Internet and computer security company Symantec has issued a statement today related to the Vault 7 WikiLeaks documents leaked from the CIA, saying that the methods and protocols described in the documents are consistent with cyberattacks they’d been tracking for years.
Symantec says they now believe that the CIA hacking tool Fluxwire is a malware that had been known as Corentry, which Symantec had previously attributed to an unknown cyberespionage group called Longhorn, which apparently was the CIA.
They described Longhorn as having been active since at least 2011, and responsible fro attacks in at least 16 countries across the world, targeting governments and NGOs, as well as financial, energy, and natural resource companies, things that would generally be of interest to a nation-state.
While the WikiLeaks themselves have been comparatively short on details, as WikiLeaks continues to share specific vulnerabilities with companies so they can fix them before the details are leaked to the general public, the ability of security companies like Symantec to link the CIA to known hacking operations could prove to be even more enlightening as to the scope of CIA cyber-espionage the world over.
Well, the taxpayer’s money may be ill spent but the software does work to break stuff…
One key point is that the taxpayer investment was used to blame/disguise the origin of the software breakage. That helps from the POV of preserving the US govt’s completely fake reputation for legality and also, possibly, for collecting more money in the future to go after/crackdown on “those crooks”. It’s almost a perpetual motion machine for public bilking. That is actually the essence of the CIA – it is far and away the most successful, powerful, and destructive hard core criminal syndicate every put together. The topic of this story is like a single blade of grass on a prairie.
Nice comment Josh… WTF…!!!!! Like a single blade of grass on the prarie… Great stuff..!!!!!
Yes, there’s a public ‘white economy’ Empire and a shadow ‘black economy’ Empire, just like there’s now the public face of government and there’s a shadow government.
The barriers between the two were always very porous, but the formal formation of the shadow government was very recent (9/11).
The black economy long preceded it but must have grown in size and complexity such that it was no longer possible to operate it as if it didn’t exist, requiring a more formal shadow government tapped into white market management resources.
Still the same pattern, like the trillion public dollars pumped into Afghan opium will never again grace the public books except as red ink but the black books are fully in the black.
Cheney/Rumsfeld’s pet COG project kicked in on 9/11 and the endless “We take all your money, your rights, and kill because of (our) Islamic terror ops” kicked into high gear after 9/11. But in a historical context, I see the Security Act of 1947 as the real key development. That created the regimes of professional, criminal Spook, with the ability to take money from both taxpayer and crime, hidden & protected from all legal enforcement or government supervision, accountable to noone in practice. The CIA and the narcotics trade go back to the beginning. False flags go back to the beginning. Using Islamic radicals as pawns goes back to at least the 1953 coup in Iran. So none of that except COG is new. But the gap between the tech (including social engineering tech) that the public knows about and the tech that Spook has keeps growing wider.
For sure, the 1947 SA changed everything. Before that, the CIA was the OSS and more or less under Constitutional mandate under the Defense Department.
Then 1947 SA took it and placed intel in kind of a Constitutional loophole of a legal no-mans-land. The Dulles seemed to understand the potential of what they had going when they had it. The highest-up in and behind the OSS probably also knew the potential of the OSS, freed of genuine oversight.
Much of the Deep State constitutes a Constitutionally undeclared branch of government. After the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches there is the… Information Branch, for lack of a better description.
Unenumerated powers devolve to the States and the People; no record of them sanctioning that except through ignorance.
Washington is out of control.
Always good work Jason Ditz! But this it too complicated for the American people.
When they accept nonsense such as evil satanic barrel bomb demonization of Assad, you get an idea of their depth of understanding.
Play to the intelligenc level of garden slugs and you can’t go wrong!
I wonder how many of those attacks were blamed on Russia?
I’d love to see them analyze the DNC hacks, oh wait, we can’t because Crowdsource was the only company that had access to their computers. Time to start a war.
“… and NGO’s, as well as financial, energy, and natural resource companies, things that would generally be of interest to a nation-state”… SERVING (HYPOTHESIS) THE INTERESTS OF PRIVATE SECTOR CORPORATE CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTORS.
This, Jason, is what I believe to be the real story here. To what extent is the “free” market distorted by the thievery of the CIA and the rest of the Peeping-Tom “intelligence” matrix? How much “intelligence” does a million dollar campaign donation buy? How many trade secrets? contract bids? actionable (= blackmail-able) dirt on a rival’s CEO?
My guess is it’s a whole lot more than a million dollars worth and amounts to another tax payer welfare program to enrich the already vulgarly wealthy.
I’d love to see Symantec and the rest of the cyber-security industry, that is very much caught between a digital rock and a virtual hard place by all of this, do a whole lot of wiki dumping to expose the slimmy things their rock-turning sleuthing discovers on these matters.
Yes, I’d love to see that.