
Re: For the Crashing and Burning, Collapsing and Crushing of Dodgy Ethereal ...
See you at Sea. In uniform.
116 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2022
With rewards of up to $10 million dollars to grab the heads of some hackers, stupid people may be inclined to do illegal, dangerous and silly things .
Looks more and more like the Wild West. But in the real-life Wild West - not the movies on the telly, where the USA is actually good at lawfare and warfare (only in the telly) - people die for real.
If you are smart enough, you can see those Mossad puss1es coming from a mile away. Just carry your knifes and hopefully a gun. They try to kill a lot, but they fail a lot too. Been there.
Always remembering: Boys Go to Baghdad, Real Men Go to Tehran
Had they worked for Russia, Iran or China, with a deal including passport, citizenship, nano microchips ( yes, those from remote torture some people I know have in their possession and cost a good amount of money $$ ), cyber tools and other exploitation software - which those folks also have, everything encrypted - those former NSA operatives would be happy at work.
Personally, I prefer to deal with my local military / government, also because it lowers your chance of being killed, but we know some government heads need to be changed to that happen. But in any case, there is the former alternative.
Their biggest mistake was to be an USA citizen.
I saw the joke alert. But will post it anyway, to confirm your point of view.
https://www.blopeur.com/2020/04/08/Intel-x86-patent-never-ending.html
"Average annual temperatures at Iqaluit are around −9.5 °C (14.9 °F), compared with around 5 °C (41 °F) in Reykjavík, which is at a similar latitude"
The temperatures there are quite ok, but I believe there is no reliable power source. So, a nuclear plant would have to be installed as well - high cost.
QUOTE: trying to invent a new anonymous method of currency transactions? But that problem has been solved for centuries with the physical transfer of fiat currency and/or fungible metals
No, Mr. You cannot make an anonymous transaction with a person you do not know, in the other side of the globe, and probably in a sanctioned country, using old bills or fungible metals. You can do that with cryptocurrency. You will stay anonymous. If you are intelligent enough, no 3-letter agency will ever touch you or extradite you - maximum they can do is to put 24/7 surveillance on your computer and house, make some jokes with you, nothing more than that. You will still take everything you earned with you.
Enough said.
QUOTE:Apparently not ransomware or foreign spying
Due to the non-stealth nature of the attack, the most plausible explanation is either 1) Grudge or 2) Profit. In (1) they got really mad at someone from work, and in (2) a certain company will receive huge money to fix the attack.
If it the attack was stealth, in preparation for a major action, I would bet separatists.
QUOTE: The bad guys are just sitting there saying: 'I don't have to just go look anymore. I just need to pull up all the CVEs
Wrong. Every serious business are stockpiling vulnerabilities. Also Google. A 1-day vuln. is good, but a research lab for 0-day vuln. is way better, if offensive time comes. Meanwhile, we all hope not, because peace is better.
QUOTE: for the vast majority of cases a regular rootkit would be sufficient
I agree on that.
But a microcode-rootkit would be the most undetectable piece of nasty code, and could be activated remotely without triggering any alarm bells - actually, you could even submit a sample to any famous sandboxes, and they would not flag nothing malicious at all.
Probably the reason China and Russia insist on using home-made silicon for mil/intel/sensitive stuff.
QUOTE: Complete bollocks. The Russian backed separatists ignored the first Minsk agreement, launching an offensive before it was even implemented
When your neighbors are being killed (ethnic Russians in Ukraine) for 8 years in your country (Ukraine), you tend to strike back.
QUOTE: Don't forget that this whole thing stretches back to the treaty that Russia would honour Ukraine's borders in return for the Soviet era nuclear weapons stationed on Ukrainian territory being given to Russia.
Let's stretch a bit more, to the point NATO said it wouldn't expand an inch more. NATO did expand. A lot more.
QUOTE: The second mistake was not fast tracking Ukrainian membership of NATO
Ukraine was good dealing both with USA and Russia pre-2013. But USA was not happy with this situation. It was a win-win for Ukraine.
Then, NATO decide Ukraine should be west-only backing the 2014 Ukraine maidan coup - part of the not-expand-an-inch-more NATO broken promise.
>so something positive could come out of this unjustified invasion of Ukraine
The Minsk 2 accords, which was agreed by both Kiev and Russia and would pave the way for peace, was not implement by Kiev. Kiev chose war instead of peace.
The "unjustified invasion narrative" seems a bit off.
Honestly, they cannot.
NSA/FBI cannot tap in EVERY fiber. NSA/FBI cannot make a MiTM in EVERY VPN connecting brokers to an exchange in another country, converting to fiat currency in pre-paid cards of another country.
They can put some millions in the pockets of a few politicians, hoping their goal will be achieved in-between the election cycle, but politicians tend to change every 4-6 years, so... no !
In the old days, I had an entire federal department managing thousands of assets via an Access file + VBA application.
Using VBA significantly lowered the time I would spend setting up servers, databases, etc.. to create the application in a few days, and once you showed some workers they "just had to open a document" and the application would start to run, things became really simple and speedy in the office.
Now it makes me wonder how many of these legacy systems are still in use nowadays.
QUOTE: The incident is an embarrassment for an IT services giant such as SHI.
If even the Russian bears can penetrate the Pentagon, DHS and others - and I mean, those guys have billions of budget and their daily job is to kill people for a living - there is no reason to be ashamed for having your systems compromised by an skilled adversary.
QUOTE: hit one of the major cloud providers
If you get to the core of a major cloud provider, source code for the tools or the orchestrating tools itself are a much more valuable target.
It enables a shy business to deploy REDIS / NOSQL / MongoDB / etc clusters in an amazon-like-way, with a nice control panel - a shy business can potentially become a major player itself.
QUOTE: Since all strings are encrypted, it makes finding the parameters challenging for security researchers."
Not at all, since the decryption key is embedded in the executable.
Storing only the hash of the command line parameters, would make analysis more truly challenging.
QUOTE: One of the first jailbreaks for the iphone was a bug in an image rendering library
So was one of the last bugs used by NSO / Pegasus to silently penetrate iPhones with a zero-click exploit. But Google do not care / look too much into exploits being actively used by some friendly government agencies.
Search for Pi-Hole and add Google's safebrowsing domains into that list. I advise to also add ads.google.com, and see how many websites actually hosts FONTS/JS/CSS into google infrastructure. A LOT. People just grab a bootstrap code half hosted on google and keep spreading it. Sad.
A way to stop the App GAP is to pay coders to use the web version of the most common apps and to automate the command line version of those.
As an example, Signal has a desktop version, that, with some voodoo, allows you to use the command line to register, and then to talk, message over the web app. Others might work also this way.
QUOTE: Trump administration two years ago tried to have the app banned from the US in an effort to force its China-based parent company to sell to a US-based owner
It is all about collecting data and who are the owners. Lets stop pretending it is something else.
The old owners just get mad when there is an attempt to sell the business to someone else. But that's capitalism and we all love it, right?