Iraq civil war: You can fight with an AK-47 ... or a HOME-COOKED Trojan Iraq's bloody civil war has spilled over onto the internet, notes a researcher that has spotted a large increase in cyber-espionage tools and other forms of malware. Members of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) group have made extensive use of social media to spread slickly produced propaganda as an accompaniment to …
Today, one uses at least an AK-74, if not an AK-103. Although the AKs that Petraeus lost in the Iraq omnishambles before the surge are labeled as "AK-47", so who knows.
Anyway, these ISIS guys have the chutzpah (ha HA!) of using the technology the use of which would probably merit a righteous cutting off of the hands (possibly at the neck level) when used. Will their heads explode?
"....the AKs that Petraeus lost in the Iraq omnishambles..." On at least one occasion, British troops in Basra recovered the same Glock pistol from two dead Shia militants. The Glocks had been given by the EU for the new Iraqi police and, after the first recovery, it was given back to the local Iraqi police before again ending up with the militants. The troops were regularly seeing the Glocks being openly sold for cash on the streets of Basra. Just about every house had at least one AK, and the bigger clan compounds often had heavier kit such as RPGs, all in the hands of civilians. I suspect a lot of the missing AKs simply got sold for cash by their new Iraqi owners the minute they got issued.
Ah, but these are not EU Glocks. (Why should the EU give out Austrian produce in a US-occupied territory). To cite:
The author of the report from the Government Accountability Office says U.S. military officials do not know what happened to 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces from 2004 through early this year as part of an effort to train and equip the troops. The highest previous estimate of unaccounted-for weapons was 14,000, in a report issued last year by the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.
But yes, quite certainly these were sold on. This is why Obama's proposal to ship weapons to Syria overtly (and prior to that, one suspects, covertly ship the contents of the armories of late strongman Ghaddafi via CIA express) is not necessarily the best idea. ISIS now has 2 billion cash to spend.
"....Why should the EU give out Austrian produce in a US-occupied territory....." Because the US was not responsible for the whole country after the invasion, large chunks - including Basra - were under British control. The US-supplied Glocks went to the Iraqi Police Academy in Mosul, the EU-supplied ones went via the British administrators in Basra. The Iraqi Security Services (police, border guards, military and assorted special authorities) are the single largest users of Glocks in the World.
The obvious solution is to encourage the various millitants to abandon soviet era weapons and start their own weapons program
That way there would be no further attacks because the Jihadist fighter would be stalled while 6 nations can't agree on how many wheels the Toyota pickup should have (inviting the French into the consortium is always good here).
There would be no IEDs because the committee to decide if it is the red or green wire would still be in preliminary inter-government discussions about where the first meeting would be held and the freedom-fighter-2000 platform on which all new terrorists armaments are to be based is delayed until 2025.
"Collected technical indicators have also shown a large pool of self-written RAT (Remote Administration Toolkits) using Secure Sockets (SOCKS) and FTP/HTTP BackConnect with embedded file system browser for infected victims remote monitoring masked under Google Chrome and publicly available software"
I don't understand, does Google Chrome download and install the RAT toolkit without user action. If not why the mention of Google Chrome in a story that's patently about vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows.
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