Author Archives: News Sources

Tor network possible target of raids by law enforcement authorities

CSO Online reports: The Tor Project said on Friday that the online anonymity network may go dark in coming days due to an attempt to incapacitate it.

The project’s leader Roger Dingledine aka “arma” drew attention to the possible outage on the project’s blog, flagging a tip-off that its directory authority servers — a handful of servers that form a consensus on which relays that Tor clients should use — may be the target of an upcoming “seizure”.

“The Tor Project has learned that there may be an attempt to incapacitate our network in the next few days through the seizure of specialized servers in the network called directory authorities,” Dingledine warned.

The wording of the alert suggests that the attacker is law enforcement rather than hackers. Should an attacker gain control of a majority of those servers, they would be able to vote in a fake Tor network.

As the project explains in its FAQ: “The directory authorities provide a signed list of all the known relays, and in that list are a set of certificates from each relay (self-signed by their identity key) specifying their keys, locations, exit policies, and so on. So unless the adversary can control a majority of the directory authorities (as of 2012 there are 8 directory authorities), he can’t trick the Tor client into using other Tor relays.”

A thread on Hacker News notes there are actually now nine directory authorities located across Europe and the US, so the attackers would need to gain control of five in order point Tor users to a phoney Tor network.

“We are taking steps now to ensure the safety of our users, and our system is already built to be redundant so that users maintain anonymity even if the network is attacked. Tor remains safe to use,” Dingledine noted.

It’s not clear what the motivation is for the possible seizure, nor which authority may be behind it. However, there is speculation it may be related to the Sony Pictures investigation due to the hackers having used Tor in the attack. [Continue reading…]

The Register today reports: As foreshadowed last week, Tor network exit nodes have gone down after what appear to be raids by law enforcement authorities.

Thomas White (@CthulhuSec) warned users to steer clear of his Tor servers after he lost control following what he’s called “unusual activity” that meant “I have now lost control of all servers under the ISP and my account has been suspended,” White wrote in an update on the Tor mailing list.

“Having reviewed the last available information of the sensors, the chassis of the servers was opened and an unknown USB device was plugged in only 30-60 seconds before the connection was broken.

“From experience I know this trend of activity is similar to the protocol of sophisticated law enforcement who carry out a search and seizure of running servers.”

White said users should treat the servers as hostile until control was regained signified by a PGP signed message from himself.

He also urged them not to jump to conclusions about the identity of any possible agency nor harbour concern for the integrity of the Tor network.

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Did North Korea really attack Sony?

Bruce Schneier writes: I am deeply skeptical of the FBI’s announcement on Friday that North Korea was behind last month’s Sony hack. The agency’s evidence is tenuous, and I have a hard time believing it. But I also have trouble believing that the U.S. government would make the accusation this formally if officials didn’t believe it.

Clues in the hackers’ attack code seem to point in all directions at once. The FBI points to reused code from previous attacks associated with North Korea, as well as similarities in the networks used to launch the attacks. Korean language in the code also suggests a Korean origin, though not necessarily a North Korean one since North Koreans use a unique dialect. However you read it, this sort of evidence is circumstantial at best. It’s easy to fake, and it’s even easier to interpret it wrong. In general, it’s a situation that rapidly devolves into storytelling, where analysts pick bits and pieces of the “evidence” to suit the narrative they already have worked out in their heads.

In reality, there are several possibilities to consider: [Continue reading…]

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ISIS morale falls as momentum slows and casualties mount

The Financial Times reports: An activist opposed to both the Syrian regime and Isis, and well known to the Financial Times, said he had verified 100 executions of foreign Isis fighters trying to flee the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, Isis’s de facto capital. Like most people interviewed or described in this article, he asked for his name to be withheld for security reasons.

“After the fall of Mosul in June, Isis was presenting itself as unstoppable and it was selling a sense of adventure,” a US official said. He added that the dynamics have changed since the US launched air strikes in August and helped break the momentum of the Isis advance, which has helped stem the flow of foreign recruits — though he warned that the change of mood “doesn’t affect the hardcore people of Isis”.

Analyst Torbjorn Soltvedt, of Verisk Maplecroft, a UK-based risk analysis group, said morale may be taking a hit as militants grapple with the shift from mobile army to governing force.

“Before they were seizing territory, forcing armies in Iraq and Syria to retreat,” he said. “Now they’re basically an occupying force trying to govern.”

After flocking to Syria and Iraq during Isis’s heady days of quick victories, some foreigners may also be questioning the long, gruelling fight ahead.

Mr Solvedt said his organisation has had many reports of foreign fighters, including Britons, contacting family members and state authorities seeking ways to return home.

Isis members in Raqqa said the organisation has created a military police to crack down on fighters who fail to report for duty. According to activists, dozens of fighters’ homes have been raided and many have been arrested. [Continue reading…]

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How ISIS rules

Sarah Birke writes: In late November, there were widespread reports that both the US-led coalition and the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus have stepped up their bombing campaign against the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, in eastern Syria. The jihadist organization has long been secretive about where its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and other senior members are based — locals say they move around between Iraq and Syria — but Raqqa is often referred to as the “capital” of ISIS’s self-declared caliphate, and has become its most emblematic city.

To judge from images distributed by the group, Raqqa is an extremist hotbed whose inhabitants crave a radical version of Islam, enjoy public executions, and fervently support their ruthless black-clad overlords; the beheading of James Foley — and of several of the other hostages — was filmed on a hill in its outskirts. Yet there is little about this provincial center of some 500,000 people that might have suggested jihadist or even Islamist tendencies. In fact, Raqqa did not even enter the Syrian conflict until 2013.

Living in Damascus before the war, I had several occasions to visit Raqqa, and I was struck by how ordinary it was. A dusty place far from the country’s other major cities, it offered few amenities and most Syrians complained about it, if they chanced to visit. It was true that the local population, a mixture of tribes and settled Bedouins, were almost entirely Sunni Muslim, but unlike such eastern cities as Hama and Aleppo it didn’t have a tradition of Islamist activism. As a resident of al-Tabqa, a town near Raqqa with a Syrian air base that was captured by ISIS in August, put it: “The irony is we were famous for not praying!”

But Raqqa’s substantial size, location, and relative remove from the main areas of conflict have been critical to ISIS’s aim of creating a large and highly centralized state. The group holds territory that now extends from the outskirts of Aleppo in Syria’s west to Iraq’s Iranian border in the east, from the Syrian-Turkish border in the north down through Iraq’s Anbar province to six miles outside of Baghdad in the south. Although its forces have been pushed back, slowly, from Kobane, on the Syrian-Turkish border, they have also won land elsewhere, including at Heet and Ramadi in Iraq, despite US-led bombardment. [Continue reading…]

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Syria says Israeli drone downed in Quneitra

Reuters reports: Syria said on Sunday that an Israeli drone had been brought down in the province of Quneitra near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

State media said the drone was flying above the village of Hadar when it was downed. It was not immediately clear whether it had been shot down or had crashed.

Quneitra has seen heavy fighting between forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and rebels including al-Qaeda-linked fighters.[Continue reading…]

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For Israelis ‘a growing sense that Israel is becoming an isolated ghetto’

Roger Cohen writes: Uneasiness inhabits Israel, a shadow beneath the polished surface. In a violent Middle Eastern neighborhood of fracturing states, that is perhaps inevitable, but Israelis are questioning their nation and its future with a particular insistence. As the campaign for March elections begins, this disquiet looks like the precursor of political change. The status quo, with its bloody and inconclusive interludes, has become less bearable. More of the same has a name: Benjamin Netanyahu, now in his third term as prime minister. The alternative, although less clear, is no longer unthinkable.

“There is a growing uneasiness, social, political, economic,” Amos Oz, the novelist, told me in an interview. “There is a growing sense that Israel is becoming an isolated ghetto, which is exactly what the founding fathers and mothers hoped to leave behind them forever when they created the state of Israel.” The author, widely viewed as the conscience of a liberal and anti-Messianic Israel, continued, “Unless there are two states — Israel next door to Palestine — and soon, there will be one state. If there will be one state, it will be an Arab state. The other option is an Israeli dictatorship, probably a religious nationalist dictatorship, suppressing the Palestinians and suppressing its Jewish opponents.”

If that sounds stark, it is because choices are narrowing. Every day, it seems, another European government or parliament expresses support for recognition of a Palestinian state. A Palestinian-backed initiative at the United Nations, opposed in its current form by the United States, is aimed at pushing Israel to withdraw from the West Bank by 2017. The last Gaza eruption, with its heavy toll and messy outcome, changed nothing. Hamas, its annihilationist hatred newly stoked, is still there parading its weapons. Tension is high in Jerusalem after a spate of violent incidents. Life is expensive. Netanyahu’s credibility on both the domestic and international fronts has dwindled. [Continue reading…]

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Most of Netanyahu’s Likud campaign funding coming from Americans

Haaretz reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far raised nearly 539,000 shekels ($137,000) in his bid to retain his position at the head of Likud. The sum came from 15 donors, all of whom are from overseas. Fourteen are from the United States, while one is from Spain.

At this point, Netanyahu’s only challenger is Danny Danon, who has raised a total of 261,000 shekels from 11 donors – 10 of whom reside in the United States.

Before dropping out of the leadership race, Moshe Feiglin had raised 220,000 shekels from 217 donations.

The Likud primary will be held on December 31, with the winner leading the party into the Knesset election, which will be held on March 17. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS ‘executes 100 deserters’ in Syria’s Raqqa

Al Arabiya reports: Militants belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have executed 100 members for trying to flee their base in the northern Syrian city of Raqaa, the Financial Times reported on Saturday.

An activist, who was identified by the newspaper as opposed to the Syrian regime and ISIS, confirmed to the FT the execution of the 100 foreign fighters attempting to flee Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital.

After being on the run for months, “frustration” began sweeping among the Islamist militants, the daily said.

Fighters sense a halt to ISIS’ military progress and are witnessing mounting casualties among their ranks, the report added.

“Morale isn’t falling – it’s hit the ground,” an opposition activist from ISIS-controlled areas of in Deir al-Zor told the newspaper.

Morale among the fighters was affected by the group’s shift toward governing areas it controls and because of U.S.-led air strikes halting their advances in Syria and Iraq.

“Local fighters are frustrated – they feel they’re doing most of the work and the dying … foreign fighters who thought they were on an adventure are now exhausted,” the opposition activist told the daily. [Continue reading…]

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Sweden’s troll hunters

Adrian Chen reports: We’ve come up with the menacing term “troll” for someone who spreads hate and does other horrible things anonymously on the Internet. Internet trolls are unsettling not just because of the things they say but for the mystery they represent: what kind of person could be so vile? One afternoon this fall, the Swedish journalist Robert Aschberg sat on a patio outside a drab apartment building in a suburb of Stockholm, face to face with an Internet troll, trying to answer this question. The troll turned out to be a quiet, skinny man in his 30s, wearing a hoodie and a dirty baseball cap — a sorry foil to Aschberg’s smart suit jacket, gleaming bald head, and TV-trained baritone. Aschberg’s research team had linked the man to a months-long campaign of harassment against a teenage girl born with a shrunken hand. After meeting her online, the troll tormented her obsessively, leaving insulting comments about her hand on her Instagram page, barraging her with Facebook messages, even sending her taunts through the mail.

Aschberg had come to the man’s home with a television crew to confront him, but now he denied everything. “Have you regretted what you’ve done?” Aschberg asked, handing the man a page of Facebook messages the victim had received from an account linked to him. The man shook his head. “I haven’t written anything,” he said. “I didn’t have a profile then. It was hacked.”

This was the first time Aschberg had encountered an outright denial since he had started exposing Internet trolls on his television show Trolljägarna (Troll Hunter). Usually he just shoots them his signature glare — honed over decades as a muckraking TV journalist and famous for its ability to bore right through sex creeps, stalkers, and corrupt politicians—and they spill their guts. But the glare had met its match. After 10 minutes of fruitless back and forth on the patio, Aschberg ended the interview. “Some advice from someone who’s been around for a while,” he said wearily. “Lay low on the Internet with this sort of stuff.” The man still shook his head: “But I haven’t done any of that.”

“He’s a pathological liar,” Aschberg grumbled in the car afterward. But he wasn’t particularly concerned. The goal of Troll Hunter is not to rid the Internet of every troll. “The agenda is to raise hell about all the hate on the Net,” he says. “To start a discussion.” Back at the Troll Hunter office, a whiteboard organized Aschberg’s agenda. Dossiers on other trolls were tacked up in two rows: a pair of teens who anonymously slander their high school classmates on Instagram, a politician who runs a racist website, a male law student who stole the identity of a young woman to entice another man into an online relationship. In a sign of the issue’s resonance in Sweden, a pithy neologism has been coined to encompass all these forms of online nastiness: näthat (“Net hate”). Troll Hunter, which has become a minor hit for its brash tackling of näthat, is currently filming its second season.

It is generally no longer acceptable in public life to hurl slurs at women or minorities, to rally around the idea that some humans are inherently worth less than others, or to terrorize vulnerable people. But old-school hate is having a sort of renaissance online, and in the countries thought to be furthest beyond it. The anonymity provided by the Internet fosters communities where people can feed on each other’s hate without consequence. They can easily form into mobs and terrify victims. Individual trolls can hide behind dozens of screen names to multiply their effect. And attempts to curb online hate must always contend with the long-standing ideals that imagine the Internet’s main purpose as offering unfettered space for free speech and marginalized ideas. The struggle against hate online is so urgent and difficult that the law professor Danielle Citron, in her new book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, calls the Internet “the next battleground for civil rights.” [Continue reading…]

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Yazidis cheer Kurds on Iraqi mountain for breaking ISIS siege

Reuters reports: Iraqi Kurdish fighters flashed victory signs as they swept across the northern side of Sinjar mountain on Saturday, two days after breaking through to free hundreds of Yazidis trapped there for months by Islamic State fighters.

A Reuters correspondent, who arrived on the mountain late Saturday, witnessed Kurdish and Yazidi fighters celebrating their gains after launching their offensive on Wednesday with heavy U.S. air support.

The Iraqi Kurdish flag fluttered, with its yellow sun, and celebratory gunfire rang out. Little children cheered “Barzani’s party”, in reference to the Kurdish region’s president, Massoud Barzani.

“We have been surrounded the last three months. We were living off of raw wheat and barley,” said Yazidi fighter Haso Mishko Haso. [Continue reading…]

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Spain jails four accused of recruiting women for ISIS

Vice News reports: Three women and a man, accused of recruiting young women for the Islamic State through social media and WhatsApp forums, were sent to prison by a Spanish judge on Thursday. They were allegedly part of a jihadist network that has managed to send 12 women to join the terrorist group in Syria and Iraq.

Spanish National Court Judge Santiago Pedraz “ordered unconditional detention for membership in a terrorist organisation,” according to a judicial source.

Police arrested seven suspects this week — four people in Melilla and Ceuta, Spanish territories in northern Africa, a Chilean woman in Barcelona, and two men in the Moroccan town of Castillejos. Two women arrested in Barcelona and Ceuta were apparently about to travel to the Middle East. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian opposition leader: UN ‘freeze’ must be tied to broad peace process

The Wall Street Journal reports: Syria’s opposition chief, who was in Brussels this week to meet with European Union foreign ministers, is warning Western leaders against embracing a possible United Nations “freeze” on Syrian fighting unless it’s tied to a broader peace process.

Hadi al-Bahra, president of the Syrian National Coalition, said a plan being floated by UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura could be a breakthrough. But if it’s not part of a political resolution, Mr. Bahra said, it will simply give the regime of President Bashar al-Assad time to regroup.

“I’m seeing some fatigue with a few countries who feel a need just to support any proposal submitted, whether it’s part of a political solution or not, just for the sole reason that there is nothing available except this,” Mr. Bahra said in an interview.

Mr. de Mistura has been discussing a plan to freeze the fighting around the embattled city of Aleppo, meaning both sides would stay where they are and ratchet down the violence to zero. The goal would then be to spread the freeze to other areas.

European Union foreign ministers, meeting here Monday, largely embraced the idea as a rare glimmer of hope in a conflict that has killed some 200,000 people. “There is a good chance … that he can succeed in going step-by-step to impose a freeze in Aleppo,” Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn told reporters. “That would be perhaps the beginning of a more positive evolution… In any case, we don’t have a lot of options.”

But Mr. Bahra’s concerns were echoed privately by some countries, including Britain and France. Any plan must ensure that Mr. Assad doesn’t redeploy his troops and attack elsewhere, he said, and it must guarantee serious consequences if either side violates the deal. [Continue reading…]

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Chinese general anticipates North Korea’s ‘collapse’

The New York Times reports: When a retired Chinese general with impeccable Communist Party credentials recently wrote a scathing account of North Korea as a recalcitrant ally headed for collapse and unworthy of support, he exposed a roiling debate in China about how to deal with the country’s young leader, Kim Jong-un.

For decades China has stood by North Korea, and though at times the relationship has soured, it has rarely reached such a low point, Chinese analysts say. The fact that the commentary by Lt. Gen. Wang Hongguang, a former deputy commander of an important military region, was published in a state-run newspaper this month and then posted on an official People’s Liberation Army website attested to how much the relationship had deteriorated, the analysts say.

“China has cleaned up the D.P.R.K.’s mess too many times,” General Wang wrote in The Global Times, using the initials of North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “But it doesn’t have to do that in the future.”

Of the government in North Korea, he said: “If an administration isn’t supported by the people, ‘collapse’ is just a matter of time.” Moreover, North Korea had violated the spirit of the mutual defense treaty with China, he said, by failing to consult China on its nuclear weapons program, which has created instability in Northeast Asia. [Continue reading…]

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Hollywood’s war against Google

Ars Technica reports: Tensions between Google and Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood exploded into public view this week, as Google filed court papers seeking to halt a broad subpoena Hood sent to the company.

The Hood subpoena, delivered in late October, didn’t come out of nowhere. Hood’s investigation got revved up after at least a year of intense lobbying by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). E-mails that hackers acquired from Sony Pictures executives and then dumped publicly now show the inner workings of how that lobbying advanced—and just how extensive it was. Attorneys at Sony were on a short list of top Hollywood lawyers frequently updated about the MPAA’s “Attorney General Project,” along with those at Disney, Warner Brothers, 21st Century Fox, NBC Universal, and Paramount.

The e-mails show a staggering level of access to, and influence over, elected officials. The MPAA’s single-minded obsession: altering search results and other products (such as “autocompleted” search queries) from Google, a company the movie studios began referring to as “Goliath” in around February 2014. The studios’ goal was to quickly get pirated content off the Web; unhappy about the state of Google’s voluntary compliance with their demands and frustrated in their efforts at passing new federal law such as SOPA and PIPA, the MPAA has turned instead to state law enforcement.

The most controversial elements of SOPA/PIPA would have let content owners effectively shut down websites they said were infringing their copyrights or trademarks. This already happens—think of various peer-to-peer sites that no longer exist—but it usually involves drawn-out litigation. SOPA promised a faster-moving process that would have essentially made rights holders a website’s judge, jury, and executioner.

To get the same results in a post-SOPA world, MPAA has hired some of the nation’s most well-connected lawyers. The project is spearheaded by Thomas Perrelli, a Jenner & Block partner and former Obama Administration lawyer. Perrelli has given attorneys general (AGs) across the country their talking points, suggesting realistic “asks” prior to key meetings with Google. Frustrated with a lack of results, Perrelli and top MPAA lawyers then authorized an “expanded Goliath strategy” in which they would push the AGs to move beyond mere letter writing. Instead, they would seek full-bore investigations against Google.

If the AGs felt short on resources—well, Hollywood studios could help with that. Money from Sony and other Big Six studios was available to draft the actual subpoenas, to research legal theories to prosecute Google, to spread negative press about the search giant, and to reach out to other state AGs that might join with Hood.

This is how the project unfolded over the past year. [Continue reading…]

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Feds release new details about malware targeting Sony

Ars Technica reports: The highly destructive malware believed to have hit the networks of Sony Pictures Entertainment contained a cocktail of malicious components designed to wreak havoc on infected networks, according to new technical details released by federal officials who work with private sector security professionals.

An advisory published Friday by the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team said the central malware component was a worm that propagated through the Server Message Block protocol running on Microsoft Windows networks. The worm contained brute-force cracking capabilities designed to infect password-protected storage systems. It acted as a “dropper” that then unleashed five components. The advisory, which also provided “indicators of compromise” that can help other companies detect similar attacks, didn’t mention Sony by name. Instead, it said only that the potent malware cocktail had targeted a “major entertainment company.” The FBI and White House have pinned the attack directly on North Korea, but so far have provided little proof. [Continue reading…]

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Peshawar massacre: Pakistan’s enemy within

Pervez Hoodbhoy writes: The gut-wrenching massacre in Peshawar’s Army Public School has left Pakistan aghast and sickened. All political leaders have called for unity against terrorism. But this is no watershed event that can bridge the deep divides within. In another few days this episode of 134 dead children will become one like any other.

All tragedies provoke emotional exhortations. But nothing changed after Lakki Marwat when 105 spectators of a volleyball match were killed by a suicide bomber in a pickup truck. Or, when 96 Hazaras in a snooker club died in a double suicide attack. The 127 dead in the All Saints Church bombing in Peshawar, or the 90 Ahmadis killed while in prayer, are now dry statistics. In 2012, men in military uniforms stopped four buses bound from Rawalpindi to Gilgit, demanding that all 117 persons alight and show their national identification cards. Those with typical Shia names, like Abbas and Jafri, were separated. Minutes later corpses lay on the ground.

If Pakistan had a collective conscience, just one single fact could have woken it up: the murder of nearly 60 polio workers — women and men who work to save children from a crippling disease — at the hands of the fanatics.

Hence the horrible inevitability: from time to time, Pakistan shall continue to witness more such catastrophes. No security measures can ever prevent attacks on soft targets. The only possible solution is to change mindsets. For this we must grapple with three hard facts.

First, let’s openly admit that the killers are not outsiders or infidels. Instead, they are fighting a war for the reason Boko Haram fights in Nigeria, IS in Iraq and Syria, Al Shabab in Kenya, etc. The men who slaughtered our children are fighting for a dream — to destroy Pakistan as a Muslim state and recreate it as an Islamic state. This is why they also attack airports and shoot at PIA planes. They see these as necessary steps towards their utopia. [Continue reading…]

Make of it what you will, but a statement attributed to the newly formed al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), strongly condemns the massacre.

In Peshawar army school attack, more than 130 children have died. “And to him we belong and to him we return”. On this tragic incident, our hearts are deeply saddened. There is no doubt about the oppression of pakistan army and that its crimes have exceeded all limits. Truth is that, Pakistan army has exceeded all limits in its subservience to Americans and the massacre of Muslims. Its also true that, America is totally dependent on Pakistan’s army to silence any voice for Shariah.

But these crimes of Pakistan army and its horrific oppression CANNOT justify that its revenge be taken from innocent Muslims.

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