The Syrian Electronic Army - A Russian Payback for the NSA and PRISM?

The Syrian Electronic Army - A Russian Payback for the NSA and PRISM?

By Dark Politricks

After recent attacks by the Syrian Electronic Army on big western media and personal targets I think something else is going on than just a renegade bunch of pro-Assad hackers getting lucky by hacking certain websites.

In recent weeks the Syrian Electronic Army has attacked big targets such as Microsoft, Skype,  CNN, the BBC and even Barack Obama's Twitter and Facebook accounts.

For who missed it. #SEApic.twitter.com/9xG4N8kedi

SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) January 1, 2014

It seems to me that someone is sending the west a message.

A message that is meant to mean a lot more than just signalling that they are just a group of good Syrian hackers.

I think the message is meant to say a lot more than: "look I can hack your twitter account", and from a recent talk given by the Israeli PM on the need for Internet security, I think the west are getting a little jittery about their technological supremacy when it comes to obtaining personal information for their own ends.

The recent hack attack on the President of the USA's social media accounts seem to me to be a warning  from a certain country that "you may have the NSA / GCHQ and back doors into all US social media accounts BUT we do as well".

The message from the Syrian Electronic Army when they hacked the account was to remind people being mis-informed by their media and politicians that the Syrian rebels were NOT the moral equivalent of the US "founding fathers" as some idiots were claiming but in fact they were al-Qaeda linked terrorists committing horrible atrocities.

The Syrian Electronic Army reminded the west through the Presidents hacked accounts that the US backed al-Qaeda linked rebels in Syria are committing terrorist attacks that would be condemned if they occurred in any other country than Syria.

From the article:

President Obama’s official Twitter and Facebook accounts – which have a combined audience of 76 million followers – were hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army and used to promote a link to a video which highlights how US-backed rebels are committing terror attacks in Syria.

The account was compromised less than a day after Obama's presidential campaign website was also hacked by the SEA.

As a techie I work with computers every day. I see our own servers being constantly probed with attempts to hack and control them through XSS, SQL Injection and other methods. I even created my own software defence system for a certain big website I had created that our company sells a lot.

After all these years one thing is perfectly clear from analysing the hacks, the majority of them come from Russian servers.

All techies know the Russian Mafia has control of numerous botnets to use for DDOS attacks and other forms of hacking.

The official definition of a BotNet is:

A network of private computers infected with malicious software and controlled as a group without the owners' knowledge, e.g. to send spam.

Many techie magazines have spoken of the recent sophisticated TARGET hack which compromised up to 70 million consumers credit card details and shown how the code that was used could be linked back to older Russian malware.

This TARGET hack attack was so sophisticated no existing anti-virus software could detect it and it has been used in up to 6 other attacks in recent months since the Black Friday shopping weekend in America.

From BGR.

Target on Friday further revealed the scope of the hacking attack it suffered during the busy 2012 Black Friday and Christmas shopping season, saying that additional personal data has been stolen by hackers, on top of credit/debit card information and encrypted pins. The company said that the stolen info includes names, mailing addresses and phone numbers or email address from as many as 70 million Target customers. The number is significantly higher than the previous estimate, which suggested that up to 40 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen.

The investigators have also revealed that any known antivirus software couldn’t detect the malware used, with hackers having also added in features that covered the fact that they were actually copying data from the credit and debit cards swiped in point-of-sale (POS) machines. Interestingly, the malware was programmed to steal data during prime business hours (i.e from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. local time) and store it on an internal Target server that was also controlled by the hackers.

“What’s really unique about this one is it’s the first time we’ve seen the attack method at this scale,” iSight Partners senior vice president Tiffany Jones said. “It conceals all the data transfers. It makes it really hard to detect in the first place.”

So not only do we have Russian linked undetectable hacks going on inside the USA that are stealing money direct from people's credit cards, but we have on the scene a new group of Syrian hackers who seem to be capable of hacking into nearly every major social media website account - just as the NSA can do with their PRISM software.

Whether these hacks are happening through social engineering methods e.g sending a link in an email to trick people to enter their bank or website account details or through the use of comprimised networks, keyloggers, Trojans and other forms of viruses I don't know, but they seem to be succeeding whenever they try.

We all know that Russia is Syria's ally.

Therefore is it too much of a stretch to believe that the Syrian Electronic Army has Russian help or is even formed by Russian military skilled in the art of electronic warfare?

It is only a guess but all these hack attacks on the west come just after Edward Snowden has revealed the scale of the Wests own ability to obtain personal data from the Internet.

Not only that but he has proven that all the major social networks from Twitter to Facebook can be accessed at will by the NSA/GCHQ to obtain users information.

Therefore I am wondering, is this Russia sending back a message that they are perfectly capable of using their own methods to obtain important data or crash / hack websites?

Whether Snowden has anything to do with this or not I have no idea but I think the probability is pretty low. As Glenn Greenwald said if he were a Russian spy they wouldn't have kept him waiting in an airport lounge for months and instead would have lauded him as a hero before rushing him to safety to debrief him of all his secrets ASAP.

The Russians may not host the major backbone servers that the Internet is based upon.

They may not even host any of the major social media sites like Twitter or Facebook that have 500 million users and therefore make it much easier to access the databases of such sites.

However they do have years of hacking experience and probable control of millions of personal PC's that could be used without the owner's knowledge in a coordinated hack attack.

You may even be sitting on an infected computer right now.

One of the first things many sophisticated viruses do is block ports and install their own firewall and virus checking software so that another virus cannot remove them from the infected machine. Therefore you may think your computer is safe from your regular scans but in reality it could be compromised and sending occasional packets of data in DDOS attacks controlled by Russian software.

As I said, this is all conjecture, but the timing of attacks and the targets (western news broadcasters and western shoppers) make it seem like this sort of message is being sent.

The Russian Mafia, who were mainly ex KGB agents when the USSR split up, were the first criminal gangs to start to use hacking and viruses to steal identities, bank accounts and other forms of financial fraud.

Whilst script kiddies in the west were just happy to see their Macro viruses spread the net wiping files from computers before being emailed on to more computers using the infected PC's email contact list - the Russians were out to make big bucks from their hacking.

Therefore it would come as no surprise to me if I was to learn that the Syrian Electronic Army is full of Russian cyber attack specialists and that the hack attacks against the west will continue to rise with ever more sophisticated hacks on the same lines as the TARGET hack.

I may be wrong but it's something to think about.....  

View the original article Are the Russians telling the West that they can hack just as well as the NSA can too? at darkpolitricks.com.

We are sleep walking into a surveillance society created by our own consent

We are sleep walking into a surveillance society created by our own consent

By Dark Politricks

Most of us don't even realise it but we are all sleep walking into a surveillance society by our own consent.

Here in the UK the previous governments plans to introduce identity cards were scrapped by the incoming Tory Liberal coalition and we were offered a watered down version of a very good Freedom Bill as an attempt to restore some lost liberties. However in the great scheme of things this has meant very little for the young generation who have grown up with the Internet.

The billions of users that make use of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and communicate by Skype and iPhones when they are not on the Internet can forget the old conspiracy theory that many people subscribed to regarding the micro-chipping of the population like dogs as it is no longer required because we are already living in a state of total surveillance where are every move is monitored.

Can you imagine someone living in the 1960's being told that in the future all the following would be true.

What would they say.

Would they call you a paranoid conspiracy freak or would they believe that we would have to be living in some of fascist government for all this to happen?

Whatever they would say I doubt they would believe you if you told them that it would all be by choice and that the public has willingly traded privacy for the the sake of consumerism and a fake sense of "security" from terrorism.

So what kind of world have we walked into?

• A world in which millions of  CCTV cameras adorne public walls (over 4 million in the UK), indoor shops and streets capturing your every move hundreds of times a day. Not only has the technology progressed so that the cameras have inbuilt facial recognition and can identify criminals and others on the myriad of central databases (such as TRAPWIRE) as they enter specific areas they have now built cameras that can actually identify criminal activity by analysing the movements of the subjects being watched and identifying suspicious moves such as fights, objects being thrown and voices being raised. This is all compiled and stored in huge super computers the size of cities such as the one being built under UTAH.

• A world in which to get on a plane you have to be virtually strip searched by potentially dangerous X-Ray machines that can see your naked body through your clothes. Not only have these scanners been proved to be infective when it comes to identifying certain materials that can be used to create an explosive device on board a plane they have yet to catch a single terrorist in the act trying to board a plane and are instead used to demean and humiliate travellers who's only wish is to go on holiday.

• A world in which there is no need to microchip everybody as the majority of people carry around mobile phones with them that constantly keep track of their location by GPS or GPRS. Modern smart phones log the users current geographical location wherever they are and the police have been caught  out downloading this data without a warrant using handheld devices.

• A world in which all telephone and email conversations are routed through huge super computers run by western nations such as the USA, UK, Canada and Australia to look for suspicious content. The Echelon system has been running for decades now intercepting billions of communications between people and whilst it was originally set-up during the Cold War it has now progressed to general snooping on the population supposedly to aid the fight against terrorism but in reality it has been used for industrial espionage as well as other spurious and   probably illegitimate reasons.

• A world in which all your banking transactions, credit card purchases and wire transfers are handed over without question to the USA. You would have thought that being a European country the USA wouldn't have any legal right to such personal data but you would be wrong. At first they just took it and then once the EU found out about it they kicked up a fuss for a bit before bending over like they usually do and signing an agreement which allows the US to monitor all our banking transactions under the SWIFT agreement.

• A world in which millions of people have been slowly conditioned over time to consider privacy as an antiquated concept. Through the use of social media Internet sites such as Facebook and MySpace people post every conceivable kind of personal information from "checking in" to their current location, to tagging friends in photographs and posting details about their habits, hobbies and social activity. Whilst many people only see this as harmless fun the huge database that is generated is worth billions not only to advertisers who can then target specific adverts as well as government sources who have intimate links with companies such as Google, Mircorsoft and Facebook and see this data as a goldmine for recording networks of people and identifying possible malcontents for further investigation.

• A world in which all our Internet traffic is tracked and monitored by various government agencies and front companies that work for them. The US government has had close links with the big IT companies for a number of years and this is confirmed by the attendance of their CEO's at yearly Bilderberg meetings.

• A world in which people have gotten so used to be spied on from the skies, through Google Earth, and monitored by CCTV and their computers that they can see nothing wrong with the full spectrum surveillance society they actively participating in. They actively search on Google Maps to see if they can spot their car, house or building as if it's "fun" to be recorded forever in a publicly accessible database as well as the myriad of government owned ones.

When the head of Google Eric Schmidt, the co-founder of Facebook Chris Hughes, and the creator of Microsoft, Bill Gates, all attend their yearly Bilderberg meeting we can only guess what they discussed with all the government officials who always deny being there and the globalists who want full control over the worlds resources.

Remember we are just a resource to these capitalists, nothing more, nothing less and if it meant an extra few bucks in profit to some company somewhere they wouldn't even ask before throwing us under a bus.

However we know that these companies are very closely linked with the US Government and the CIA and not only has Microsoft build in backdoors into their PC's so that the NSA can access computers but Google was helped to startup with CIA seed money and has helped American security agencies develop real time monitoring systems that trawl the net looking for data that can help identify persons of interest whether they be terrorists, dissidents or just people brave enough to still exercise their freedom of speech.

Our technological world which more and more people depend on for every day activities is slowly becoming part of the prison wall that surrounds us.

As new advances in computing come on the scene and get taken up by large numbers of users it isn't long before one of the big government linked companies come along and buy it up. Google has bought up so many applications that it has been a common joke in the developing world that the only profitable business model on-line is to write an application and hope it gets bought up Google.

An example of a recent buy-out was the popular but loss making Skype Voice over IP service that allowed users to make long distance phone calls over the Internet which was bought out by Microsoft for £5.2 billion.

Some people might wonder why Microsoft would want to spend so much money on a loss making service but when you consider their close ties with the NSA it becomes quite clear. Instead of having to spend huge amounts of money building tools to tap into the major Internet connections to then decrypt and listen into the traffic they now have access to the front end application.

Why build back doors when you have a front door key?

Why even open the door when the people using the house are willing to let you in and take photos of everything they have?

This is the stage our future generation is at with their constant finger flicking and tapping of the latest iPhone. Gadgets that let advertisers and the government know your interests, your friends, your plans, your whereabouts and much, much more.

Because the common Internet user perceive tools like Google Earth and Facebook as beneficial to their own lives they pay little attention to the other users of such tools and bit by bit we are slowly succumbing to a modern high tech police state in which soon the only privacy that will be available will be virtual worlds such as a better version of Second Life. A world where people can escape and be who they want to be as the world outside has become so cold and horrible to live in the only pleasure they get is pretending to be someone else, somewhere else.

All these points are signs that we are already living in a high tech surveillance society. You might brush all this off as inconsequential paranoia and see these intrusions as important tools in the never ending fight against terror and for most people it is most certainly a case of "if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about".

However we only have to remember the years of communism in which hunts for dissidents and free thinkers were the primary job of the Stasi and KGB to realise that when such a huge spy apparatus exists the scope of it's remit only grows and grows until the number of innocent people caught up in its web eventually outnumbers the guilty. America is already there with it's million citizens with high security clearance, it's dozens of security agencies and it's Orwellian double speak when it introduces bills that limit peoples liberties such as the PATRIOT ACT.

It for this reason that we should all be worried and if history teaches us anything it is that we never learn from it.

Our power hunger leaders are most certainly prone to repeating the worst excesses of previous surveillance states only this time round they will have super high tech tools with which to do the job.

For our own sake we need to keep a very close eye on the people that are supposedly meant to protect us as it might already be too late for logic and reason to reverse this move to neo-fascism. The fear of real and fake terrorists added to the excitement of a child with all the electronic monitoring toys they could posses is a lethal combination, and without proper balances and checks it will grow and grow until there is no stopping it.

One thing is for sure and that is we are not helping by just handing over our most private data and information.

View the original article at www.darkpolitricks.com.