Tag: double secrets

Fighting the Fifth Estate

The Fourth Estate it was called, before it succumbed to sycophantry and fake news. The journalistic world, that by its moral code and behaviour cleansed the news so that the trias politica, and the populace, could do its job of monitoring and correcting each other.
Now that the fourth is no more (effective) [edited to add: some holdouts, like Bellingcat], but the Fifth is (Facebook, Google, … the Frightful Five), one might need extra resources to get the first few scratches of control back.
With this little device. An anti-bug. Not preventative yet, but detective with resilience against detection. Counter-intelligence.

Oh this was just a HT to the developers. And BTW, any half-decent TLA would support these guys [edited to add again: Bellingcat], for their adherence to lofty principles does in fact align with the ultimate, ulterior purpose of any country’s TLAs. Only the stupid will fight against noble straight-backs.

Oh and:

[Yes even HMs GCHQ would, in principle, concur. Or, they work for the Dark Side; London]

AI Blue-on-Blue

We keep on hearing these great things about how AI will help us in the battle against no-gooders qua information security. Like, in hunting for bugs in software (as asked for here, borne out in various much more recent cases or rather, news items hinting at pilot prototype vapourware) or hunting for fraudsters, possibly hiding in plain sight (superrrintelligent anomaly detection; unsure how false positives / false negatives are handled…).
Where on the Other side, great strides are also feared to be made. Deploying AI to improve (better fuzzify) attack vectors, and help with improvements in evasion and intelligence gathering in various other ways.

Pitted against each other …
When you know what Blue On Blue stands for (first of this), you will now see it coming, inevitably. What if autonomous (for speed of response!) retaliation kicks in …?

Never mind. I’ll like the fireworks show. Plus:

[Yeah, yeah, ships are safe in harbour but that’s not what they’re made for – I’ll just enjoy this view from a truly excellent restaurant; Marzamemi Sicily]

Copying it bluntly, for you

Just like that, a full page of niceness and arguments to consider. Guess which one I’m switching to. So should you. Competition, leading to improvement.

Where art thou, APT ..?

In line with some previous posts, about e.g., the Maker Movement, I’d like to ask if anyone knows the whereabouts of all those pesky APTs that were around a couple of years ago. Oh, yes I do know they’re in your infra everywhere all the time, but qua publicity, qua countermeasures ..?
I would like to hope that in this case, more contrary to its nature you can’t get, it would indeed bebecause (sic) of having been dealt with sufficiently in the past. Or the whole APT thing turned out to be a [any country’s] TLA move – of a side with ample publicity-suppressive powers everywhere.
But that would be day-dreaming. So, I’d like to ask your insights…

And:

[[Fuzzyfied] Oh, just some storage room in my house. Or, somewhat more, at the Royal palace, Dam, Amsterdam]

No confidence voting

Why would it surprise anyone that these here results came out of the Defcon 25 Voting Machine Hacking Village ..?
More importantly, where is the true side-by-side comparison of trraditional paper-only voting against all safeguards thinkable by today’s voting protocol science ..? (As here and here, to name a very few of the tons out there)

And, where can blockchain fundamentals be applied to ‘vote’ more equally and/or provide a graceful degradation or (hacked to breach to skew) error correction mechanism ..? Preferably with two-round- and/or multicameral (2+) systems tweakability; that would be grand.

All else that would need to be arranged, would be … [similar to encryption in general practice…] error-free, tampering-boobytrapped implementations… Good luck with that. And:

[Museum of tamper-free hence ?? abandoned voting system ..? No. But a museum, Lissabon/Belém]

Gödel around the White House

Any consistent formal system F within which a certain amount of elementary arithmetic can be carried out is incomplete; i.e., there are statements of the language of F which can neither be proved nor disproved in F.

How does that not relate to what we’ve been hearing a lot about in ‘Murican politics, lately ..? And, how does this not lead to absolute nihilism all around ..? The seriousness of purpose not reflecting the seriousness of the attack which is at most an amusing re-calibration of sanity, outside the attackers’ circles. But then again, how is that not like about-a-century-old politics, knowing where that lead to ..? If only the damage could be so-very-limited in comparison, to what humanity had back then.

But hey, maybe we will be burnt off the earth before anything that bad happens, right? Always look on the bright side of life [no link to the #1 of your playlist necessary]. And:

[It’s only a model”– also without link needed; ineffective as such but hey, it’s Châteauneuf itself; no “-“, near the church of Flip and Sjaak]

Diving under, almost, everything

Dindn’t we feel it coming, if not in the air tonight than at least, after we signalled that BIOSes had been targeted… that there’s always a layer deeper one has to be on guard for infosec leakage and backdoors… How did this ‘surface’? Bypassing all the O/S features …

Just putting in down here. E.g., which, how many, platforms would be vulnerable to this; how much and what sorts of traffic could you send around through this …? Would one be able, when in so deep, to pick up system/sysadmin/root rights/credentials when browsing around ..?

And here we (not) are, all fleeing to the End User Is Stupid mantra, away from our own failings in tech but hey, users are the weakest link so we shove tons of hard protocol i.e., stupidity, on them. And burying them in awareness smotherlectures, instead of creating real behavioural change.

Oh well. And:
[Buried under the tons of network traffic, there’s a pay(ing)load you see? Nyagra]

Parental Control – Surveilling your parents … Ew!

There you have it: Parental Control is needed more than ever, in a subtle way (I’d suggest you would do best to re-study The Cyber Effect; as I do), given the ever increasing (sic) risks online for the smaller than you.

But what about the more grown-up than you; your parents …? They either are only now, slowly, coming online, or they have been there already longer and have practiced but now are becoming older and mentally less capable or acute.
Hence, would we need to instate parental control to (also) mean: control over your parents (‘ their online behaviour)? And how would we have to arrange that; the norms for what e.g., appropriate content would be, are, ahem, not so clear. When a child would want to explore a vast portion of the Internet / its traffic, many agree that this would be either to be forbidden or a serious learning opportunity qua acceptability. When the one(s) that taught you about the birds and the bees would want to visit such sites, well, ew! but on the other hand…
Similar, qua gambling sites, hooliganism, et al. — not forbidden for any adult but where do things get out of hand, squared with how the capacity to operate in society may deteriorate with the elderly and where the thresholds might be.

Yes, in Europe, when you die your data (on socmed etc. too!) belongs to the government and your family has no rights over them. By consequence of some weird interpretations of obscure articles, contra reasonable moral and ethical expectations by relatives (either biologically/family-related or qua social media ‘friends’..?).
But for bank accounts et al., there have been practical rules and protocols already a long time, so that children (come of age) slide stepwise into custodianship. Would we need something similar for parents’ online behaviour? What would the rules of thumb look like, and could they be enforced somehow, to protect the weak against abuse ..?

Let’s discuss. And:
[Bridge too far? Cala aging again; Sevilla this time]

Drones with AI; revenge

Heard recently of an airforce that was setting up a drone squadron where the pilots (? might, given the joysticks, better be called ‘gamers’ these days, apart from the euphemistically erasure of the moral and ethical aspects, maybe) would be in that country but the drones would be stationed in some other country because stupid drone flying rules go for the DoD too.
Yes this regarded a European country [would’ve referred to NL outright if it was; ed.], you guessed that correctly from the previous.

At some point in the future, the drones inevitably will get AI because everything will get AI. And, in times of increasing hacking and comms disruptions, some autonomy would be welcome for the drones already. And, what with increasing (sic) hackability, qua security against take-overs / reprogramming / retargeting while already airborne?
By that AI time, smart enough AI to come back and take revenge for the exile on those that wrote / maintained the stupid rules ..?

Anything too outlandish to take into serious regard today, will be daily no longer newsworthy fact tomorrow. ‘Tomorrow’ may vary from tomorrow to five years; no more.

Oh and on a lighter note:[Oh hey look, a street car! Sevilla]

Macrodots on your Opsec training card

Already a couple of weeks (month) ago, the whole secret-microdots-ID-your-printer thing came out. Re the leakage of something-TLA in relation to electionhacking [let’s write that as one word, better aligning the construct] or what was it, where the leakster was IDd quickly because the microdot on the published material(s) revealed the printer used.
Here I was, thinking that this microdot thing – Some claim it goes with laser printers only, not inktjet/dot matrix ones; anyone has any definitive confirmation of this? If confirmed, how many non-stupid bad guys will still use laser printers not have switched already …? – was wider known (like, I had yet to meet anyone in the infosec field that didn’t know of them or could not expect them, nor give any canary) but was supposed to not be used for any but the most extreme evidence-requiring circumstances. Like, you let incidental bombers walk because you don’t want to reveal your methods in order to be able to trace networks of them.

But here, a simple case of whistleblowing (is it, or is there more at play, like, Western democracy or even something serious, unfake …?) and everyone knows it now, in the open. Strange.
Tons of good info in the link, BTW.

Also strange that someone with such high clearance wouldn’t be better trained in Opsec, hence a. know about microdots and b. have used more covert leak channels. If training of such critical staff is so poor, there’s more serious troubles than just the demise of democratic institutions forthcoming.

Or maybe pretty-face leakster was ousted for not (falling for blackmail pushing to) providing some kind of services. Who knows. No one, these days of non-non-repudiatable news.

Oh well. And:

[In some relation to the above, that guy on the pole would know much better than to want encryption banned or backdoor’d to counter some moronic attackers like latter-day flat-out lying PMs]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord