11.02.16
Posted in Bioterrorism, Cyberterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 11:56 am by George Smith
If you’re going to do anything with real goods, illicit, dangerous, or both, you can’t hide on the Dark Web. If there’s enough manpower to investigate and it’s present at the right time, your anonymity is pierced.
From Sweden, on a recent ricin case:
A Swedish court has sentenced a 27-year-old German man to one year’s imprisonment for stealing toxic substances from a university where he was a student.
The Uppsala District Court on Friday said Gurkan Korkmaz used the alias LarryFlow to offer lethal substances like ricin on dark-web online markets, but added that it could not be proven he actually sold the substances.
Swedish police started the investigation in the fall of 2015 after receiving tips from U.S. police.
The FBI has put a not insignificant amount of resources into penetrating marketplaces on the dark web. The most public part of the operation has been the tracking, arrests and convictions of those buying and selling poisons like ricin or abrin.
Korkmaz was arrested as the supplier of a ring of blackmailers that had sent ricin letters to a government offical in the Czech Republic in hopes of extorting payment in bitcoins through the use of threats. No digital money was paid out.
From a newspaper report:
[Events] follow the initial arrest of the [Korkmaz] in April on suspicion of selling poison through the internet to a group that blackmailed a Czech minister for large sums of money.
“There was an attempt to blackmail the Czech state. There was a threat to spread different kinds of poison among the general public in the country if the state did not pay out quite a lot of money in bitcoin to the blackmailers. This man’s participation is that he is alleged to have supplied the poison,??? prosecutor Henrik Söderman explained.
Swedish authorities were initially alerted to the man’s trail when the FBI notified their colleagues in Sweden that poison had been sold via a website.
The police have not yet identified the buyers …
Korkmaz did not attempt to make ricin. Instead, he stole it from a lab, one that presumably used a purified source for research.
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11.01.16
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:42 pm by George Smith
Going to repeat myself. Behold, David Leonhardt, going from NYTimes economics reporter, defender of the riches, to opinion page writer, wealthy whitemansplainer on how you must get up on the barricades and preserve American values and apple pie. One of the many grandees who spent his career writing propaganda in support of all the economic policies that have contributed to the great anger that has vomited up Trump.
Leonhardt:
But this election is different. Trump threatens American values, threatens America’s interests and — as is clear from the financial markets’ dire view of a Trump presidency — threatens the economy …
One week from Tuesday night, the often-depressing campaign of 2016 will be over. Before it is, take a moment to imagine how it would feel to live in a country that had voted for and was run by Donald Trump.
Then go out and do your part to keep America great.
“Post your own voting plan to Facebook, and ask your friends to reply with theirs,” Leonhardt writes.
Yes, Twitter tweeting, Facebooking, top boy, head boy, you’re just a lickspittle … that’s how the song goes. Share, share, share. Save democracy and the American way.
Let’s pause a moment to remember Kevin Coyne. Thanks, guy.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Phlogiston at 11:30 am by George Smith
“[A] small, tightly knit community of computer scientists who pursue such work—some at cybersecurity firms, some in academia, some with close ties to three-letter federal agencies—is also spurred by a sense of shared idealism and considers itself the benevolent posse that chases off the rogues and rogue states that try to purloin sensitive data and infect the internet with their bugs,” it reads at Slate.
Important stuff! “A Union of Concerned Nerds” are about to explain how they almost discovered Donald J. Trump was in league with Russia!
“We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,??? explained one of the academicians who, naturally, wished to remain anonymous.
One of the defenders of election integrity, nicknamed Tea Leaves (BTW, Tea Leaves is Cockney slang for “thieves,” which I lernt from watching The Limey)
They soon began “scrutinizing” a computer in Moscow, from a bank, that was connecting with Donald J. Trump’s domain “in a strange way.” Strange ways on the internet…
The information and data was passed on to a man named Vixie. There was “no higher authority” when it came to this kind of thing.
The transmissions of the suspicious computer in Moscow were deemed indeed very suspicious.
“The data has got the right kind of fuzz growing on it,??? according to Vixie, as told to the reporter. It’s the interpacket gap, the spacing between the conversations, the total volume.”
Growing fuzz. Interpacket gap.
What could be going on? Influence peddling and other skullduggeries yet to be determined, but suspiciously, very suspiciously, tied to events in the election cycle, like the days between two debates!
You could read it here. Or just go to the NY Times and skip the jargon and fog of cyberwar:
F.B.I. officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank. Computer logs obtained by The New York Times show that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 “look-up??? messages — a first step for one system’s computers to talk to another — to a Trump-connected server beginning in the spring. But the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.
“Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank,” reads a sentence from the top of the story.
Oh well. With a week to go democracy still needs saving. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
Listen for the “hee’s” and sinister theme invoking the terror of cyberwar near the end.
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