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Thread: High-tech sabotage Of U.S. defense & security

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    Angry High-tech sabotage Of U.S. defense & security

    Sabotage with fake tech gear...

    Fake tech gear has infiltrated the U.S. government
    November 8th, 2012 - A record number of tech products used by the U.S. military and dozens of other federal agencies are fake. That opens up a myriad of national security risks, from dud missiles to short-circuiting airplane parts to cyberespionage.
    Despite laws designed to crack down on counterfeiters, suppliers labeled by the U.S. government as "high risk" are increasing their sales to federal agencies. Their presence in government's supply chain soared 63% over the past decade, according to a new study released by IHS, a supply chain management consultancy. Suppliers with the high-risk branding are known to engage in counterfeiting, wire fraud, product tampering and a laundry list of other illicit and illegal behaviors.

    Last year, 9,539 banned businesses were found to have sold technology the government. Roughly 10% of those incidents involved counterfeit parts or equipment. "What keeps us up at night is the dynamic nature of this threat, because by the time we've figured out how to test for these counterfeits, they've figured out how to get around it," said Vivek Kamath, head of Raytheon's supply chain operations. "It's literally on almost a daily basis they change. The sophistication of the counterfeiting is amazing to us." The number of fake tech products floating around in the market quadrupled from 2009 to 2011, according to IHS - and they're sneaking into some high-profile places.

    In September 2010, the Missile Defense Agency found that the memory in a high-altitude missile's mission computer was counterfeit. Fixing the problem cost $2.7 million. Had the bomb launched, it most likely would have failed, the agency said. Two years earlier, the FBI seized $76 million of counterfeit Cisco routers that the Bureau said could have provided Chinese hackers a backdoor into U.S. government networks. A number of government agencies bought the routers from an authorized Cisco vendor, but that legitimate vendor purchased the routers from a high-risk Chinese supplier.

    China continues to be the largest source for counterfeit and pirated goods found in the United States, accounting for 62% of the $178 million in products (with an estimated retail value of $1.1 billion) that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency seized last year. Some in Congress have pushed for a crackdown. "Counterfeit parts pose an increasing risk to our national security, to the reliability of our weapons systems and to the safety of our men and women in uniform," Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, said last year in support of anti-counterfeiting regulations.

    Source

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    Obama's fault.

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    waltky (11-11-2012)

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    The government is looking for a fix.

    I remember when I was in Iraq we ordered some Sony TV flat screens for our TOC. We got some cheap knock offs with Sony labels and even the cardboard box looked legit.

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    Red face

    Exposure of Alleged NSA Hacking Tools May Be Warning to US...

    Snowden: Exposure of Alleged NSA Tools May Be Warning to US
    Aug 16, 2016 — National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden says the exposure of malicious software allegedly linked to his former employer may be a message from Moscow, adding a layer of intrigue to a leak that has set the information security world abuzz.
    Technical experts have spent the past day or so picking apart a suite of tools purported to have been stolen from the Equation Group, a powerful squad of hackers which some have tied to the NSA. The tools materialized as part of an unusual electronic auction set up by a group calling itself "Shadow Brokers," which has promised to leak more data to whoever puts in a winning bid. In a series of messages posted to Twitter, Snowden suggested the leak was the fruit of a Russian attack on an NSA malware server and could be aimed at heading off U.S. retaliation over allegations that the Kremlin was trying interfere in America's electoral process.


    "Circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility," Snowden said. "This leak is likely a warning that someone can prove U.S. responsibility for any attacks that originated from this malware server. That could have significant foreign policy consequences. Particularly if any of those operations targeted U.S. allies. Particularly if any of those operations targeted elections."

    Snowden did not immediately return messages seeking additional comment. The NSA did not immediately return emails seeking comment on his claim. Messages sent to an address registered by the Shadow Brokers were not returned. The Equation Group was exposed last year by antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab, which described it at the time as a "God of cyberespionage." Many have since speculated that the NSA is behind the group, although attribution in the field of cyberespionage is a notoriously tricky issue.

    http://www.military.com/daily-news/2...arning-us.html

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    Angry

    Whether mistake or deliberate, it's out there now...

    Exclusive: Probe of leaked U.S. NSA hacking tools examines operative's 'mistake'
    Thu Sep 22, 2016 | A U.S. investigation into a leak of hacking tools used by the National Security Agency is focusing on a theory that one of its operatives carelessly left them available on a remote computer and Russian hackers found them, four people with direct knowledge of the probe told Reuters.
    The tools, which enable hackers to exploit software flaws in computer and communications systems from vendors such as Cisco Systems and Fortinet Inc, were dumped onto public websites last month by a group calling itself Shadow Brokers. The public release of the tools coincided with U.S. officials saying they had concluded that Russia or its proxies were responsible for hacking political party organizations in the run-up to the Nov. 8 presidential election. On Thursday, lawmakers accused Russia of being responsible. Various explanations have been floated by officials in Washington as to how the tools were stolen. Some feared it was the work of a leaker similar to former agency contractor Edward Snowden, while others suspected the Russians might have hacked into NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. But officials heading the FBI-led investigation now discount both of those scenarios, the people said in separate interviews.

    NSA officials have told investigators that an employee or contractor made the mistake about three years ago during an operation that used the tools, the people said. That person acknowledged the error shortly afterward, they said. But the NSA did not inform the companies of the danger when it first discovered the exposure of the tools, the sources said. Since the public release of the tools, the companies involved have issued patches in the systems to protect them. Investigators have not ruled out the possibility that the former NSA person, who has since departed the agency for other reasons, left the tools exposed deliberately. Another possibility, two of the sources said, is that more than one person at the headquarters or a remote location made similar mistakes or compounded each other's missteps. Representatives of the NSA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the office of the Director of National Intelligence all declined to comment.


    After the discovery, the NSA tuned its sensors to detect use of any of the tools by other parties, especially foreign adversaries with strong cyber espionage operations, such as China and Russia. That could have helped identify rival powers’ hacking targets, potentially leading them to be defended better. It might also have allowed U.S officials to see deeper into rival hacking operations while enabling the NSA itself to continue using the tools for its own operations. Because the sensors did not detect foreign spies or criminals using the tools on U.S. or allied targets, the NSA did not feel obligated to immediately warn the U.S. manufacturers, an official and one other person familiar with the matter said. In this case, as in more commonplace discoveries of security flaws, U.S. officials weigh what intelligence they could gather by keeping the flaws secret against the risk to U.S. companies and individuals if adversaries find the same flaws. Critics of the Obama administration's policies for making those decisions have cited the Shadow Brokers dump as evidence that the balance has tipped too far toward intelligence gathering.

    The investigators have not determined conclusively that the Shadow Brokers group is affiliated with the Russian government, but that is the presumption, said one of the people familiar with the probe and a fifth person. One reason for suspecting government instead of criminal involvement, officials said, is that the hackers revealed the NSA tools rather than immediately selling them. The publication of the code, on the heels of leaks of emails by Democratic Party officials and preceding leaks of emails by former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, could be part of a pattern of spreading harmful and occasionally false information to further the Russian agenda, said Jim Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The dumping is a tactic they've been developing for the last five years or so," Lewis said. "They try it, and if we don't respond they go a little further next time."

    http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cy...-idUSKCN11S2MF

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    Red face

    Kaspersky manager arrested...

    Anti-hacking manager at Russian cybersecurity firm arrested
    Thursday 26th January, 2017 - A manager at Russia's biggest cybersecurity firm in charge of investigating hacking attacks has been arrested.
    Kaspersky Lab confirmed reports in Russia's respected Kommersant newspaper that Ruslan Stoyanov, head of its computer incidents investigations unit, was arrested in December. Kommersant said that Stoyanov was arrested along with a senior Russian FSB intelligence officer and that they both face charges of treason. Kaspersky's spokeswoman, Maria Shirokova, said in a statement that Stoyanov's arrest "has nothing to do with Kaspersky Lab and its operations". She said the company has no details of the charges Stoyanov faces, but added that the investigation dates back to the time before Stoyanov was hired by Kaspersky.


    The head of the investigations department of a Russian cybersecurity firm has been arrested

    Stoyanov's previous jobs, listed on the LinkedIn website, include a position at the Cyber Crime Unit at the Russian interior ministry in the early 2000s. US intelligence agencies have accused Russia of meddling in the presidential election through hacking to help Donald Trump win the vote, claims that Russia has rejected. US and EU officials have also accused Russia of hacking other Western institutions and voiced concern that Russia may try to influence this year's elections in Germany, France and the Netherlands. It was not immediately clear if the arrests are somehow linked to these allegations.

    Andrei Soldatov, who has studied the internet and Russian security services for more than a decade, called the arrest of the Kaspersky manager "unprecedented"."It destroys a system that has been 20 years in the making, the system of relations between intelligence agencies and companies like Kaspersky," he said. "Intelligence agencies used to ask for Kaspersky's advice, and this is how informal ties were built. This romance is clearly over."

    http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ne...-35396575.html

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    Question

    Kaspersky smoking gun found on US systems...

    About 15 Percent of US Federal Agencies Detected Kaspersky on Networks
    November 14, 2017 - About 15 percent of U.S. federal agencies have reported some trace of Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab software on their systems, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official told Congress on Tuesday.
    Jeanette Manfra, assistant secretary for cybersecurity at DHS, told a U.S. House of Representatives panel that 94 percent of agencies had responded to a directive ordering them to survey their networks to identify any use of Kaspersky Lab products.



    Eugene Kaspersky, Chief Executive of Russia's Kaspersky Lab, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Moscow



    The Trump administration in September ordered civilian U.S. agencies to remove Kaspersky Lab from their networks, saying it was concerned the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm was vulnerable to Kremlin influence and that using its anti-virus software could jeopardize national security.


    Kaspersky Lab has repeatedly denied the allegations.


    https://www.voanews.com/a/fifteen-pe...s/4114557.html

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