No pussyshit Politics

Trump, Putin, and the Art of Appeasement
"Donald Trump’s Russia strategy is based on making a series of one-sided concessions in the hopes of luring Moscow into a more positive global relationship. There’s a name for this approach: appeasement. A man who ran for office as the ultimate negotiator is intent on giving away the store on Crimea and Syria for free—and it’s unlikely to reap much of a dividend.

In 2014, following the toppling of a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine, Russian forces seized control of the Ukrainian province of Crimea, held a referendum of dubious legitimacy to determine control (which found widespread support for incorporation into Russia), and then promptly annexed the territory. In response, Western states imposed sanctions on Russian banks and corporations that Putin admitted have hurt the Russian economy.

Putin craves international recognition of Russian Crimea and the lifting of sanctions. Only eight countries currently recognize Moscow’s annexation, and it’s an awkward squad of leftist Latin American regimes (Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela), a founding member of the “Axis of Evil” (North Korea), a regime whose leader has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes (Sudan), an African country facing economic collapse (Zimbabwe), and an embattled ally that has murdered thousands of its own citizens (Syria). Moscow desperately needs a few respectable countries to accept the new status of Crimea. The ultimate prize would be U.S. recognition because of Washington’s global power and the possibility of inducing American allies to follow suit.

But rather than dust off The Art of the Deal and drive a hard bargain, Trump has chosen the alternative path of appeasement. His strategy is to recognize Russian Crimea in return for nothing. In July, Trump was asked whether he would recognize Russia Crimea and lift sanctions, and simply responded: “Yes. We would be looking at that.” In August, he added “the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were.”

That sound was American leverage vanishing into the air.

Meanwhile, in Syria, the United States also has something that Putin desires: support for (or acquiescence in) a pro-Russian regime in Damascus. In strategic terms, Syria matters far more for Russia than for the United States. Syria is the location for Russia’s only military base outside the former Soviet Union. And Putin is now embroiled in a high-stakes military operation to save Assad’s regime.

Will Trump’s abandonment of bargaining and endorsement of appeasement improve America’s strategic position? For sure, Putin is no Hitler. The Russian leader is not set on waging war. Moscow’s interventions in Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Syria in 2015, were all designed to save embattled allies.

Moscow’s desire for recognition of its seizure of Crimea, and its interest in maintain a tyrant in power in Syria are not legitimate grievances. Neither is there any evidence that satisfying Putin’s wishes will lead the Trump administration into the sunlit uplands of Russian-U.S. cooperation. Putin seeks to restore Russian power by undermining the global liberal order based on institutions like NATO and the European Union, and by meddling in the U.S. election. Rather than being converted into a pillar of global stability, Putin is likely to pocket Trump’s concessions and look for more gains elsewhere.

The art of the deal became the art of the fold."

Alex Jones Scrubs Pizzagate Content; Complaint Reveals New Tie Connecting Shooter To Jones



The coolest thing on the internet is moving to Canada
Wayback Machine Announces Move To Canada Out Of Fear Of Trump Censorship | Zero Hedge
Even The Internet Archive Is Moving To Canada Because Of Trump

Obama promises retaliation against Russia over hacking of US election

“I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections … we need to take action,” Obama said. “And we will – at a time and place of our own choosing.
“Some of it may be explicit and publicised; some of it may not be.”

The CIA has judged that the Russian cyber attacks, including the hacking of emails from the Democratic National Committee, were intended to influence the election in Donald Trump’s favour. The FBI agrees that there was Russian hacking but have not as yet concluded it was intended to favour the Republican contender.

Senators from both parties have called for a congressional enquiry, while Trump himself has rejected the reports and his office has derided the CIA.

“This is somebody, the former head of the KGB, who is responsible for crushing democracy in Russia, muzzling the press, throwing political dissidents in jail, countering American efforts to expand freedom at every turn; is currently making decisions that’s leading to a slaughter in Syria,” the outgoing president said.

“And a big chunk of the Republican Party, which prided itself during the Reagan era and for decades that followed as being the bulwark against Russian influence, now suddenly is embracing him.”



Great he's going to do something, sometime. Just what we need.

Hat tip to r/geopolitics poster DownWithAssad.

The founder of CrowdStrike is a Russian-American and his company has been tasked with investigating the DNC/Podesta leaks. He blames Mother Russia. Relevant excerpts:

At six o'clock on the morning of May 6, Dmitri Alperovitch woke up in a Los Angeles hotel to an alarming email. Alperovitch is the thirty-six-year-old cofounder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, and late the previous night, his company had been asked by the Democratic National Committee to investigate a possible breach of its network. A CrowdStrike security expert had sent the DNC a proprietary software package, called Falcon, that monitors the networks of its clients in real time. Falcon "lit up," the email said, within ten seconds of being installed at the DNC: Russia was in the network.

Alperovitch, a slight man with a sharp, quick demeanor, called the analyst who had emailed the report. "Are we sure it's Russia?" he asked.

The analyst said there was no doubt. Falcon had detected malicious software, or malware, that was stealing data and sending it to the same servers that had been used in a 2015 attack on the German Bundestag. The code and techniques used against the DNC resembled those from earlier attacks on the White House and the State Department. The analyst, a former intelligence officer, told Alperovitch that Falcon had identified not one but two Russian intruders: Cozy Bear, a group CrowdStrike's experts believed was affiliated with the FSB, Russia's answer to the CIA; and Fancy Bear, which they had linked to the GRU, Russian military intelligence.

Alperovitch then called Shawn Henry, a tall, bald fifty-four-year-old former executive assistant director at the FBI who is now CrowdStrike's president of services. Henry led a forensics team that retraced the hackers' steps and pieced together the pathology of the breach. Over the next two weeks, they learned that Cozy Bear had been stealing emails from the DNC for more than a year. Fancy Bear, on the other hand, had been in the network for only a few weeks. Its target was the DNC research department, specifically the material that the committee was compiling on Donald Trump and other Republicans. Meanwhile, a CrowdStrike group called the Overwatch team used Falcon to monitor the hackers, a process known as shoulder-surfing.

Ultimately, the teams decided it was necessary to replace the software on every computer at the DNC. Until the network was clean, secrecy was vital. On the afternoon of Friday, June 10, all DNC employees were instructed to leave their laptops in the office. Alperovitch told me that a few people worried that Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, was clearing house. "Those poor people thought they were getting fired," he says.

For the next two days, three CrowdStrike employees worked inside DNC headquarters, replacing the software and setting up new login credentials using what Alperovitch considers to be the most secure means of choosing a password: flipping through the dictionary at random. (After this article was posted online, Alperovitch noted that the passwords included random characters in addition to the words.) The Overwatch team kept an eye on Falcon to ensure there were no new intrusions. On Sunday night, once the operation was complete, Alperovitch took his team to celebrate at the Brazilian steakhouse Fogo de Chão.

...

Aperovitch's June 14 blog post garnered so much media attention that even its ebullient author felt slightly overwhelmed. Inevitably there were questions about the strange names his company had given the Russian hackers. As it happened, "Fancy Bear" and "Cozy Bear" were part of a coding system Alperovitch had created. Animals signified the hackers' country of origin: Russians were bears, Chinese were pandas, Iranians were kittens, and North Koreans were named for the chollima, a mythical winged horse. By company tradition, the analyst who discovers a new hacker gets to choose the first part of the nickname. Cozy Bear got its nickname because the letters coz appeared in its malware code. Fancy Bear, meanwhile, used malware that included the word Sofacy, which reminded the analyst who found it of the Iggy Azalea song "Fancy."

The day after the media maelstrom, the reporters were back with less friendly questions: Had Alperovitch gotten his facts right? Was he certain Russia was behind the DNC hacks? The doubts were prompted by the appearance of a blogger claiming to be from Eastern Europe who called himself Guccifer 2.0. Guccifer said that the breach was his, not Russia's. "DNC'S servers hacked by a lone hacker," he wrote in a blog post that included stolen files from the DNC. "I guess CrowdStrike customers should think twice about company's competence," Guccifer wrote. "Fuck CrowdStrike!!!!!!!!!"

an incorrect attribution in public. "Did we miss something?" he asked CrowdStrike's forensics team. Henry and his staff went back over the evidence, all of which supported their original conclusion.

Alperovitch had also never seen someone claim to be the only intruder on a site. "No hacker goes into the network and does a full forensic investigation," he told me. Being called out, he said, was "very shocking. It was clearly an attack on us as well as on the DNC."

Alperovitch initially thought that the leaks were standard espionage and that Guccifer's attacks on CrowdStrike were just a noisy reaction to being busted. "I thought, Okay, they got really upset that they were caught," he said. But after documents from the DNC continued to leak, Alperovitch decided the situation was far worse than that. He concluded that the Russians wanted to use the leaked files to manipulate U. S. voters—a first. "It hit me that, holy crap, this is an influence operation. They're actually trying to inject themselves into the election," he said. "I believe that we may very well wake up on the morning the day after the election and find statements from Russian adversaries saying, 'Do not trust the result.' "

...

Days later, Alperovitch got a call from a Reuters reporter asking whether the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had been hacked. CrowdStrike had, in fact, been working on a breach at the DCCC; once again, Alperovitch believed that Russia was responsible. Now, however, he suspected that only Fancy Bear was involved. A lawyer for the DCCC gave Alperovitch permission to confirm the leak and to name Russia as the suspected author.

Two weeks later, files from the DCCC began to appear on Guccifer 2.0's website. This time he released information about Democratic congressional candidates who were running close races in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. On August 12, he went further, publishing a spreadsheet that included the personal email addresses and phone numbers of nearly two hundred Democratic members of Congress.

...

Alperovitch's friends in government told him privately that an official attribution so close to the election would look political. If the government named Russia, it would be accused of carrying water for Hillary Clinton. The explanations upset Alperovitch. The silence of the American government began to feel both familiar and dangerous. "It doesn't help us if two years from now someone gets indicted," he said. After Michelle Obama's passport was published online, on September 22, Alperovitch threw up his hands in exasperation. "That is Putin giving us the finger," he told me.

Source: The Russian Expat Leading the Fight to Protect America

The guy responsible for ousting Stuxnet as being an American/Israeli cyberworm (no friend of the U.S. government/establishment) also says that his company, Symantec, has found that Russia was responsible for the leaks:

It is pretty clear judging by the indicators of compromise [IOCs]. The binaries that were used to hack the DNC as well as Podesta’s email as well as some other Democratic campaign folks, those IOCs match binaries and also infrastructure that was used in attacks that were previously recorded by others as having Russian origin. That much we can confirm. So if you believe other people’s—primarily government’s—attribution that those previous attacks were Russian, then these attacks are definitely connected. We’re talking about the same binaries, the same tools, the same infrastructure.

We’ve analyzed the tools, the binaries, and the infrastructure that was used in the attack, and from that we can confirm that it’s connected to a group that has two names. One is Sofacy, or “Cozy Bear,” and The Dukes, which is also known as “Fancy Bear.” From the binary analysis point of view, I can tell you that the activities of these attackers have been during Russian working hours, either centered on UTC+3 or UTC+4; they don’t work Russian holidays; they work Monday to Friday; there are language identifiers inside that are Russian; when you look at all the victim profiles they would be in interest to the Russian nation-state. So all of that stuff fits the profile. Now, could all those things be false flags? Sure. Other government entities obviously have come out and said it is the Russian state, and the binary forensics would definitely match that.

There was another attack that happened in the Ukraine. So in December, in the Ukraine, all the power went out to about 260,000 households, or customers. They basically infiltrated the power company, got access to the machines that controlled the power, they flipped the computer switches off and shut down the power, and then they began to wipe all the machines and devices—overriding the hard drives and trashing the machines so that they couldn’t be started up again, or so that the switches couldn’t come on again. Ukrainians were able to get power back after six hours by switching to manual mode. They went off their computer monitor mode and physically flipped the switches to bring the power back up. What’s interesting about that case is the fact that they were more behind technologically actually helped them. Something very similar could easily happen in the U.S. and we’re much more beholden to computing infrastructure here, so our ability to switch to manual mode here would be much more difficult.

Is there linkage between the DNC and Podesta hacks and the 2014 State Department hacks that were also believed to be carried out by Russia?

Yeah, these are being conducted by the same groups. We know that from the IOCs—by looking at the tools they use and the infrastructure they use.

Many of these attacks were happening prior to the nomination of Trump. Based on that theory, people believe that there was a general plan for disruption, and it may be the case now that the easiest and best way to do so is in the manner you speak, but these attacks did not just start happening post-Trump’s nomination. So in that sense, there is a feeling that it’s not a very Trump-specific activity versus an election disruption activity. This is the easiest way for them to disrupt the election.

Source: Cybersecurity Expert: Proof Russia Behind DNC, Podesta Hacks

Another cybersecurity company, SecureWorks, has published some interesting blogposts about all this:

In mid-2015, CTU researchers discovered TG-4127 using the accoounts-google . com domain in spearphishing attacks targeting Google Account users. The domain was used in a phishing URL submitted to Phishtank, a website that allows users to report phishing links (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Example of accoounts-google . com used in a phishing URL.

Recipients who clicked the link were presented with a fake Google Account login page (see Figure 2). The threat actors could use entered credentials to access the contents of the associated Gmail account.

Figure 2. Fake Google Account login page.

Encoded target details

Analysis of the phishing URL revealed that it includes two Base64-encoded values (see Figure 3). The decoded Base64 values (see Table 1) match the Gmail account and its associated Google Account username. If a target clicks the phishing link, the username field of the displayed fake Google Account login page is prepopulated with the individual’s email address.

Figure 3. Spearphishing URL.

Table 1. Decoded Base64 values from the phishing URL used by TG-4127.

Use of the Bitly URL-shortening service

A Bitly URL was uploaded to Phishtank at almost the same time as the original spearphishing URL (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Bitly phishing URL submitted at same time as accoounts-google . com phishing URL.

Using a tool on Bitly’s website, CTU researchers determined that the Bitly URL redirected to the original phishing URL (see Figure 5). Analysis of activity associated with the Bitly account used to create the shortened URL revealed that it had been used to create more than 3,000 shortened links used to target more than 1,800 Google Accounts.

Figure 5. Link-shortener page for bit.ly/1PXQ8zP that reveals the full URL.

Target analysis

CTU researchers analyzed the Google Accounts targeted by TG-4127 to gain insight about the targets and the threat group’s intent.

Focus on Russia and former Soviet states

Most of the targeted accounts are linked to intelligence gathering or information control within Russia or former Soviet states. The majority of the activity appears to focus on Russia’s military involvement in eastern Ukraine; for example, the email address targeted by the most phishing attempts (nine) was linked to a spokesperson for the Ukrainian prime minister. Other targets included individuals in political, military, and diplomatic positions in former Soviet states, as well as journalists, human rights organizations, and regional advocacy groups in Russia.

Other targets worldwide

Analysis of targeted individuals outside of Russia and the former Soviet states revealed that they work in a wide range of industry verticals (see Figure 6). The groups can be divided into two broad categories:

• Authors, journalists, NGOs, and political activists (36%)
• Government personnel, military personnel, government supply chain, and aerospace researchers (64%)

TG-4127 likely targeted the groups in the first category because they criticized Russia. The groups in the second category may have information useful to the Russian government.

Figure 6. TG-4127 targeting outside of Russia and former Soviet states.

Authors and journalists

More than half (53%) of the targeted authors and journalists are Russia or Ukraine subject matter experts (see Figure 7). It is likely that the Russian state has an interest in how it is portrayed in the media. U.S.-based military spouses who wrote online content about the military and military families were also targeted. The threat actors may have been attempting to learn about broader military issues in the U.S., or gain operational insight into the military activity of the target’s spouse.

Figure 7. Subject matter expertise of authors and journalists targeted by TG-4127.

Government supply chain

CTU researchers identified individuals who were likely targeted due to their position within the supply chain of organizations of interest to TG-4127 (e.g., defense and government networks). Figure 8 shows the distribution by category. The targets included a systems engineer working on a military simulation tool, a consultant specializing in unmanned aerial systems, an IT security consultant working for NATO, and a director of federal sales for the security arm of a multinational technology company. The threat actors likely aimed to exploit the individuals’ access to and knowledge of government clients’ information.

Figure 8. Categories of supply chain targets.

Government / military personnel

TG-4127 likely targeted current and former military and government personnel for potential operational insight gained from access to their personal communications. Most of the activity focused on individuals based in the U.S. or working in NATO-linked roles (see Figure 9).

Figure 9. Nation or organization of government/military targets.

TG-4127 targeted high-profile Syrian rebel leaders, including a leader of the Syrian National Coalition. Russian forces have supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime since September 2015, so it is likely the threat actors are seeking to gain intelligence on rebel forces to assist Russian and Assad regime military operations.

Success of the phishing campaign

CTU researchers analyzed 4,396 phishing URLs sent to 1,881 Google Accounts between March and September, 2015. More than half (59%) of the URLs were accessed, suggesting that the recipients at least opened the phishing page. From the available data, it is not possible to determine how many of those Google Accounts were compromised. Most of the targeted accounts received multiple phishing attempts, which may indicate that previous attempts had been unsuccessful. However, 35% of accounts that accessed the malicious link were not subject to additional attempts, possibly indicating that the compromise was successful.

Of the accounts targeted once, CTU researchers determined that 60% of the recipients clicked the malicious Bitly. Of the accounts that were targeted more than once, 57% of the recipients clicked the malicious link in the repeated attempts. These results likely encourage threat actors to make additional attempts if the initial phishing email is unsuccessful.

Source: Threat Group-4127 Targets Google Accounts

"I've combed through all the cybersecurity pieces and compiled all of the confirmed victims and targets of Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear."

Confirmed Victims

• DNC
• DCCC
• NATO General Breedlove
• Secretary of State Colin Powell
• George Soros' Open Society Foundation
• NSA

Confirmed Targets

Individuals in political, military, and diplomatic positions in former Soviet states, as well as journalists, human rights organizations, regional advocacy groups, authors, journalists, NGOs, and political activists in Russia:

• Bellingcat
• Opposition-based Russian journalist Roman Dobrokhotov

Government personnel, military personnel, government supply chain, and aerospace, such as:

• Systems engineer working on a military simulation tool
• Consultant specializing in unmanned aerial systems
• IT security consultant working for NATO
• Director of federal sales for the security arm of a multinational technology company
• High-profile Syrian rebel leaders, including a leader of the Syrian National Coalition
• German parliament
• Italian military
• Saudi foreign ministry *Spokesperson for the Ukrainian prime minister.

Clinton campaign/DNC:

• National political director
• Finance director
• Director of strategic communications
• Director of scheduling
• Director of travel
• Traveling press secretary
• Travel coordinator
• Director of speechwriting for Hillary for America
• Deputy director office of the chair at the DNC
• William Rinehart, a staffer with Clinton’s presidential campaign.