KGB did not use or believe in polygraphs. Always found that an interesting comparison to American intelligence.
270 karma · joined September 6, 2019
The part the US Navy plays in developing it is only a small slice of it all at the beginning.
Later on Tor becomes sort of hijacked by a brilliant but troubled Steve Jobs like figure (or something like that).
Its steward for several years becomes the organization that produces Radio Free Asia.
And so on.
The show "How It's Made" is helpful. Also if you live close to any brand names that have a factory, they will usually do a tour.
This was the engineer who helped set up the new policy: https://awe.com
To be honest, maybe it's a good idea. It depends on how much support Huawei is willing to give OpenSSL.
I worked with two good reporters to look into this. There is no documentation one can find at https://grow.google/partners/ or at https://google.org. Those websites lead to perhaps 200 significant links, and we scoured every PDF on the sites. Also we checked LinkedIn for those who had the IT Support certs. Nothing.
Their last program was basically just "office hours" on how to use Google Analytics in libraries across beset former rust belt cities.
They did have a consistent office hours for their one pilot program in New York that people could also call into, but it was mostly college kids who were brilliant, talented, and going to get a job anyway the couple of times I shadowed.
The saddest part was probably their previous partnering with Goodwill. 0 people were hired from this partnership. This was back in 2017 when it was hard to know, but that organization is under significant litigation now for practices such as paying sub minimum wage (sub $1) to mentally disabled employees, paying board members well in excess of 6 figures, etc.
I say this as someone who considers GCP their favorite cloud and consistently recommends it to customers where security is a priority.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/technology/google-job-tra...
1. The FBI does appear to have been a subscriber to Mr. Troia's services. Two FBI emails to agents appear among the list of subscribers that is not very big. Also Europol, Amazon, and the Dubai Police also appear...
2. The MGM Grand appears to have grossly understated the amount of users who were hacked in the 2019 breach. This hacker is claiming well over 100 million, instead of the 10 million or so MGM claims.
3. The most relevant paragraph I think is the below:
> DataViper contained several undisclosed breaches . MGM Grand Hotels is included in the dataset with 142 million entries and was imported by Vinny on November 30th 2019 . This number is very different to the 10.7 million number that they stated were affected [1] . This indicates that MGM knowingly misreported information regarding this data breach and that Vinny is aware of this misrepresentation . FiveStars is another data breach that is in DataViper but not publicly disclosed . It was imported in November 2019 . It is unclear where it was reported to them and they failed to notify their users or if Vinny did not notify FiveStars . The same is true of Zumiez.com (160 million), Avito.ru (30 million), Mamba.ru (13 million), MyVestige.com (11 million), LocateFamily.com (11 million), and others .
4. I forked the entire list of domains hacked, provided by the original reporter I believe at ZDNet, to here: https://gist.github.com/danvau7/337b0ac71db8c7298e712ed5ba3a...
5. Vinny Troia claims a PhD, but it comes from the not very well respected / for-profit "Capella University" in the United States.
No comment on this, although I posted to show what the farthest extent postulated is for the question you asked. But Corecivic.com is not a good company certainly and likes to pretend it is the Bureau of Prisons (which has real authority from a legal sovereign state), and lol has previous hosted on Huawei Cloud of all places.
That some random hosting company Netsential, not even a Microsoft Partner was chosen, makes both me and apparently the NSA suspicious.
More than likely DataFoundry is a front company. DataFoundry, which definitely is a real company, was ultimately hosting the Nestential sites. Their founders are former Peace Corps [1] recruits from the 1970's. They look like nice people but definitely not engineering experts. Also everyone at the company has been in place for nearly its entire existence. That is a tell-tale sign of fraud, a tech company should have massive movement within its executive ranks during these last two decade boom years. Also no one I know has done business with them, and even their customer list seems pretty thin when you realized almost all of them have the same one or two Private Equity owners...
[1] - https://www.datafoundry.com/blog/meet-founders-ron-carolyn-y...
I think US agencies have sort of realized this mistake now, and actually for the last couple of years. The former NSA directors have said some revealing comments that reflect pretty authentic looking doubt, shame, and guilt over the various pathways programs took (with the exception of perhaps Admiral John Poindexter).
Perhaps agencies like the DHS, which when it was created was the largest reorganization of government since the Department of Defense was created in 1947, have not yet learned...
Netsential.com [1] was a Houston-based software dev, hosting, and cloud provider. I lived most of my life in Houston, and they are loosely connected to an old ISP called Texas.net and a more recent data center company called Data Foundry.
Something like 630+ websites were hosted by Netsential. All of them DHS fusion centers, multi state intel sharing groups, police training outfits, etc. The source code leaked as well for all of these websites. Extremely poorly done ASP.net rigged together "web apps" with CSV files being used for the backend data tier.
Here is the most fascinating thing. 7 years ago, as part of the Edward Snowden document dump, a single page screenshot of an list of the Top 16 addresses the NSA was targeting in North America appeared.
#16 on that list [2], codenamed WAXTITAN, was the IP address 64.9.146.208, which belonged and belongs to Netsential/YHC Corporation [3].
The question now I think is who in the world are these other 15 IP addresses, all of which are scattered around typically rural North America?
[1] - netsential.com
[2] - https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/...
[3] - https://blog.12security.com/darkness-at-noon-01-waxtitan/
Also, because we're now in the 2020s, they are the worlds largest purchaser of drones, even beyond the military.
A lot of fascinating, cutting edge stuff is going on at BLM and DoI.
Counterintelligence goes through cycles. Sometimes it produces the best, sometimes it's a point where the worst are parked in.
For background, Vladimir Putin is a little unusual in that he studied at an academy that was famous for counterintelligence. At the time CI was not as high status in the KGB so his emergence later was unexpected.
That being said, if you didn't see my earlier reply to your earlier comment, no worries as I definitely made that oversight previously myself.
Look I think in technology today, we should take suspicion as a positive trait (which it most certainly isn't always). Asking questions of who controls what, who is in charge, what is that person like/what can we assume their motivations are, is to be applauded. That being said, I know this must stress you out only more on top of all the work you do. That is extremely fair and tbh I would be resentful.
I could be wrong about all this. But even if I am, I ask that you imagine the positive consequences. Perhaps others elsewhere will question suspicious things they have seen. Hopefully they will be respectful and seek a path of investigation that while willing to "blame and shame", which does sometimes happen, use those powers sparingly, and only with some level of consensus.
EDIT: Also just upvoted you as show of good faith :)
Off the cuff, it does seem strange that a new hosting provider hasn't been looked for a while (things happen you always have to recheck), and I'm not clear what happened to his startup skysheet.com (important because you want to know how everyone is getting their money).
Other answers were solid though. Thank you Daniel and I will post a follow up with reasonable questions if needed and drop it after that.
Please email me I can put you in contact tonight with the people you need to be speaking to.
dan.ehrlich@12security.com
Considering Credit Karma and Wilson Sonini are now almost suing me, I like to think I get results from what I've published.
Oh and so is Perkins Coie, but again, they won't file the civil suit for Wyze even though a good amount of emails I have sent asking them.
Fun fact, the new video drone platform from DJI is called...Ryze.
FYI, I have begged CK to please sue me, and have weighed filing a lawsuit myself, simply to enter legal discovery. It never happens though. I wonder what they are avoiding?
I have told them over and over any lawsuit would be for $1 and I want no money.
Maybe it is this?
https://blog.12security.com/two-minutes-to-midnight/
Tbh probably not they do a lot of bad stuff. Most likely they just infer I know about whatever the "really bad thing" is.
It's a front company. They have something like 30 names, only 7 employees who can be inferred every really worked at the company + are real humans.
Also, try finding the verified account on Twitter for Hacker News. You can't :)
The idea that this platform, full of comments and small stories from some of the best sysadmins in the world, it not a high value target...is somewhat naive.
It appears to be the little heard of and quite hard to track down "M5 Security Solutions" also known as "M5 Hosting". What is strange is they do say they do private hosting for the Department of Defense. Can we get an expansion on that relationship? Thank you.
Then again, my house won't blow up. This seems like a major win.
However recently my neighbor was able to get emergency generators with 48 hour run times supplied by inline natural gas. To do this with Tesla Home Batteries would require perhaps 6 of them.
So still undecided on where I stand.
Not sure what the motive would be though.
First is the various attempts by China to build underground "neutrino detectors" in various parts of the country. Before all of the Chinese Academy of Science websites were taken down, you could see pictures of it. They were tunneling quite deep. 100 miles at around average depth of 4,000 feet.
Of course no one does nuclear like the Americans. The Department of Energy's secretive DUNE project...Deep Underground Nuetrino [E] is well under way across Illinois and will eventually extend the accelerator at Fermilab to over 800 miles underground.
This technology is, to use an overused term, the Manhattan Project of the 21st century.
Also interesting of note, why does UTexas's name servers point to University of Illinois's name servers?
Could be nothing. After all UI was where Firefox was developed originally by Marc Andreesen and others around 1994. This is also where the Apache web server was created.