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Iranians Compromised a Highly Sensitive CIA Covert Communications System in 2011 by Using Google Search: Report (yahoo.com)
In 2011, Iran was able to use Google's search functionality to hack into a secret CIA communication network that was being used to contact agents and informants around the world -- a breach that appears to have triggered the exposure and execution of Agency sources in China and Iran, Yahoo News reported Friday.
"Don't Be Evil"
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
The link only points to a page demanding (not requesting) access to my device. Is there an accessible link?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
In 2013, hundreds of CIA officers â" many working nonstop for weeks â" scrambled to contain a disaster of global proportions: a compromise of the agencyâ(TM)s internet-based covert communications system used to interact with its informants in dark corners around the world. Teams of CIA experts worked feverishly to take down and reconfigure the websites secretly used for these communications; others managed operations to quickly spirit assets to safety and oversaw other forms of triage.
âoeWhen this was going on, it was all that mattered,â said one former intelligence community official. The situation was âoecatastrophic,â said another former senior intelligence official.
From around 2009 to 2013, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to the secret internet-based communications system, a key means for remote messaging between CIA officers and their sources on the ground worldwide. The previously unreported global problem originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired â" despite warnings about what was happening â" until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result, according to 11 former intelligence and national security officials.
The disaster ensnared every corner of the national security bureaucracy â" from multiple intelligence agencies, congressional intelligence committees and independent contractors to internal government watchdogs â" forcing a slow-moving, complex government machine to grapple with the deadly dangers of emerging technologies.
In a world where dependence on advanced technology may be a necessary evil for modern espionage, particularly in hostile regions where American officials canâ(TM)t operate freely, such technical failures are an ever present danger and will only become more acute with time.
âoeWhen these types of compromises happen, itâ(TM)s so dark and bad,â said one former official. âoeThey can burrow in. It never really ends.â
A former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the compromise said it had global implications for the CIA. âoeYou start thinking twice about people, from China to Russia to Iran to North Korea,â said the former official. The CIA was worried about its network âoetotally unwinding worldwide.â
Yahoo Newsâ(TM) reporting on this global communications failure is based on conversations with eleven former U.S. intelligence and government officials directly familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive operations. Multiple former intelligence officials said that the damage from the potential global compromise was serious â" even catastrophic â" and will persist for years.
More than just a question of a single failure, the fiasco illustrates a breakdown that was never properly addressed. The governmentâ(TM)s inability to address the communication systemâ(TM)s insecurities until after sources were rolled up in China was disastrous. âoeWeâ(TM)re still dealing with the fallout,â said one former national security official. âoeDozens of people around the world were killed because of this.â
***** EAT AT JOE'S
One of the largest intelligence failures of the past decade started in Iran in 2009, when the Obama administration announced the discovery of a secret Iranian underground enrichment facility â" part of Iranâ(TM)s headlong drive for nuclear weapons. Angered about the breach, the Iranians went on a mole hunt, looking for foreign spies, said one former senior intelligence official.
The mole hunt wasnâ(TM)t hard, in large part, because the communications system the CIA was using to communicate with agents was flawed. Former U.S. officials said the internet-based platform, which was first used in war zones in the Middle East, was not built to withstand the sophisticated counterintelligence efforts of a s
Come on guys, if you can google it, it's not "hacking".
In fact, "hacking" isn't even about computer security; if you think it is you lack Clue and are likely spouting nonsense. Which is exactly what most of the "computer security" s'kiddies do for a living. So here: Somebody left the door wide open, and instead of pointing to the culprit you find some other idiots to point to, just to deflect the blame. Syeah right, "hacking". Nope, sheer unadulterated incompetence.
Seems insecure.
Maybe we should go back to typewriters.
30 Chinese assets executed. Iranians use Google to break into a classified information system. Covertly funded "Friendly rebels" become ISIS.
Obama was one of the worst presidents ever.
Wow, they really need to stop picking up those USB drives people leave at the airport.
How exactly did this communications channel work? Was it one-way, two-way, or whatever? Enter data on an html form using some code words? Subsequent paragraphs in the story don't convey any new information. It's all just a rehash of a single sentence.
They made sure Google indexed their malware web site Shemales4CIA.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If you consider USA evil — more evil than Iran and China — then you are in a wrong place. Learn Chinese and Farsi and fuck off to that part of the world, both physical and virtual...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Why is this data even available to Google or any public connection for that matter? Stupid...
Most of the methods Iranians used would have been familiar to George Smiley. They looked at what the Americans obviously knew about Iran and figured out who could have told them. Then they leaned on those people and found out how they were communicating with the CIA.
This is where Google came in. These people were using phony websites to communicate with the CIA, and Iranian intelligence used Google to uncover similar websites. Then they hacked into those websites after which they had the keys to the kingdom.
It was the CIA's reliance on a bodged-together, vulnerable system that killed those assets. They used it even after they'd been warned by their own analysts in 2008 that it had been compromised.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There was still some old fashioned spying going on. Without a double agent to show the Iranians a sample website, they never would have figured out which strings to search for.
The bigger question is, did Iran share this information with China and Russia? If so, what did they get in exchange?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Wait a mintute! We have agents in other countries? What are we trying to do? Manipulate other countries and influence their elections or something?
I thought Russia was the one that did that!
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
So how did Russia get the names of US agents, one former FSB and one current FSB, and one hotel cleaner, six days after Trump got the unredacted piss memo with the names of those agents in? (Sergei Mikhailov etc. we know they are the piss memo spies because Russia claims they were behind the 'Democrat email hack' which is bollocks).
Was that Google too?
Some sort of magic Google thing?
There is ONE article by "Zach Dorfman and Jenna McLaughlin" and this is it. Just because you read it, don't assume its true. A quick search of Zach Dorfman alone doesn't reveal any special insight, he's the classic career non degree going to a government job.
It's simple how the Iranian thing will pan out. Just like Syria. In Syria, Russia pretending to be fighting ISIS, while actually fighting a lot of Assad enemies, including US allies. Trump handed Syria over to Russia with only a small number of troops left. Iran will similarly be forced to deal with Russia.
I love that movie - Spy Game // Brad Pitt & Robert Redford. good stuff for a Friday. might have to pull out the VHS and watch it again on my VCR.
And neither the first nor last example.
The future of real warfare between states isn't limited to military force. It's likely that any military actions will be preparatory and sustaining, but not decisive. Attacks on infrastructure, denial of access to critical information and resources, and isolation from allies can all be accomplished with information technology.
This example is most instructive in that it shows how states with limited resources in some areas can be capable, even formidable adversaries in others. The US has the most capable military assets available, with only a few (but notable) exceptions where adversaries have sufficient assets to cause major losses to US forces and potentially prevail in regional conflicts. But in so-called 'cyber' warfare, the US has no discernible advantage. Relatively small, impoverished, or militarily weak states have equal capabilities. And non-state players can be just as capable.
For the US, the only real hope is that it has undisclosed capabilities, which is entirely likely, or that it will focus on developing those. Sadly, unlike military force, which takes in some instances a generation to develop new and overwhelming advantages, cyber warfare changes year,y, actually, monthly, and these advances are shared virtually instantly among allies, requiring no factories, manufacturing techniques, or natural resources beyond manpower, intellect, and thought. Ask aerospace engineers - it takes so much less time to devise a new weapon system than it does to actually manufacture and refine it to the point of usefulness. And cyber warfare is cheaper too, by every measure, to develop and deploy.
I'm confident in assuming that the US and others have the means to detect and monitor electronic communications among allies and adversaries worldwide, with few exceptions. And they constantly have to refine those methods to keep up with the changing landscape. And the only way to do that is to deploy an intercept system that captures everything, everywhere, all the time, and keeps it for analysis and exploitation. All this means our government is compelled to violate our privacy and civil rights, if not explicitly, then implicitly, as it captures all the things always, just to be able to find the enemy's vulnerabilities and secrets.
It's a nasty business. We have no other choice. Our enemies will certainly do so, and without a shred of restraint. If they can prevail at our expense, they will indeed. And this example shows that there is no hope of ever turning back from this state. It will only get worse. All attempts to secure our information systems will only succeed in making it more difficult to find the enemy. They will use all security measures to improve their methods. But we must improve security, no matter, for all the other reasons. A vicious circle, one impossible to stop.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
That was actually in the news three years ago, but because of secrecy, the details of exactly what he warned about was left out. Now we know: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/ne... or https://www.thestate.com/news/...
"The CIA case involves former contractor John Reidy, who asserts he was punished after warning of a “catastrophic failure” in the spy agency’s operations. “It was a recipe for disaster,” Reidy wrote in his appeal, which was redacted by intelligence officials. “We had a catastrophic failure on our hands that would ensnare a great many of our sources.” His lawyer, Kel McClanahan, said Reidy was in charge of identifying foreign sources and systems in the telecommunications and computer fields that would be of interest to U.S. intelligence agencies.
Reidy also was responsible for developing intelligence operations against those targets, his lawyer said. McClanahan said his client is not permitted to discuss the case in more detail even with him because the CIA says the information is classified.
Reidy asserts that he first detected vulnerabilities in a CIA program in 2006, according to the appeal filing obtained by McClatchy. Signs of the problems included “anomalies in our operations and conflicting intelligence reporting that indicated several of our operations had been compromised,” he wrote, adding that he noticed “sources abruptly and without reason ceasing all communications with us.”
OR search Spy Games clips on YouTube before you settle down to watch your favorite VHS on your still-functional VCR.
You can scan for Dinner Out while you're at it. They don't make movies like *that* anymore.
Enjoy =)
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I guess this is why search results sucked after 2006
So how did Russia get the names of US agents, one former FSB and one current FSB, and one hotel cleaner, six days after Trump got the unredacted piss memo with the names of those agents in?
I'm not sure what your point is. The article here is about one intelligence failure, which was in 2011. You're asking about a different intelligence failure, six years later. The existence of one intelligence failure doesn't say much about the other one.
...There is ONE article by "Zach Dorfman and Jenna McLaughlin" and this is it. Just because you read it, don't assume its true.
Yes, it is one article. Once you read it, however, you see that there were earlier articles on the same leak which just didn't have the actual details. :
https://www.pulitzer.org/files/2015/national-reporting/mcclatchy/10mcclatchy2015.pdf. (alternate source: https://www.kentucky.com/news/...)
Or here: https://www.emptywheel.net/201...
Or here: https://www.thestate.com/news/...
30 Chinese assets executed. Iranians use Google to break into a classified information system. Covertly funded "Friendly rebels" become ISIS. Obama was one of the worst presidents ever.
If you dig down into the references, you see that the first realization that there was a problem dates back to 2006, two years before Obama was elected:
Reidy asserts that he first detected vulnerabilities in a CIA program in 2006, according to the appeal filing obtained by McClatchy. source: https://www.thestate.com/news/...
Under Obozo's watch, a lot of assets were executed. Think of their families and children as well. So where's the blame?????!!!!!!
Hopefully, Trump can use this on the campaign trail to maintain Republican control of the House.
I've got an indestructible bridge to sell you if you believe these outrageous claims against those who the globalists want to subdue and occupy, especially when they (the globalists and their vassal states' intelligence communities) created and conveniently "lost control" of the tools needed to hack others from "behind" a targeted group's firewalls in their name. They have all that technology, and all they proved was that THEY were the ones who are the ones "hacking" us, not some foreign power or actors.
"The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home."
The means of "defence" are propaganda and technology. Those tools are used in an inverted way by the controllers of government through their intelligence community and media (which is the overt arm of the intelligence community). They have turned those tools and/or the news and propaganda regarding them inward on its citizens. The key is stop believing in it, as they have now made it clear that we need absolute, unimpeachable proof instead of their word, which is worth nothing and should never have been given any value from the start.
It doesn't matter. Stop splitting hairs. You (Dems) will still lose in 4 days. Trump will convince honest, hard-working Americans that the Dems fucked this up during their tenure and got a lot of their family members killed off because their incompetence. And you people want back into the White House? Fuck off. You will lose.
"CIA Exposed a Highly Sensitive Communications System on the Public Internet, Where it Could be Compromised by Iranians Simply Using Google Search"
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Great flick!
and they themselves have murdered hundreds of people, perhaps more, since their inception. The sooner this spying/murder organization is removed, the better.
SECOPS is hard. Don't use Cloudy services if you care about security of the data.
"Metadata" matters too. Using it there are wide inferences that can be made. Average people don't have a clue how dangerous metadata is. It usually isn't about where you are for peons like us. It is about where we are NOT and using patterns to figure out where we are likely to me, when.
Humans are creatures of habit. With the raw data that our personal tracking devices contain and share with the phone company, that data can be turned into information. Most people don't think they are all that interesting, which is true, until it isn't for some other reason.
That's the lesson for everyone. Not just spies, but for you and me too.
Or many of the other letter agencies of US Govt? I am very concerned that all my tax money is not really getting a good ROI. I think we all have a very lofty ideal of what those agencies are capable of but it may be a bogus ideal that is formulated by Movies and TV and not based on reality.
This strikes me as a fundamental point. The further away you get from an understanding of first principles, the easier for common mode failures to occur -- and I think it ties as well into a failure of imagination about those failure modes as a direct result of lack of familiarity with them. It's easy to say "low tech is a solved problem, so let's focus on all the sexy high-tech stuff"; but low-tech pattern recognition can bite you just as easily, if not moreso.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
But if a gun is used, it is the fault of the gun manufacturer.
Actually, by law, if a gun is used in a crime it is explicitly not the fault of the gun manufacturer.
The 2005 "Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act" makes gun manufacturers immune from liability for use of their guns.
http://time.com/4967018/las-vegas-shooting-gun-lawsuits/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Lawful_Commerce_in_Arms_Act
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gun-manufacturers-crimes-products/
With the raw data that our personal tracking devices contain and share with the phone company,
As a spy, you want your observable behavior to blend in with the crowd. Hiding (too much) is just as suspicious as standing out.
This is why everyone needs to use secure communications and encryption*. Of course, this makes law enforcement snooping that much more difficult. One has to balance the safety of our friends working in hostile countries with the possibility that some people might abuse security to swipe some Disney content. It appears that Mickey Mouse won out over some lives in this case.
*It would be interesting to see if the CIA portals were set up on secure web sites.
Have gnu, will travel.
Come on, Google as a tool was about as important as they fact that they used the internet developed by US own DARPA. Oh, and they likely used Intel or AMD CPUs, and probably US made Windows or Linux, paired Chrome or Edge or Firefox too.Or maybe they used an iPad, so let's change the headline to using Apple.
The article makes it sounds like Google was the weakness here. If it wasn't for Google search, they would have used other tools with the same result. While interesting news, the headline on Slashdot is just sensationalism - notice the linked article does not have Google in the headline, or any other splashy company names.
I'm not even sure they hacked those websites. I think they just logged which IPs connect to those domains, and then spied on those.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
MAD Mag Spy vs. Spy comic. And with the bombs
How dare they even think about using counterespionage techniques against the US! Don't they know that they are just supposed to do nothing and let the US win? /s
When the UK spied on German troop trains in WW1 it used local people who had a reason to be in the area and who would not be noticed.
The UK had the best spies in position to spy on passing troop trains.
The Germans waited for the information collected to be passed back up spy networks and found the spies.
The UK failed at having a good way to pass information back quickly and with no way of getting detected.
During WW2 UK spies had poor radio and code security skills.
The ability to detect radio use and long term code use kept decrypted was something the UK took time to understand.
The "internet" is not used in the same ways as in the USA all over the world.
Habits and traits stand out given nations have total control over all their own internal internet use.
Once a plausible way of talking to the CIA is found using the internet is detected then nation will be all over that to find more people talking to the CIA in the same way.
Understand the culture you are spying on. Talk to all the anthropologist in the CIA and work out what kind of normal internet sites get visited a lot.
Expect people who are tempted to spy for the USA to be under constant watch. When the CIA can work out who will spy for them, so can that nation.
Visiting a strange web site not many other people in that nation have found/used will stand out when a nation watches its security cleared workers.
Never tell political leaders about what is found when spying. They will tell the press for political reasons and the world will know. The nations been spied on then only have a very short list of who to follow and find all the spies.
Stop talking to political leadership about what is found in real time. Politicians entire party structure is set up to talk to people. Don't tell the politicians secrets that uncover spies still in place.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
And more oops: a CIA employee named John Reidy figured out that there was a leak and warned about it two years before. His information was ignored, and he was removed from his job
Perhaps you guys do not understand how rotten CIA has become, I do.
A friend of mine used to spy for CIA, and I say -used to- because he is currently inside a jail cell in China, and this is his 8th years inside a Chinese jail.
They (the CIA) knew what happened, but did nothing, and we petitioned the US government many times, back when a guy named Hussein was the POTUS, and that fella did nothing, either.
Sir, there is no loyalty inside CIA --- all foreign assets have now being considered disposable .
My friend is not the only CIA former assets being locked up, and CIA is doing absolutely NOTHING in trying to free them !
The lesson CIA successfully conveyed to the people of the entire world is this --- Never, *ever*, trust Uncle Sam with your life.
Public websites aren't exposed to the Internet? !?
Do you understand how retarded you must be to think they could possibly be as stupid as you must be for claiming this?
Because if you can't win the battle for cybersecurity, why even fight?
You are perfectly aware that guns do not have safety regulations anywhere as seriously cars.