The Coming Cyber War #15

Cyber Warfare:

 DARPA had a hacking game of capture the flag for AI and 'Mayhem' won the $2 million prize.

The Chinese Info Warfare branch gets profiled.

A hacker group is claiming to have hacked the NSA's Equation Group and is offering to auction off the cyber weapons they discovered.

Snowden is speculating the leak of the cyber weapons is a threat by Russia against the US retaliating for the DNC hack.

There is a lot of panic at the NSA with the leak of the weapons.

Some unreleased Snowden documents confirm the reality of the NSA hack.

Cyber Surveillance:

The broad hacking powers of the British government are being challenged in a European court.

An unusually advanced malware has been detected and apparently has been resident for 5 years on numerous computers, even air gapped ones.

The Russians are being blamed by Pelosi for the DNC hack.

The hack was a lot worse than what people realize, too.  Even more data is being released.

The hacker got his twitter account reinstated.  It had been suspended.

Australia hacked TOR users' computers in the US.

Cyber Security:

A new malware has been devised to transmit data between air gapped computers...by using the sounds of their hard drives.

What are the threats to satellite operations?

NIST is seeking feedback on cryptography.

WADA is under attack by hackers.

Business groups are appealing China's new cyber security law.

Most people ignore 90% of cyber security warnings.

Russia claims to have developed a new, secure communications method that does NOT use satellites.

Cyber Crime:

Airlines are getting spoofed with fake boarding passes in their lounges.

Cisco has patched the ExtraBacon exploit.

Clinton Foundation hired a cyber security firm after the hack.

One cyber security expert turned the tables on some scammers and infected their computers with ransomware.

DDoSCoin is a cryptocurrency designed to reward someone for participating in DDoS attacks.

All of the Eddie Bauer stores in the US were infected by malware.

A fake login malware is spreading via google ads.

Hackers are aggressively attacking the Rio Olympics.

The Houston area hackers who were stealing Jeeps (30 of them!) using a computer were caught.

It should be called the Internet of Infected Things: ransomware for IOT thermostats has been discovered.

Kenya has acquitted accused hackers from China & Taiwan.

linkedin is under attack by bots stealing members' info.  

Nigerian scammers infected themselves with their own malware. 

Oracle's credit card readers have been infected.

The Russian hacker,  Roman Seleznev who is son of a member of the Russian Duma, is being prosecuted for cyber crimes.

Starwood Hotels had a malware breach in 20 US hotels.

Ukrainian nationalist hackers leaked personal info on journalists.

Serious or joking?  Julian Assange stated wikileaks is after Trump's tax returns.

MQ-9 Reapers now Flying Operational "Gorgon Stare" Wide-area Airborne Surveillance System

The US Department of Defense (DoD) has confirmed that the US Air Force (USAF) is flying the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in Afghanistan equipped with the Gorgon Stare wide-area airborne surveillance (WAAS) system.

The confirmation came in the form of an image that was posted on the DoD's Flickr site that showed a Gorgon Stare-equipped Reaper of the 62nd Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron (ERS) departing Kandahar Airfield on 5 December. The accompanying caption names the Gorgon Stare as being the payload pictured.

While the USAF has previously issued two images of the Reaper fitted with Gorgon Stare in Afghanistan (in August 2012 and September 2014), on both of those occasions the images were believed to have been released in error. Even though the images showed the Gorgon State in-theatre, the USAF did not name the system or respond to requests for confirmation.

The Gorgon Stare Increment II payload, which is shown in all three of the images so far released, comprises two underwing pods, one of which houses an electro-optic (EO) camera, the other an infrared (IR) camera (the baseline Gorgon Stare has a different configuration, comprising a single podded EO/IR turret with a second pod for the datalinks).

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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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Ubiquitous Computer Vision

E-2D Hawkeye to Command the UCLASS RAQ-25 Navy Strike Drone?

The US Navy has decided to embed its future unmanned surveillance and strike aircraft in the same air wing that operates the Northrop Grumman E-2C/D, an airborne command and control platform.

The decision settles a philosophical debate within the navy over who should have command over the unmanned carrier launched airborne surveillance and strike (UCLASS) aircraft during operations.

Options under review as late as August included operating UCLASS aircraft as a standalone unit, as a detachment to a wing of Lockheed Martin F-35C fighters or as a detachment to a wing that includes the E-2C/D.

Naval officials quietly announced their decision in a little-noticed directive released last month. That notice, dated 18 December, says a new UCLASS unit called the “fleet introduction team” will be established on 1 October.

The notice also says the first UCLASS unit will be a detachment to the airborne command and control logistics wing on board the carrier. That wing includes the E-2C and E-2D, a fleet that monitors airspace for hostile aircraft and missiles and directs the carrier’s strike aircraft in air combat.

The directive confirms that the navy has decided to assign the UCLASS fleet to the commander of the E-2 unit on board the carrier, a Naval Air Systems command (NAVAIR) spokeswoman tells Flightglobal.

The navy, however, has not settled on the details of how future E-2 crews will operate alongside the UCLASS fleet.

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Now THAT'S BIG DATA: In 2012, the US Air Force Spy Planes Recorded at Least 365,000 Hours of Video

The U.S. Air Force’s fleet of drones and manned spy planes recorded nearly 50 days’ worth of surveillance video every 24 hours in 2012, according to one former top official.

The video comprised a portion of the roughly 1.3 million megabytes of data that the Air Force’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency gathered daily, then-lieutenant general Larry James said at an industry event in April 2012.

Today James works for NASA.

The general’s remarks—and other surprising insights into the Air Force’s spying efforts—are included in the ISR Agency’s official history for 2012, a heavily-redacted copy of which War Is Boring obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

In the two years since James revealed the extent of the flying branch’s aerial spying, the Air Force has changed significantly—retiring many aircraft and adding others, all in line with the Pentagon’s shifting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other war zones.

But it’s unlikely the aerial spies are less busy today than they were in 2012.

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Indian Navy Wants American MQ-4C Triton Maritime Surveillance Drone

The Indian Navy has earlier shown interest in acquiring six to eight of the maritime variants of the US high altitude, long endurance (HALE) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for extended ocean surveillance. The drones have been upgraded as the MQ-4C Triton maritime surveillance platform for the U.S. Navy, providing real-time intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance over vast ocean and coastal regions.

The Global Hawk has been deployed by the U.S. in Japan, and the U.S. this week approved the sale of four Global Hawks to South Korea. Australia and Japan too have expressed interest in these drones, though Australia later backed out because of the high price.

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Dangers and Promise of Big Data

US Air Force Declares Gorgon Stare Increment 2 Operational

The US Air Force (USAF) has declared initial operational capability of the latest version of its Gorgon Stare persistent wide-area airborne surveillance system developed by Sierra Nevada Corporation.

The upgraded system provides a four-fold increase in area coverage and a two-fold improvement in resolution compared to its predecessor, the company said on 2 July.

Gorgon Stare is a spherical array of nine cameras installed on board the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle.

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Unmanned Underwater Vehicles Will Lead to Cheap, Universal Submarine Surveillance

The US Navy recently announced that it will make more use of submarine drones, contracting with marine technology developer Teledyne Benthos to re-purpose the Slocum Glider as an instrument used for military activity. The contract is worth $203.7M.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, here is what the Slocum Glider is: a 5 foot-long autonomous underwater vehicle capable of moving to specific locations and descending to depths of 4,000 feet. It is driven by variable buoyancy, and it can move both horizontally and vertically.

The Slocum Glider can be programmed to patrol for weeks at a time, collecting data on its environment, surfacing to transmit to shore while downloading new instructions at regular intervals.

Compared to traditional methods, the drones have a relative small cost: the need for personnel and infrastructure is reduced to its minimum and the vehicle is able to work around the clock and around the calendar. It works very well: in November 2012, an autonomous glider set a Guinness World Record by traveling over 14,000 kilometers on an autonomous journey of just over one year duration!

Many Navies and ocean research organizations already use a wide variety of gliders, which cost around $100,000. But the US Navy now plans to increase the number of those drones from 65 to 150 by 2015. In its 2015 budget request, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency even claimed for $19 million to develop drones “that can provide non-lethal effects or situational awareness over large maritime areas.” This represents a spending increase of nearly 60 percent over 2014!

The good news for us is that these submarine drones, unlike the majority of airborne drones, won’t use environmentally unfriendly fuel. Instead, the glider is propelled by the thermocline, which is thermal energy found between the upper and lower mixed layers of sea water. The upper surface has a near atmospheric temperature while the deep water ocean has a temperature situated between 2 and 4 °C.

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The Surveillance Industry

A Former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge: Reform the Court

CONGRESS created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 1978 as a check on executive authority. Recent disclosures about vast data-gathering by the government have raised concerns about the legitimacy of the court’s actions. Congress can take a simple step to restore confidence in the court’s impartiality and integrity: authorizing its judges to appoint lawyers to serve the public interest when novel legal issues come before it.

The court is designed to protect individual liberties as the government protects us from foreign dangers. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that the Nixon administration had violated the Fourth Amendment by conducting warrantless surveillance on a radical domestic group, the White Panthers, who were suspected of bombing a C.I.A. recruiting office in Ann Arbor, Mich. In 1975 and 1976, the Church Committee, a Senate panel, produced a series of reports about foreign and domestic intelligence operations, including surveillance by the F.B.I. of suspected communists, radicals and other activists — including, notoriously, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Foreign Intelligence Service Act set up the FISA Court in response. To obtain authority to intercept the phone and electronic communications of American citizens and permanent residents, the government must only show probable cause that the target has a connection to a foreign government or entity or a foreign terrorist group. It does not have to show, as with an ordinary search warrant, probable cause that the target is suspected of a crime.

For decades, the court worked under the radar. That changed after 2005, when The New York Times disclosed a National Security Agency program of surveillance of e-mail to and from foreign countries. Though the surveillance was conducted outside of FISA (Congress later specified that FISA court approval was required), the disclosures brought the court to the public’s attention. Criticism of the court (on which I served for six years after 9/11, while the caseload grew enormously) revived recently after revelations that the N.S.A., without court orders specifying individual targets, gathered troves of data from companies like Google and Facebook.

[..]

James Robertson, a retired federal judge who served with me on the FISA court, recently called for greater transparency of the court’s proceedings. He has proposed the naming of an advocate, with high-level security clearance, to argue against the government’s filings. He suggested that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which oversees surveillance activities, could also provide a check. I would go even further.

In an ordinary criminal case, the adversarial process assures legal representation of the defendant. Clearly, in top-secret cases involving potential surveillance targets, a lawyer cannot, in the conventional sense, represent the target.

Congress could, however, authorize the FISA judges to appoint, from time to time, independent lawyers with security clearances to serve “pro bono publico” — for the public’s good — to challenge the government when an application for a FISA order raises new legal issues.

During my six years on the court, there were several occasions when I and other judges faced issues none of us had encountered before. A staff of experienced lawyers assists the court, but their help was not always enough given the complexity of the issues.

The low FISA standard of probable cause — not spinelessness or excessive deference to the government — explains why the court has so often granted the Justice Department’s requests. But rapid advances in technology have outpaced the amendments to FISA, even the most recent ones, in 2008.

Having lawyers challenge novel legal assertions in these secret proceedings would result in better judicial outcomes. Even if the government got its way all or most of the time, the court would have more fully developed its reasons for letting it do so. Of equal importance, the appointed lawyer could appeal a decision in the government’s favor to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review — and then to the Supreme Court. No opportunity for such review exists today, because only the government can appeal a FISA court ruling.