By the end of the attack, Barr's iPad was reputedly erased, his LinkedIn and Twitter accounts were hijacked, the HBGary Federal website was defaced, proprietary HBGary source code was stolen and with over 71,000 private emails now published to the internet, HBGary was laid bare.
In this, was our first lesson: The asymmetry of cyber warfare.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the secret sauce for connecting the digital “virtual” revolutionary circles, and the same circles on the street face to face. It has been used for years at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE), and is a modern day version of the self-identification pins of Charles Fourier. Imagine now if every American committed to destroying the two-party tyranny and achieving Electoral Reform were to buy and wear one of these. It would create a critical mass–a constantly live, interactive, irrepressible swarm for the restoration of the Republic.
Openmoko™ is a project dedicated to delivering mobile phones with an open source software stack. Openmoko was earlier more directly associated with Openmoko Inc, but is nowadays a gathering of people with the shared goal of “Free Your Phone”. Distributors are currently selling updated versions of the Openmoko Inc's phone released in 2008, Neo FreeRunner, to advanced users, while the software stack for FreeRunner and future free phones is being developed by the community.
Solar-powered OpenBTS systems costs pennies a day and operates in the farthest outreaches of Earth.
By Julie Bort, Network World
August 30, 2010 02:47 PM ET
Today I bring you a story that has it all: a solar-powered, low-cost, open source cellular network that's revolutionizing coverage in underprivileged and off-grid spots. It uses VoIP yet works with existing cell phones. It has pedigreed founders. Best of all, it is part of the sex, drugs and art collectively known as Burning Man. Where do you want me to begin?
As the #jan25 revolution continues in Egypt, many people are finding that some of the oldest tricks in the book are working to get them connected, which authorities have tried to stop from happening with enforced curfews and cuts to Internet service.
IDG News Service – “When countries block, we evolve,” an activist with the group We Rebuild wrote in a Twitter message Friday.
That's just what many Egyptians have been doing this week, as groups like We Rebuild scramble to keep the country connected to the outside world, turning to landline telephones, fax machines and even ham radio to keep information flowing in and out of the country.
This search is a VERY important one, and does not yield the correct answer, which is in itself an indictment of information technology.
The correct answer is NEGATIVE, and Paul Strassmann, former Director of Defense Information, is the person who established this fact for the top corporations, although he likes to soft-shoe it and say neutral or negative. NOT positive. There is no Return on Investment (RoI) for information technology in and of itself. He first disclosed this in his keynote luncheon presentation at OSS '96, and then published a book. Both links are below. Paul Strassmann is one of our heroes–he has NOT been listened to carefully enough, and is in our little black book as a “must have” advisor for any future Information Operations (IO) “break-out” but only if he signs a non-compete and forgoes any association with any of the vendors selling vapor-ware (which is to say, all of them).
By Greg Miller Wednesday, December 22, 2010; 12:24 AM
The CIA has launched a task force to assess the impact of the exposure of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and military files by WikiLeaks.
Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it's mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: W.T.F.
The irreverence is perhaps understandable for an agency that has been relatively unscathed by WikiLeaks. Only a handful of CIA files have surfaced on the WikiLeaks Web site, and records from other agencies posted online reveal remarkably little about CIA employees or operations.
Phi Beta Iota: We understand that CIA used to handle Department of State Embassy traffic, and the ugly little fact associated with WikiLeaks, that the Department of Defense is now handling Department of State traffic, has been buried. The DoD “Grid” is hosed and is never going to be fixed absent a a clean sheet break from the legacy and the contractors. GAO is interested in doing an update to its first two damning indictments of DoD's Swiss Cheese Communications environment, it just needs one Member of Congress to ask for it….
Afterthought: CIA had a chance in 1986, under Bill Donnelly (DDA), Ken Weslick (C/DO/IMS), and Robert Steele (PM Project George (Smiley)), in combination with the superb work of Gordon Oehler, Dennis McCormick, and Diane Webb in in DI/OSWR, to get it right. They were specifically told at the highest levels that they needed to do two things: change the paradigm from “once in, everything visible” to “need to know tracking and accountablity,” and implement the “reverse hit” strategy that disclosed need to know hits to the owner of the clandestine or covert information rather than the seeker. With Bill Casey's death CIA lost whatever chance it had of entering the 21st Century moderately coherent. We have wasted close to a quarter century because DoD had a death drip on ADA and refused to contemplate object-oriented programming or open source software for decades beyond ADA's natural death, and OMB gave up the concept of inter-agency interoperability and secure information-sharing in the 1980's. At the same time, the National Information Infrastructure was all theater and no security. Marty Harris meant well, but he simply would not focus on fundamentals such as code-level security, education, and strict classification limitations.
Everybody is putting out their Top 10 lists of predictions for 2011. Not to be left out of the party, below is a list of what we expect to see in 2011 in Cyber Security.
1. Malware.
2. Blame the User.
3. Reactive approaches to security will continue to fail.
4. Major Breaches in Sectors with Intellectual Property.
5. Hacktivists will bask in their new-found glory.
Phi Beta Iota: Nothing wrong with any of the above, except that they are out of context. As the still-valid cyber-threat slide created by Mitch Kabay in the 1990's shows, 70% of our losses have nothing to do with disgruntled or dishonest insiders, or external attacks including viruses. Cyber has not been defined, in part because the Human Intelligence crowd does not compute circuits, and the circuit crowd do not computer human intelligence. We are at the very beginning of a startling renaissance in cyber/Information Operations (IO) in which–we predict–existing and near-term hardware and software vulnerabilities will be less than 30% of the problem. Getting analog Cold War leaders into new mind-sets, and educating all hands toward sharing rather than hoarding, toward multinational rather than unilateral, will be key aspects of our progress. Cyber is life, life is cyber–it's all connected. Stove-piped “solutions” make it worse.
