Politics
Let’s try these Nightmare Vision Goggles...
...and they’re glorious!


Anon, Feb 4th 2018
Last week I got a call from some spook cunt who wanted me to join his firm and provide malware analysis services to the FBI, NSA and the biggest regional security centres on the planet. I fucked the interview by smoking council estate skunk beforehand and talking ethics and they moved on with no interest. I mention this purely to establish some sort of Cyber Security credentials, which are central to the Nunes memo, of course, and which may help us to assess where all this is going...

But first let’s ditch the technical stuff and focus on the current shade and colour of ‘deep state’ objections to the House Intelligence Committee.  It seems to me (within the impressively tight confines of their treachery) that the opponents to the memo’s release are broadly complaining that it is ‘unprecedented’ for state security to be dragged into such partisan conflict, which is odd because that’s precisely what Trump is saying, or more importantly, what Nunes is saying is the very reason they had to break cover and engage the public.
OK. Yes, Democrats, it is unprecedented that the President of the USA has been isolated so much that he has to expose an illegal and clearly partisan collusion between the FBI, the DoJ and the DNC as a matter of not only ethics but survival. You may have a point there. Is it unprecedented however that the public have been brought into the debate? Yes, if you’re a Democrat, because it actually is literal democracy; the creed they left so far behind round about when the Fresh Prince started airing.
When the opponents of an  ‘unprecedented’ move are in full voice, is it because they have legitimate gripe with the management of the table and it’s deviation from norms, or is it because they are artlessly exposing that they were the ones who have been fucking up as Dungeon Master, unopposed, for the prior two decades when all the talent that used to be in .gov hightailed it to IT and Finance?
Where it is clear Trump had cause to authorise the memo, it seems apparent this was not spontaneous, and that a neat assessment of its impact is beyond the pale; it’s a hand grenade, the pin finally pulled after a year of - yes - exactly the kind of deep state cronyism and hubris that Trump has been talking about since the trail, and which the Democrats and their minions in the media have nevertheless pushed beyond breaking point with their ‘Russia’ narrative.
To anyone outside /pol this stuff is still working, though barely, the mainstream media still have the character of a dangerous and spurned feminist, and their ongoing abuse of reason will certainly find it’s mark among some of the State sanctioned liberal Twitterati at the heart of literally every news story on Earth as of 2006.
People, normies specifically, just want to know they are still not a paedofile, love muslims, and aren’t being a racist when the spotlight of social media hits them. And this is literally all they fucking care about in the postmodern climate of fear they have worked so hard on for decades when their profile picture actually is an actual ‘person’ and not a jpg of Wojack with an M16 (for example.)
But the mechanics of Nune’s memo are trivially easy to understand, and they do not lend themselves at all to the Democratic pleas for caution, especially given that their A game is to release an even longer memo. See the disconnect?
Truly best timeline then, presupposing this ongoing drilling at the rotten core of neo-liberalism will continue successfully. At present the next move is for the ‘Dem’s’ to release their ten pages to (our) four. For an actual flawless victory these ten pages will have to show that Trump is compromised by Russia. This is not going to happen, by any sane measure, because infosec…
One of the thorniest problems in info security is attribution; finding out who did what after a hack. Long story short; unless you have the guy who did it in an interview room, and his hard disks being analysed in another, it is virtually impossible to say with certainty who did what on the Internet. This is not an opinion but a hard fact, and it has surely had some hand in the clusterfuck that is the Democrats response to their own hack in 2016. This long, meritless, and corrupt probe into Russia has more to do with the Democrats themselves than it does with Trump. And that would be true still even if it turns out Trump enjoys Stolichnaya and Putin bux as well as high cheekboned slavs. Even if Trump is 100% guilty of collusion at the worst level it still is less material to what has happened than the broader response of the US gov to cyber, which has in the past week been determined strategically to be on par with nuclear bombs by the Pentagon in their review of the US nuclear capability.
When the DNC was hacked, I attended a talk by Secureworks who had been monitoring Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear for a number of years. The spearphish in at least one attack used a domain (myaccount.google.com-securitysettingpage.tk) which has been used repeatedly for the better part of a decade, solely against Russia’s enemies.
Would the GRC like access to loads of juicy urls which are great for seducing clicks? Yes, but they are not ten a penny so when they get one that works they have to decide whether to keep using it, and so make the attribution significantly easier by one or all of your victims, or accept that it is of finite use and drop it at some point. The Russians chose column A.  NB for anyone interested in this most of this information is available. To get the best perspective on it I would suggest the above domain, the bit.ly links they use, the domain registrations, and timing (one of the attacks stopped on the Defender of the Fatherland day.)
Again, attribution is nearly impossible, but the sloppiness and brazen character of modern Russia is seemingly well on display in this hack, which is another reason why notions of their wizard like ability to erode democracy are so laughable and precisely the last thing the Democrats and their cabal should have taken up as their counter narrative. But that’s what happened and here we are. Because, as we are all well aware now, they are universally loathsome and dominated by the same fear and jealousy they pretend to see anytime someone dares to ask why a Somali is standing where Bob used to be.
In their defence it is a clear move. Their logic, that if they got fucked over they can’t be alone, is actually pretty sound in infosec terms nowadays. This is borne out, ironically, by the FISA applications against Trump himself reported by Louise Mensch last year. If there is a second memo (current inside estimates are that the Nunes memo represents between 10 and 15 % of the material planned for release) and a third, etc, it seems likely that these will focus on that FISA application against Trump himself  (which was within the half percent of FISA requests that are actually denied). Leaving aside Mensch’s credentials as a wildly inaccurate blogger this is where the rabbit hole truly begins. Mensch, bless her, is not a technologist, so she has to trust the opinion of Tea Pain, a middling CIRT habitue and Democrat. TeaPain’s assertions on his blog cleave to only one possibility - that Trump tower has a server which has been set up as a covert coordination channel between Trump and Putin and which is also being used to seed fake news and transmit US voter Data (allegedly hacked by Russia.) Wow, that’s a doozy. Could even be true. But as he himself should know given his role, it is also wildly fucking unlikely.
Here’s the thing. That spook cunt? My main responsibility would have been reverse engineering malware. A distant second would have been monitoring / infiltrating carding forums and hacker marketplaces on the dark web. That’s important to all of this because it is an accurate reflection of the probability and impact from two types of threat vector; code and people.
Statistically, if you get ‘hacked’ it’s almost certain to be code, NOT an Advanced Persistent Threat (human actor with actual hands on levers). Your email is on a list with several million other spearphish targets, your machine is exposed to a worm, or you’re using an online service which is either compromised itself or which is used in furtherance of other attacks based on secondary data (your IP address, using the same password across services and systems, etc). So statistically, the Trump Tower server, which is precisely the sort of ageing infrastructure that doesn’t get Asset Managed, was probably hacked remotely, NOT set up by (not one but two!) human actors in concert who - within the scheme of cybersecurity - are as unlikely as a Quasar in fucking Sainsbury’s when compared to a worm thrashing around through gazillions of clock cycles looking for some way to monetise viagra spam, which is broadly what the metadata and DNS records between the systems suggest.
There is a reasonable fear at this point that Trump tower was hacked by the GRB, true. If I was Russia I would have done it. I’m a Trumptard and I accept that. Shit I even accept that the initial FISA against Page was a judicious and sensible move when Trump was headed to the White House like a rocket, with all of his attached strings largely unknown. But what is unforgivably stupid is for the FBI of all people to still be wrapped up in this concern in the form of the Mueller investigation. It is doubly stupid because it’s overkill. The FISA granted to spy on Page has sufficient scope for wholesale acquisition of anything Trump has done anyway.
To sum up, and to look at the Trump Tower / Nova Bank story purely as an infosec concern, the high likelihood is that the DoJ/FBI/DNC cabal will illustrate that Trump was hacked by Russia too. It’s a measure of how rudderless they now are that they perceive that particular train as a light at the end of the tunnel.