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U.S. Denies Using Flame Malware To Spy On French President
CowboyRobot writes with the (not unexpected) official U.S. denial of using the Flame malware to spy on France. From the article: "That allegation was leveled at the U.S. government by unnamed French officials, according to a Tuesday report in the weekly French newspaper L'Express. It reported that computers belonging to top advisers to then French president Nicolas Sarkozy had been hacked using the Flame cyberespionage malware, which was designed to be used in highly targeted attacks... Napolitano was also asked if it wasn't ironic that while the United States has been sounding alarms over the growing amount of malware that's targeting U.S. government system, it also commissioning the Stuxnet and Flame cyber-espionage malware used against Iran. Napolitano, however, pled official ignorance. 'These programs were never attributed in any way to the U.S. government.'"
and it hence gives us a very warm feeling of comfort and solace; which is very important between two nations known for very cordial relations.
U.S. Denies Using Flame Malware To Spy On French President
So what did they use to spy on him then?
To see how the bad the presidents love life is to make themselves feel better? Or if this was a few years ago perhaps they just wanted to hear Carli Bruni singing in the bath?
Never believe anything until it's been officially denied. (source)
F: Hey, USA, did you eat my last cupcake? ...while my job is to, er, increase the protection of cupcakes using all the means available to me.
USA: The consumption of the last cupcake was never attributed in any way to me.
F: I see. But did you eat it?
USA: Beyond this point, your question presupposes a yes or no answer...
F: Well, yes, I want to know if you ate it...
USA:
F: Okaayy... you ate it, didn't you?
USA: Look, to do this, my cupcake procurement and protection budget has been increased 40% last year, and will increases another 75% next year. Everyone's cupcakes will be safer!
F: Wow, thanks! But I notice you didn't actually deny taking my cupcake.
USA: Sorry, I have to go now.
No, Flame isn't from the US. The greatest joke is the offical response from the US embassy:
Flame is a cooperation of the United States with Israel. You could read that in the Washington Post.
This cannot be! Denials are useless! America is always at fault for everything that goes wrong everywhere in the entire world.
That is true, unless they can blame another country for something it didn't do!
To be fair, it usually is.
did they expect them to say? Oh yeah, my bad, we did it for the lolz. (speaking in the style of Steve Martin in Pink Panther)
le flamé
rewriting history since 2109
touché
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Non! "Le Flamé Royale"!
Alas, poor Yorick Slashers, we would have the TRUTH !!
Non! "Le Flamé Royale"!
With Cheese.
Whenever you get caught doing something you deny it. Thats the first rule of doing shit youre not supposed to do. Hell if the government will deny when their own special forces gets caught or killed by the enemy why should they fess up to a computer virus when human life means so little to them?
Rule of life to live by...
Never write anything down.
No video.
No pictures.
Deny, deny, deny.
Royal flaming cheese head?
Don't mine me. I'm monolingual, but I thought that almost made sense.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
'nuff said
Non! "Le Flamé Royale"!
With Cheese.
Extra Bacon?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Non! "Le Flamé Royale"!
With Cheese.
Extra Bacon?
Pigs are filthy animals.
which is why americans love bacon
would we want to spy on the French president?
I wish they would just say something like "Of course we are spying on the French president. We spy on everyone, friend and foe alike. That's our job. And if you aren't spying on us then you should fire your incompetent intelligence staff and find better ones."
I can't for one moment believe that could ever be true? The USA? Not the USA where the DIA has had at least several members of the richest families in America at its help since its inception by McNamara?
Sure, John Negroponte (recently noted at an Aspen Institute gathering on intelligence, along with fave biographer of Petraues, Paula Broadwell, who managed to do his biography while she was doing the general) and Frank Wisner, Jr. (still hasn't figured out the CIA murdered his dad????) put together that Franco-American Foundation to screw Sarkozy's competitor in the first presidential election, but I just can't believe the USA would continue to do such horrific stuff!!!!!
Uh oh! My French poodle, curiously enough named after Sarkozy, is getting upset and I must ran to feed him.....
Royal flaming cheese head?
Don't mine me. I'm monolingual, but I thought that almost made sense.
You're barely monolingual....
Still cleaner than most 2 year-old children . . .
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Even if the U.S. government originally wrote Flame, and used it to spy on and map out Iranian facilities in preparation for their Stuxnet attack... the fact is that once its on machines in the wild, anyone with access to the machine who notices that it is there, can get access to it. That's the problem with malware and backdoors--anybody who knows about them can use them.
We know security researchers got samples of it, and analysed it to figure out how it works. Criminal organizations probably also got samples of it and did their own study (and/or read the published results of the aforementioned researchers). Its easier to repurpose someone else's malware than the write your own.
The real question is : when Flame was being used to spy on the French president (or political advisors, or whatever) whose command and control servers was it talking to ? Was it reporting to the same servers (presumably run by the U.S. government) that the copies installed in Iran were reporting to? If so, then that lends credence to the theory that the U.S. was behind it.
But if it was reporting to some different servers somewhere else, then it could be anyone behind it--any government, or criminal gang, or multinational corporation. It could be some hackers in a garage in Russia or some state-sponsored attackers in China or some European corporation that does a lot of business in France. It could even be political rivals of the target.
Whoosh.
It's a Pulp Fiction reference. In the film, there's a famous discussion where they talk about how the McDonald's burger known as the "Quarter Pounder" in America is called a "Royale with Cheese" over in France. Hence the "with Cheese" statement here after the word "Royale" was used.
L'Express have been quick to point US responsability. While we could imagine that a third party got Flame sources, it would still have required top skills to use it. The best suspects are therefore the original authors. But US did not produce Flame alone, they did it with Israel. Why not suspect Israel?
What I find most concerning isn't the denial of the US that they had involvement, and it's not the spying in itself... what's most concerning to me is that these "top officials" and advisors were stupid enough to 1. Friend some of the attackers via Facebook and 2. Were daft enough to click on strange links to strange downloads from said attackers which follows to 3. Entered their usernames and passwords on strange phishing sites.
Seriously, I don't quite understand how people can still be so uneducated in the ways of the Internet as to fall for phishing scams. I think before you are given the keys and sent on your way, you should be taught how to drive. That is to say, perhaps for new users, Internet browsers should take people through some kind of pop-quiz style Q&A about what types of URLs and links are safe and which aren't.
Further, quite a few modern browsers have built-in phishing detection and prevention. Assuming that at least SOME of those preventative measures worked, we're then assuming that these top advisors were still stupid enough to dismiss the warnings and continue anyway.
While not surprising that our societies are run by these people... it's concerning.
Or... it wasn't him the FBI perverts were spying on, it was his wife.