[🇺🇸] While CIA is sleeping, Russian hackers are deeply penetrating American computer infrastructure

[Sharma Ji]

Some good reading, Iranian hackers did retaliate, some targeted at Saudi Infra and some directly at US infra - this is old news from ten years ago.

Cyber snooping and Cyber-war is already mainstream.

Post Stuxnet - Iranian hacking sophistication increased by leaps and bounds because they invested in training their hackers - some say with Russian and North Korean help. Granted some of the following is technical, but I can possibly explain 90% of it.

The Mandiant M-Trends Security Report discusses Iranian hacking capabilities and activities - among other things. Here is a GitHub folder where there are hundreds of other reports - knock yourself out.

annual_security_reports/Annual Security Reports/2024/Mandiant-M-Trends-2024.pdf at main · OldLearner22/annual_security_reports

A curated list of annual cyber security reports. Contribute to OldLearner22/annual_security_reports development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

NSA Snooping Was Only the Beginning. Meet the Spy Chief Leading Us Into Cyberwar

General Keith Alexander has been building a secret army capable of launching devastating cyberattacks. Now it's ready to unleash hell.

web.archive.org

NSA Snooping Was Only the Beginning. Meet the Spy Chief Leading Us Into Cyberwar

General Keith Alexander has been building a secret army capable of launching devastating cyberattacks. Now it's ready to unleash hell.

web.archive.org

https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/HTML/IF11406.web.html

Connect the Dots on State-Sponsored Cyber Incidents - Compromise of Saudi Aramco and RasGas

In 2012, threat actors wiped data from approximately thirty-five thousand computers belonging to Saudi Aramco, one of the world’s largest oil companies. Malware called Shamoon stole passwords, wiped data, and prevented computers from rebooting. Hackers calling themselves the "Cutting Sword of...

www.cfr.org

EBSCO - Research Databases, EBooks, Discovery Service

EBSCO is the leading provider of research databases, e-journals, magazine subscriptions, ebooks and discovery service for academic libraries, public libraries, corporations, schools, government and medical institutions

www.ebsco.com

Las Vegas Sands' Casino Network hit by Destructive Malware

Las Vegas Sands' Casino Network hit by cyber attack and destructive Malware

thehackernews.com

They're watching all over the place, most likely.

"They", as in, gorments the world over.

Log bhi easy to track hain these days, everyone's almost always connected to the networks, OBL did well staying hidden for so long.

No one is safe, the machine knows all.

 

[Krishna with Flute]

CIA is not sleeping

woh bhi karte cyber attcks

@Lulldapull stuxnet yaad hai ?

@Vsdoc @Cryptonian

And this side India hacked Chinese satellites and passed on wrong information to Pakistan through Chinese satellites.

 

[Suresh Naresh]

CIA is not sleeping

woh bhi karte cyber attcks

@Lulldapull stuxnet yaad hai ?

@Vsdoc @Cryptonian

'Legacy of Ashes': Exposing the real face of the CIA

By Evan Thomas
July 20, 2007
Legacy of Ashes The History of the CIA By Tim Weiner Illustrated. 702 pages. $27.95. Doubleday.

America's foes and rivals have long overrated the Central Intelligence Agency. When Henry Kissinger traveled to China in 1971, Prime Minister Chou En-lai asked about CIA subversion. Kissinger told Chou that he "vastly overestimates the competence of the CIA." Chou persisted that "whenever something happens in the world, they are always thought of." Kissinger acknowledged, "That is true, and it flatters them, but they don't deserve it."

A few years later, in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. They captured a CIA case officer named William Daugherty and accused him of running the agency's entire Middle Eastern spy network while plotting to assassinate Ayatollah Khomeini. Daugherty, who had been in the CIA for only nine months, tried to explain that he didn't even speak the native tongue, Persian. The Iranians seemed offended that the Americans would send such an inexperienced spy. It was "beyond insult," Daugherty later recalled, "for that officer not to speak the language or know the customs, culture and history of their country."

The CIA never did have much luck operating inside Communist China, and it failed to predict the Iranian revolution of 1979. "We were just plain asleep," said the former CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner. The agency also did not foresee the explosion of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atom bomb by India in 1998 - the list goes on and on, culminating in the agency's wrong call on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in 2002-03.

Tim Weiner's engrossing, comprehensive "Legacy of Ashes" is a litany of failure, from the CIA's early days, when hundreds of agents were dropped behind the Iron Curtain to be killed or doubled (almost without exception), to more recent humiliations, like George Tenet's now infamous "slam dunk" line. Over the years, the agency threw around a lot of money and adopted a certain swagger. "We went all over the world and we did what we wanted," said Al Ulmer, the CIA's Far East division chief in the 1950s. "God, we had fun." But even their successes turned out to be failures. In 1963, the CIA backed a coup to install the Baath Party in Iraq. "We came to power on a CIA train," said Ali Saleh Saadi, the Baath Party interior minister. One of the train's passengers, Weiner notes, was a young assassin named Saddam Hussein. Weiner quotes Donald Gregg, a former CIA station chief in South Korea, later the national security adviser to Vice President George H. W. Bush: "The record in Europe was bad. The record in Asia was bad. The agency had a terrible record in its early days - a great reputation and a terrible record."

And yet the myth of the CIA as an all-knowing, all-powerful spy agency persisted for years, not just in the minds of America's enemies but in the imagination of many American television-watchers and moviegoers. Among those fooled, at least initially, were most modern presidents of the United States. The promise of a secret intelligence organization that could not only spy on America's enemies but also influence events abroad, by sleight of hand and at relatively low cost, was just too alluring.

When presidents finally faced the reality that the agency was bumbling, they could be bitter. Reviewing the CIA's record after his two terms in office, Dwight Eisenhower told the director, Allen Dulles, "I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this." He would "leave a legacy of ashes" for his successor. A fan of Ian Fleming's spy stories, John F. Kennedy was shocked to be introduced to the man described by CIA higher-ups as their James Bond - the fat, alcoholic, unstable William Harvey, who ran a botched attempt to eliminate Fidel Castro by hiring the Mafia. Ronald Reagan went along with the desire of his CIA director, William Casey, to bring back the mythical glory days by "unleashing" the agency - and his presidency was badly undermined by the Iran-contra affair.

In Weiner's telling, a president trying to use the CIA resembles Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. The role of Lucy is played by scheming or inept directors. Dulles is particularly egregious, a lazy, vain con artist who watches baseball games on television while half-listening to top-secret briefings (he assesses written briefings by their weight). Casey mumbles and lies and may have been almost mad from a brain tumor by the end. Even the more honorable directors, like Richard Helms, can't resist telling presidents what they want to hear. To fit the policy needs of the Nixon White House in 1969, Helms doctored a CIA estimate of Soviet nuclear forces. In a draft of the report, analysts had doubted the Soviet will or capacity to launch a nuclear strike. Helms erased this crucial passage - and for years thereafter, until the end of the Cold War, the CIA overstated the rate at which the Soviets were modernizing their arsenal. The CIA's bogus intelligence on Iraq in 2002-03, based on the deceits of dubious sources like the one known as Curveball, was hardly unprecedented. To justify the Johnson administration's desire for a pro-war congressional resolution on Vietnam in 1964, the intelligence community manufactured evidence of a Communist attack on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Weiner, a reporter for The Times who has covered intelligence for many years, has a good eye for embarrassing detail. High-ranking officials, it appears, were often the last to know. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Robert M. Gates, who is now the secretary of defense but at the time was the first President Bush's top intelligence adviser, was at a family picnic. A friend of his wife's joined the picnic and asked him, "What are you doing here?" Gates asked, "What are you talking about?" "The invasion," she said. "What invasion?" he asked. A year earlier, when the Berlin Wall fell, Milt Bearden, the leader of the CIA's Soviet division, was reduced to watching CNN and deflecting urgent calls from White House officials who wanted to know what the agency's spies were saying. "It was hard to confess that there were no Soviet spies worth a damn - they all had been rounded up and killed, and no one at the CIA knew why," Weiner writes. (The U.S. agents in Moscow had been betrayed by the CIA mole Aldrich Ames.)

Weiner is not the first reporter to see that the CIA's golden era was an illusion. After the 1975 Church Committee hearings exposed the agency as "the gang that couldn't shoot straight," various authors began to deconstruct the myth of the CIA, most notably Thomas Powers in "The Man Who Kept the Secrets." But by using tens of thousands of declassified documents and on the record recollections of dozens of chagrined spymasters, Weiner paints what may be the most disturbing picture yet of CIA ineptitude. After following along Weiner's march of folly, readers may wonder: Is an open democracy capable of building and sustaining an effective secret intelligence service? Maybe not. But with Islamic terrorists vowing to set off a nuclear device in an American city, there isn't much choice but to keep on trying.

'Legacy of Ashes': Exposing the real face of the CIA (Published 2007)

www.nytimes.com

 

[Sharma Ji]

'Legacy of Ashes': Exposing the real face of the CIA

By Evan Thomas
July 20, 2007
Legacy of Ashes The History of the CIA By Tim Weiner Illustrated. 702 pages. $27.95. Doubleday.

America's foes and rivals have long overrated the Central Intelligence Agency. When Henry Kissinger traveled to China in 1971, Prime Minister Chou En-lai asked about CIA subversion. Kissinger told Chou that he "vastly overestimates the competence of the CIA." Chou persisted that "whenever something happens in the world, they are always thought of." Kissinger acknowledged, "That is true, and it flatters them, but they don't deserve it."

A few years later, in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. They captured a CIA case officer named William Daugherty and accused him of running the agency's entire Middle Eastern spy network while plotting to assassinate Ayatollah Khomeini. Daugherty, who had been in the CIA for only nine months, tried to explain that he didn't even speak the native tongue, Persian. The Iranians seemed offended that the Americans would send such an inexperienced spy. It was "beyond insult," Daugherty later recalled, "for that officer not to speak the language or know the customs, culture and history of their country."

The CIA never did have much luck operating inside Communist China, and it failed to predict the Iranian revolution of 1979. "We were just plain asleep," said the former CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner. The agency also did not foresee the explosion of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atom bomb by India in 1998 - the list goes on and on, culminating in the agency's wrong call on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in 2002-03.

Tim Weiner's engrossing, comprehensive "Legacy of Ashes" is a litany of failure, from the CIA's early days, when hundreds of agents were dropped behind the Iron Curtain to be killed or doubled (almost without exception), to more recent humiliations, like George Tenet's now infamous "slam dunk" line. Over the years, the agency threw around a lot of money and adopted a certain swagger. "We went all over the world and we did what we wanted," said Al Ulmer, the CIA's Far East division chief in the 1950s. "God, we had fun." But even their successes turned out to be failures. In 1963, the CIA backed a coup to install the Baath Party in Iraq. "We came to power on a CIA train," said Ali Saleh Saadi, the Baath Party interior minister. One of the train's passengers, Weiner notes, was a young assassin named Saddam Hussein. Weiner quotes Donald Gregg, a former CIA station chief in South Korea, later the national security adviser to Vice President George H. W. Bush: "The record in Europe was bad. The record in Asia was bad. The agency had a terrible record in its early days - a great reputation and a terrible record."

And yet the myth of the CIA as an all-knowing, all-powerful spy agency persisted for years, not just in the minds of America's enemies but in the imagination of many American television-watchers and moviegoers. Among those fooled, at least initially, were most modern presidents of the United States. The promise of a secret intelligence organization that could not only spy on America's enemies but also influence events abroad, by sleight of hand and at relatively low cost, was just too alluring.

When presidents finally faced the reality that the agency was bumbling, they could be bitter. Reviewing the CIA's record after his two terms in office, Dwight Eisenhower told the director, Allen Dulles, "I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this." He would "leave a legacy of ashes" for his successor. A fan of Ian Fleming's spy stories, John F. Kennedy was shocked to be introduced to the man described by CIA higher-ups as their James Bond - the fat, alcoholic, unstable William Harvey, who ran a botched attempt to eliminate Fidel Castro by hiring the Mafia. Ronald Reagan went along with the desire of his CIA director, William Casey, to bring back the mythical glory days by "unleashing" the agency - and his presidency was badly undermined by the Iran-contra affair.

In Weiner's telling, a president trying to use the CIA resembles Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. The role of Lucy is played by scheming or inept directors. Dulles is particularly egregious, a lazy, vain con artist who watches baseball games on television while half-listening to top-secret briefings (he assesses written briefings by their weight). Casey mumbles and lies and may have been almost mad from a brain tumor by the end. Even the more honorable directors, like Richard Helms, can't resist telling presidents what they want to hear. To fit the policy needs of the Nixon White House in 1969, Helms doctored a CIA estimate of Soviet nuclear forces. In a draft of the report, analysts had doubted the Soviet will or capacity to launch a nuclear strike. Helms erased this crucial passage - and for years thereafter, until the end of the Cold War, the CIA overstated the rate at which the Soviets were modernizing their arsenal. The CIA's bogus intelligence on Iraq in 2002-03, based on the deceits of dubious sources like the one known as Curveball, was hardly unprecedented. To justify the Johnson administration's desire for a pro-war congressional resolution on Vietnam in 1964, the intelligence community manufactured evidence of a Communist attack on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Weiner, a reporter for The Times who has covered intelligence for many years, has a good eye for embarrassing detail. High-ranking officials, it appears, were often the last to know. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Robert M. Gates, who is now the secretary of defense but at the time was the first President Bush's top intelligence adviser, was at a family picnic. A friend of his wife's joined the picnic and asked him, "What are you doing here?" Gates asked, "What are you talking about?" "The invasion," she said. "What invasion?" he asked. A year earlier, when the Berlin Wall fell, Milt Bearden, the leader of the CIA's Soviet division, was reduced to watching CNN and deflecting urgent calls from White House officials who wanted to know what the agency's spies were saying. "It was hard to confess that there were no Soviet spies worth a damn - they all had been rounded up and killed, and no one at the CIA knew why," Weiner writes. (The U.S. agents in Moscow had been betrayed by the CIA mole Aldrich Ames.)

Weiner is not the first reporter to see that the CIA's golden era was an illusion. After the 1975 Church Committee hearings exposed the agency as "the gang that couldn't shoot straight," various authors began to deconstruct the myth of the CIA, most notably Thomas Powers in "The Man Who Kept the Secrets." But by using tens of thousands of declassified documents and on the record recollections of dozens of chagrined spymasters, Weiner paints what may be the most disturbing picture yet of CIA ineptitude. After following along Weiner's march of folly, readers may wonder: Is an open democracy capable of building and sustaining an effective secret intelligence service? Maybe not. But with Islamic terrorists vowing to set off a nuclear device in an American city, there isn't much choice but to keep on trying.

'Legacy of Ashes': Exposing the real face of the CIA (Published 2007)

www.nytimes.com

Cool story, bro.

 

[Suresh Naresh]

@Paitoo