Tactics of Psy-Group, Black Cube Revealed in Canadian Court Battle | Hacker News Reader

Tactics of Psy-Group, Black Cube Revealed in Canadian Court Battle

calcalistech.com

214 pointsasafshalev48 comments

The fact that these 'sting operations' by private agencies were intended for planting in newspapers is an interesting issue. Reminds me of an article about how a BBC report about language tests for immigrants caused the UK government to inaccurately crack down on people who were taking tests legitimately https://twitter.com/natematias/status/992739616443772928

Basically, the media is really eager to 'expose' things, but what happened before (if the information was collected by a partisan entity) and after (if the exposé led to overreaction) is something to consider...

OT: Paul Grahm founder of YC was placed on some kind of a blacklist by SV Israeli supporters after the twitter spat he had during Gaza bombing a few years ago. I believe the spat was between PG and Mark Suster, if I remember correctly.

This was the only link I could find about this:https://pando.com/2014/08/05/graham-and-suster-square-off-ov...

I can do nothing but commend pg for his commitment to stop what I personally think is close to shooting fish in a barrel. Except it's people and the barrel is mostly dry.

I think PG is entirely wrong and Mark Suster was entirely right on that subject.

Proof?

dang, this violates HN guidelines.

e-mail the mods when you want to contact them, leaving random comments is not an effective way of doing so.

Are you a mod? You responded within about 5 seconds with a downvote.

No, I just happened to have just opened the new comments page.

Where is the list of mod e-mails?

hn@ycombinator.com, found in the guidelines and behind the "Contact"/"Support" links in the footer.

This is a commercialization of mafia tactics.

Mafia is mostly a commercial enterprise.

Which is an apt description for modern capitalism.

Honest inquiry. Has anyone else here had their behavioral patterns hacked by a psy group?

There’s not a support network.

How would you know if that was happening?

"Psy-Group" and "Black Cube," huh?

You know, for two covert intelligence gathering firms they sure could have chosen names that are a little less conspicuous.

If these were true, how would a company protect against such attacks? Esp. family members or vulnerable employees

There is training, but basically all of if surrounds not being an idiot with strangers. Aside from people accepting bribes, most of these stings involve the target trying to impress someone. They brag. They think this new person might help them land a job in the future. Or: That pretty girl you met online ... she isn't in to you.

The military deals with this issue through other means, mainly by trying to prevent employees becoming vulnerable in the first place. Living in secure housing with stable costs of living. Retirement planning / pensions. Not allowing people to fall into stupid dept (payday loans etc). And making sure employees feel valued enough that they want to stay with the company. An employee who feels secure in their position, who sees a clear road to advancement within the organization, doesn't feel the need to brag to strangers. Corporations would do well to consider these tactics.

This can be properly understood as a spearphishing attack. You would handle it in the exact same way: security awareness training to minimize data leakage, even if, in this case, the data in question isn't financial (for example) but personally and professionally damaging.

So who else here is part of these groups? It stands to reseaon that thier best client is themselves.

Which newspapers Black Cube contacted tells us so much about what goes on behind the scene.

Someone boasting about being a "Commander" is not the same as having been one. I had hoped that this piece would have done a bit more research.

Basically, there are two groups, Black Cube and Psy-Group who are completely different. The former is investigated for trying to run sting operations that make no sense. The latter is asserted to be a part of Trump's social manipulation group that got him elected. Something that could have been a part of Cambridge Analytica.

So this article offers almost nothing of substance about the latter group.

Where is the HN relevance? Did Psy-Group or Black Cube employ tech to conduct its influence operations? Were systems compromised? Was there a troll center posting in forums? Influence ops via technical means are a real problem for journalism and online communities and something relevant to HN. I'm not seeing how this article aligns with HN.

> Did Psy-Group or Black Cube employ tech to conduct its influence operations? Were systems compromised?

It's not mentioned in the article, but Black Cube did try and succeed to break the gmail address of Laura-Codruta Kovesi a couple of years ago (she's head of the Romanian anti-corruption agency, a sort of what Antonio Di Pietro and Mani Pulite was for Italy back in the '90s). Allegedly the Black Cube contractors/employees used a social engineering scheme in order to gain access to Kovesi's email. The two Black Cube contractors were subsequently arrested and they've just been given a suspended sentence, so that they can happily go back to Israel and pick other clients.

The article doesn't cover that. Do you have any references?

A quick google search gave me this article in English: https://www1.agerpres.ro/english/2016/09/14/former-sri-offic... (from the national Romanian press agency) and there's also a dedicated section on Kovesi's wikipedia page in Romanian on which you can use Google Translat: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Codru%C8%9Ba_K%C3%B6vesi....

The email thing is mentioned mostly in Romanian-only articles from 2 years ago, can't find the exact ones I remember reading back then. I found this new article in English, though (http://business-review.eu/news/romanias-dna-head-on-black-cu...), in which Kovesi denied that anyone successfully managed to hack into her emails. But the facts are that 2 Black Cube employees have just been found guilty by Romanian justice in this very case (and then they let them return home, to Israel).

HN is about more than implementation details - some of the most fruitful, engaged, passionate and interesting discussions on here have been about the use of technology to implement real world change, and the impact of technology on human culture and ways of living.

This certainly falls into that category, as in this instance the internet, specifically social media and news outlets, was used by one nation to influence the economy of another.

Frankly, psy-ops, and how to make the internet become less fertile ground for them, is a topic we should be discussing more, not less.

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