Anonymous ID: 8d5144 Oct. 19, 2018, 6:06 a.m. No.3530519   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>0527 >>0560

What Jamal Khashoggi and Edward Snowden Have in Common

 

So it is safe to say that Saudi Arabia is feeling the heat from Washington, and that has taken Riyadh by surprise. What’s interesting is the degree to which the media firestorm also has taken the kingdom’s critics by surprise. There is little love for the Saudi government on either the left or the right in the United States. The outcry over Khashoggi’s disappearance, however, seems to have rankled longtime critics of the U.S.-Saudi alliance:

 

We should all be angry about what appears to be a blatant act of murder by Saudi Arabia, but notice that the senseless killing of one well-connected dissident journalist has triggered way more elite outrage than the prolonged and brutal bombing of thousands of anonymous Yemenis.

— Stephen Walt (@stephenWalt)

 

Congressional attitudes toward Saudi Arabia have soured slowly over the past year, but Khashoggi’s disappearance has accelerated matters.

 

Why has Khashoggi’s suspected death rattled the relationship so much more than previous policy miscues? Let me suggest that the same dynamic that affected U.S. soft power in the wake of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations is now affecting the Saudis' ability to influence U.S. elite public opinion.

 

Immediately after the Snowden revelations, Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore argued in Foreign Affairs that what made Snowden so damaging was twofold. First, as they wrote, Snowden’s disclosures “undermine Washington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it. Their danger lies not in the new information that they reveal but in the documented confirmation they provide of what the United States is actually doing and why.” Second, the damage put U.S. allies in an impossible situation. What made Snowden so damaging was that long-standing allies such as Brazil and Germany curtailed cooperation because the evidence of U.S. surveillance could no longer be denied.

 

The foreign policy community in the United States could forgive a lot from the Saudis, because the other alternatives for allies in the Persian Gulf region seemed worse.

This meant that U.S. elites were willing to look the other way even as the Saudis screwed up.

 

The Saudis have a lot of chits invested inside the Beltway. Saudi leverage over other U.S. actors might increase. Akbar Shahid Ahmed noted in the HuffPost, “By directing billions of dollars of Saudi money into the U.S. for decades, Riyadh’s ruling family has won the support of small but powerful circles of influential Americans and courted wider public acceptance through corporate ties and philanthropy.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/outlook/2018/10/15/what-jamal-khashoggi-edward-snowden-have-common/

 

It appears these WaPo journalists like to write stories for a special audience, and then interweave confusing and sometimes unconnected information in the midst of the intended discussion. But, with some maths, we can add and subtract their cryptophonetic Pimsleurian. ;)

Anonymous ID: 8d5144 Oct. 19, 2018, 7:10 a.m. No.3530882   🗄️.is 🔗kun

Is CroudStrike trying to strain U.S.-China relations via 'nation state' like cyber attack?

 

Cyber Espionage Campaign Reuses Code from China's APT1

 

Oct 18, 2018 5:00 PM — Jai Vijayan Freelance writer

 

US, Canadian organizations in crosshairs of group with apparent links to a Chinese military hacking unit that wreaked havoc several years ago.

 

Several US organizations appear to be victims of a widespread data reconnaissance campaign involving malware last associated with Comment Crew aka APT1, a Chinese military-linked group that is believed responsible for stealing data from dozens of American companies between 2006 and 2010.

 

The attack group behind the latest campaign has carried out at least five separate waves of attacks against organizations in various sectors, the latest in June.

 

McAfee has christened the new campaign Oceansalt based on similarities between its malware and the so-called 'Seasalt' malware associated with the Comment Crew/APT1. McAfee's analysis shows that at least 21% of the code is unique to Seasalt and serves a reconnaissance and control function.

 

The security vendor says it has been unable to determine how Oceansalt might have obtained access to Seasalt's source code. There's no evidence to suggest that the code was leaked or is available through Dark Web channels. That suggests that the Oceansalt and Comment Crew actors have some sort of a code-sharing arrangement, or that the former has privately gained access to source code from someone belonging to the original Comment Crew.

 

A third possibility, McAfee says, is that another actor is conducting a false flag operation to make it appear like the Comment Crew has resurfaced after dropping out of sight about five years ago following a 2013 Mandiant (now FireEye) expose on the group. In its exhaustive report released along with some 3,000 IoCs, Mandiant had linked Comment Crew, or APT1, directly to a covert cyber operation of China's People's Liberation Army called Unit 61398. At the time, the security vendor estimated that APT1 had systematically stolen hundreds of terabytes of data from 141 organizations across 20 industries.

 

Many of the groups and campaigns are China-based, according to some security vendors. Just earlier this month for instance, CrowdStrike released a report summarizing its analysis of threat hunting data between January and June this year. The data showed that of the 70 or so intrusions where CrowdStrike was able to actually identify the threat actor, about 40 were likely China-based.

 

https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/cyber-espionage-campaign-reuses-code-from-chinas-apt1/d/d-id/1333073?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple