNI News.

The PLA sent about 3,500 troops for the ground portion, but it was unclear if the PLA Navy was invited to send warships to drill with the Russians.

Details from Russia on the exercise have been inconsistent, but Russian state-supported media claimed it was the largest exercise in modern Russian history.

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US Navy Lt Commander Charged With Spying for China

A U.S. naval flight officer with an extensive signals intelligence background was accused by the service of passing secrets to China, USNI News has learned.

Lt. Cmdr. Edward C. Lin, who served on some of the Navy’s most sensitive intelligence gathering aircraft, faces several counts of espionage and other charges outlined during a Friday Article 32 hearing in Norfolk, Va.

Lin, originally a Taiwanese national before his family moved to the U.S., had a career as a signals intelligence specialist on the Navy’s Lockheed Martin EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance aircraft, several sources confirmed to USNI News.

Several sources familiar with the case told USNI News the country to which Lin passed secrets was China, however, few other details are known about the case given much of the evidence is classified.

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NSA to Stop Bulk Surveillance by Sunday

The U.S. National Security Agency will end its daily vacuuming of millions of Americans' phone records by Sunday and replace the practice with more tightly targeted surveillance methods, the Obama administration said on Friday.

As required by law, the NSA will end its wide-ranging surveillance program by 11:59 p.m. EST Saturday (4:59 a.m. GMT Sunday) and expects to have the new, scaled-back system in place by then, the White House said.

The transition is a long-awaited victory for privacy advocates and tech companies wary of broad government surveillance at a time when national security concerns are heightened in the wake of the Paris attacks earlier this month.

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Oh! The Hypocrisy! Germany's Intel Service Spied on France, America, More

Germany's foreign intelligence service spied on targets including French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, the FBI and the UN children's fund, a media report said Wednesday.

The latest news report on the BND spy service fuels a debate in Germany about state surveillance that was kicked off by the revelations of fugitive US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

The claims are awkward for Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose office oversees Germany's intelligence activities, after she angrily told Washington in 2013 that "spying among friends isn't on" following reports the US National Security Agency (NSA) had bugged her cellphone.

The latest report, by Berlin public radio, adds to the list of targets the BND has allegedly spied on, citing the BND's "selectors" -- phone numbers, email and IP addresses -- for surveillance, which has been the subject of an investigation by a parliamentary oversight panel.

According to RBB Inforadio, which did not name its sources, the service has spied on Fabius, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United Nations bodies UNICEF and the World Health Organization.

Also on the list were "many European and American companies, including weapons makers such as Lockheed of the United States," said the report.

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FSB Linked Kaspersky Lab Researcher States Harrassed, Targeted by Malware From Spy Agencies

Researchers tasked with revealing attacks by intelligence agencies are being harassed, locked out of tenders, and in some cases deported, Kaspersky researcher Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade says.

Retaliation by the unnamed agencies is in direct response to news of prominent advanced-persistent threat campaigns that have coloured information security reporting over recent years.

Those reports are forcing researchers to reveal malware attacks by government spy agencies.

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Meet Babar: The French Government's Spyware/Malware

The NSA, GCHQ, and their allies in the Five Eyes are not the only government agencies using malware for surveillance. French intelligence is almost certainly hacking its targets too—and now security researchers believe they have proof.

On Wednesday, the researchers will reveal new details about a powerful piece of malware known as “Babar,” which is capable of eavesdropping on online conversations held via Skype, MSN and Yahoo messenger, as well as logging keystrokes and monitoring which websites an infected user has visited.

Babar is “a fully blown espionage tool, built to excessively spy” on its victims, according to the research, and which Motherboard reviewed in advance. The researchers are publishing two separate but complementary reports that analyze samples of the malware, and all but confirm that France’s spying agency the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) was responsible for its creation.

France’s Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

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I am waiting for the first German and Brazilian government malwares to be uncovered (I am 100% sure they exist). Then their hypocrisy can be unmasked.  The NSA might be the best at it, but it does not mean the other nation states are not doing this, too.  This is definitely not a case where the Russians, Chinese and Anglosphere are the sole naughty children online.

A Discussion at Stanford With General Hayden

Tsk, tsk, Russia. Sandworm? Really?

A cyberespionage campaign believed to be based in Russia has been targeting government leaders and institutions for nearly five years, according to researchers with iSight Partners who have examined code used in the attacks.

The campaign, dubbed “Sandworm” is believed to have been running since 2009, and used a wide-reaching zero-day exploit uncovered by the researchers that affects nearly every version of the Windows operating system released since Windows Vista.

Although iSight only has a small view of the number of victims targeted in the campaign, the victims include among others, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Ukrainian and European Union governments, energy and telecommunications firms, defense companies, as well as at least one academic in the US who was singled out for his focus on Ukrainian issues. The attackers also targeted attendees of this year’s GlobSec conference, a high-level national security gathering that attracts foreign ministers and other top leaders from Europe and elsewhere each year.

It appears Sandworm is focused on nabbing documents and emails containing intelligence and diplomatic information about Ukraine, Russia and other topics of importance in the region. But it also attempts to steal SSL keys and code-signing certificates, which iSight says the attackers probably use to further their campaign and breach other systems.

The researchers dubbed the operation “Sandworm” because the attackers make multiple references to the science fiction series Dune in their code. Sandworms, in the Frank Herbert books, are desert creatures on the planet Arrakis who are worshipped as god-like entities.

iSight is not the first to spot the attackers in the wild. Other security firms, including F-Secure in Finland, have uncovered victims over the years. But iSight was able to tie various attacks together to expose commonalities in the five-year campaign. It was encoded references to Dune—which appear in URLs for the attackers’ command-and-control servers—that helped tie some of the attacks together. The URLs include base64 strings that when decoded translate to “arrakis02,” “houseatreides94,” and “epsiloneridani0,” among others.

“Some of the references were very obscure so whoever was writing the malware was a big Dune geek,” says John Hultquist, senior manager for iSight’s Cyber Espionage Threat Intelligence team.

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I wonder what Snowden would think.

DARPA Develops Electronics Anti Counterfeit Technology

Any counterfeit high-tech goods are a serious safety threat to people and cybersecurity as well as a problem for system reliability and performance.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said this week one of its contractors, working on one of the agency’s anti-counterfeit projects has developed and deployed what it calls an Advanced Scanning Optical Microscope that can scan integrated circuits by using an extremely narrow infrared laser beam, to probe microelectronic circuits at nanometer levels, revealing information about chip construction as well as the function of circuits at the transistor level.

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Did the Russians Trick Snowden into Going to Moscow?

Ex-KGB Major Boris Karpichko told Nigel Nelson of The Mirror that spies from Russia’s SVR intelligence service, posing as ­diplomats in Hong Kong, convinced Snowden to fly to Moscow last June.

“It was a trick and he fell for it," Karpichko, who reached the rank of Major as a member of the KGB's prestigious Second Directorate while specializing in counter-intelligence, told Nelson. "Now the Russians are extracting all the intelligence he possesses.”

Karpichko fled Moscow in 1998 after spying on his native Latvia for the KGB and the post-Soviet FSB. The 55-year-old says he is still in contact with several of his old spy pals.

Snowden flew from Hawaii to Hong Kong on May 20, 2013 and identified himself to the world on June 9. The 30-year-old American became stranded in Moscow on June 23 after he landed with a void U.S. passport and an unsigned travel Ecuadorian document obtained by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Karpichko said that the Kremlin leaked Snowden’s planned flight to Moscow to provoke the U.S. into revoking Snowden's passport, which Washington did on June 22. Assange also advised Snowden that "he would be physically safest in Russia."

Snowden has been living under the protection of the post-Soviet security services (FSB) since at least receiving asylum on Aug. 1. Karpichko told The Mirror that Snowden lives in an FSB-controlled neighborhood in Moscow's suburbs.

"His flat is heavily alarmed to stop anything happening to him," Karpichko said. "He meets the FSB twice a week over plenty of food and drink.”

Former KGB General Olig Kalugin recently told VentureBeat that “the Russians are very pleased with the gifts Edward Snowden has given them. He’s busy doing something. He is not just idling his way through life."

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The Real Cost of Snowden has yet to be Paid

Regardless of how you feel about Edward Snowden’s domestic surveillance program revelations, it’s time to get real about the cost we are paying for Snowden’s leaks about America’s signals intelligence programs. In a conversation a few months ago with a very senior former US intelligence official, I was struck by their apocalyptic assessment of the damage Snowden’s leaks had caused America’s intelligence capabilities. While he naturally considered the domestic concerns overblown, he was even more upset at Snowden undoing of decades of groundbreaking American work securing our own communications and spying on foreign governments.

Success in signals intelligence relies almost entirely on the opponent not knowing where and how he is being spied upon. As soon as your methods are discovered, your opponent can evade your espionage or, even worse, spoof you with false intelligence. Be detailing the methods that the US uses to spy on other countries, Snowden’s revelations immediately and directly limited the NSA’s capabilities. We are just now beginning to see the fruit of that.

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A Little on the Australian-Indonesian Crisis

The United States has thus far avoided getting publicly involved in the Indonesia–Australia spying row; however, it can’t afford to do so any longer. Australia has demonstrated a naiveté in thinking that public diplomacy rows such as this can be settled using traditional ‘cocktail diplomacy’. Likewise, its apathy to public diplomacy on social media may be indicative of an inability to plan and conduct strategic communications campaigns. Indonesia is home to 50 million Facebook users, 35 million Twitter users and a projected 42% social media penetration of the population by 2017. As broadband internet access penetrates further into rural Indonesia, US–Allied strategic communications and public diplomacy are only going to grow in complexity and importance.

‘Cocktail diplomacy is dead,’ reads the simple Facebook post from retired Admiral James Stavridis after attending the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. Indeed, as information technology continues to mature and proliferate across the globe, public diplomacy via social media will be increasingly important as citizens become more aware of international politics and attempt to shape policy by exerting influence over their respective leaders. Nowhere does this statement resonate more profoundly than in the current Australia–Indonesia row.

Following the Snowden revelations, Indonesia’s highly socially networked population took to Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere to denounce the Australian spying. While Indonesia’s government tried to get ahead of the popular outrage and launched its own statements on social media, Australia maintained silence on its official Twitter/Facebook accounts, promising only to send a formal démarche within a week. This thumb in the eye of public diplomacy in favor of more traditional ‘cocktail diplomacy’ did nothing to assuage the growing outrage and resulted in Indonesia’s suspension of elements of the Lombok Treaty such as coordination of counter human-trafficking operations, leading to confusion, misunderstanding, accusations of violations of sovereignty/territorial waters, increased military patrols/redeployments and an escalating war of words both at the civilian and military levels.

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Snowden Starts Looking More Like a Spy

Three people at the National Security Agency have been implicated in Edward Snowden's efforts to copy classified material, including a civilian employee who resigned last month after acknowledging he allowed Snowden to use his computer ID, according to an NSA memo sent to Congress.

The other two were an active-duty member of the military and a civilian contractor. The memo does not describe their conduct, but says they were barred from the NSA and its systems in August.

The memo from the director of the NSA's legislative affairs office, Ethan L. Bauman, to the House Judiciary Committee staff does not identify the three or say whether they all worked with Snowden at an NSA post in Hawaii last year. But it offers a glimpse into the internal investigation of what intelligence officials have called the largest theft of classified material in U.S. history.

The NSA employee who resigned did not know that Snowden, an agency contractor employed by the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, planned to reveal classified NSA operations and systems to the media. But the employee admitted to the FBI in June that he had used his Public Key Infrastructure certificate, a special digital ID, to give Snowden access to material he was not authorized to see on an internal network called NSA Net.

The employee used his password to sign onto the network and Snowden secretly captured the password without the employee's knowledge, Bauman wrote, and later used it to download additional material.

The employee had his security clearance revoked in November and resigned on Jan. 10, according to the memo. Bauman's memo was first reported Thursday by NBC News.

An NSA spokeswoman declined to comment Friday.

Snowden, who is living in Moscow, has denied that he stole colleagues' passwords to gain access to classified documents. U.S. officials have confirmed reports that he used so-called Web crawler software to automatically troll the spy agency's networks and secretly access up to 1.7 million documents without being detected. It's still unclear how many he copied. News organizations have published a few dozen at most so far.

U.S. officials say Snowden mostly took documents that explained how NSA surveillance programs work, rather than fruits of eavesdropping and code-breaking operations. The officials say he was walled off from many NSA secrets, including recordings of private calls or conversations by world leaders.

But he appears to have accessed documents that could compromise military communications systems, satellite orbits and even the names of clandestine agents, officials say. Mitigating the damage, they say, will take years and cost billions of dollars.

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China now Targeting Agricultural Sector for Espionage?

The case of the missing corn seeds first broke in May 2011 when a manager at a DuPont research farm in east-central Iowa noticed a man on his knees, digging up the field. When confronted, the man, Mo Hailong, who was with his colleague Wang Lei, appeared flushed. Mr. Mo told the manager that he worked for the University of Iowa and was traveling to a conference nearby. When the manager paused to answered his cellphone, the two men sped off in a car, racing through a ditch to get away, federal authorities said.

What ensued was about a year of F.B.I. surveillance of Mr. Mo and his associates, all but one of whom worked for the Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group or its subsidiary Kings Nower Seed. It resulted in the arrest of Mr. Mo last December and the indictment of five other Chinese citizens on charges of stealing trade secrets in what the authorities and agriculture experts have called an unusual and brazen scheme to undercut expensive, time-consuming research.

China has long been implicated in economic espionage efforts involving aviation technology, paint formulas and financial data. Chinese knockoffs of fashion accessories have long held a place in the mainstream. But the case of Mr. Mo — who was arraigned last week in Des Moines, pleaded not guilty and remains in custody — and a separate one in Kansas last year suggest that the agriculture sector is becoming a greater target, something that industry analysts fear could hurt the competitive advantage of farmers and big agriculture alike.

“Agriculture is an emerging trend that we’re seeing,” said Robert Anderson Jr., assistant director of counterintelligence at the F.B.I., adding that the trend has developed internationally in the last two years. “It’s pretty clear cut. Before then, the majority of the countries and hostile intelligence services within those countries were stealing the other stuff.”

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Someone Else Also not Surprised the NSA is Pursuing Quantum Computers in Project "Penetrating Hard Targets"

In this month's issue of Physics World, Jon Cartwright explains how the revelation that the US National Security Agency (NSA) is developing quantum computers has renewed interest and sparked debate on just how far ahead they are of the world's major labs looking to develop the same technology.

In 2006 the NSA openly announced a partnership with two US institutions to develop quantum computers. However, according to documents leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, and published last month by the Washington Post, the NSA also wishes to develop the technology so that it is capable of breaking modern Internet security.

The $79.7m project, dubbed "Penetrating Hard Targets", could be made possible by the extraordinary potential of quantum computers to factorize large numbers in a short space of time, quickly deciphering encryption keys that are used to protect sensitive information.

For the NSA, this could mean deciphering banking transactions, private messages and government files; however, many physicists are not surprised and believe this is exactly the type of technology that the NSA is expected to develop.

Speaking to Physics World, Raymond Laflamme, a leading quantum information theorist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, said "If you put my level of surprise on a scale from zero to 10, where 10 is very, very surprised, my answer would be zero."

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Was the Army Intelligence Officer Really Threatening Snowden's Life or Blowing off Frustrated Steam?

Edward Snowden needs better security after a news report quoted unnamed U.S. intelligence officials saying they wanted the former spy agency contractor dead and discussing ways to kill him, his Russian lawyer said on Tuesday.

Snowden was granted asylum in Russia last summer after fleeing the United States, where he is wanted on espionage charges for leaking information about government surveillance practices.

The American's revelations caused an uproar in the United States over privacy rights and angered many U.S. allies. Russia's decision to shelter him damaged already strained ties between Moscow and Washington.

"We are concerned about potential hidden threats that we have heard often recently. In these statements ... they openly call for physical reprisal against Edward Snowden," lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said on state-run Rossiya-24 television.

Without naming any media outlet, he referred to comments reported by the website BuzzFeed, which quoted a Pentagon official as saying he would love to shoot Snowden in the head.

BuzzFeed quoted a U.S. Army intelligence officer as saying the former National Security Agency contractor could be killed Cold War-style, poked with a poisoned needle while returning home from the grocery store.

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Engineer Arrested for Trying to Send Details of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program to Iran

A former engineer for defense contractors has been indicted on charges that he tried to send Iran secret details on the U.S. Air Force's F-35 joint strike fighter program, the office of the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut said on Tuesday.

The accused man, Mozaffar Khazaee, is a dual U.S. and Iranian citizen who lived in Connecticut before recently moving to Indianapolis, prosecutors said. Khazaee, 59, was arrested on January 9 at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, they said.

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Was Snowden Really a Whistleblower? Or a Spy?

U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) believes National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden may have had help from Russia.

[...]

“There's some clear evidence there that something else was going on," Rogers continued. "This wasn't a random smash and grab, run down the road, end up in China, the bastion of Internet freedom, and then Russia, of course, the bastion of Internet freedom. And because of the nature of the information that was stolen [had] nothing to do with Americans' privacy [and] a lot to do with our operations overseas."

Rogers implied Snowden was not skilled enough to pull off the leak alone. "Some of the things he did were beyond his technical capabilities," Rogers said. "[That] raises more questions. How he arranged travel before he left. How he was ready to go -- he had a go bag, if you will."

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, was also asked on "Meet The Press" if she felt Snowden had help from the Russians.

"He may well have," she said. "We don't know at this stage."

On CBS, Mike Morell, a former deputy CIA director, agreed with Rogers' assessment.

“I don't have any particular evidence," Morell said, "but one of the things that I point to when I talk about this is that the disclosures that have been coming recently are very sophisticated in their content and sophisticated in their timing, almost too sophisticated for Mr. Snowden to be deciding on his own. And seems to me, he might be getting some help."

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So that's what its like to be ahead of the curve. ;)

Three Cheers for Judge Leon

America’s founding fathers would be “aghast” at the NSA’s bulk telephone metadata spying, a federal judge today said, finding that the program violates the Fourth Amendment and the legal argument justifying it is “the stuff of science fiction.”

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, in Washington D.C., called the NSA program “almost-Orwellian,” and ordered the NSA to stop collecting or analyzing the metadata of the two men who sued. But citing national security, Leon stayed his order pending resolution in the appellate courts.

It was the first time a district court judge has ever sided against the NSA program, and several other lawsuits across the nation are pending.

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A European Call to Action to Overturn the American Hegemony of the Internet