I'm digging through more wikileaks through the lens of Q.
Before Q the 'Year 0' release didn't make much sense. There were key pieces missing from a drop that was supposed to annihilate the current cyber landscape. I believe these pieces were responsibly censored after POTUS won the election (Spectre, Meltdown, other notable 'exploits'). Another piece of information that has been excluded from the drops are the IP addresses of ALL the command and control servers for the entire HIVE botnet, but wikileaks has left us some hints.
HIVE - CIA surveillance botnet
Initial Release(v1.0) - 10/26/2010
To really understand why HIVE is a big deal you have to understand the problems with running a covert botnet. I'm not going to pretend to be more than an internet expert but this is what I've got.
Problem 1) Command and Control(c2)
The c2 layer has two objectives. The first objective is to protect the operator from having his own tools used against him (which can be done many ways). The second objective is to give the operator control of his botnet for whatever purpose.
Problem 2) Having the right malware for the job.
Malware in this case is ambiguous, the CIA has departments dedicated to creating specialized to order payloads for likely any system. The Malware typically has to remain hidden from the victim, and there is typically high degrees of redundancy with sophisticated malware.
Problem 3) Physics
Computers and networks are bound by the laws of physics. Things like how long it takes to respond to a request, request size, tags that tell your malware what to listen for can all be used to profile an attacker.
Problem 4) How you solve Problems 1,2, and 3 can be used to profile an attacker.
The CIA understood this when they talked about the Equation Group's pitfalls. The Equation Group used extremely sophisticated attack and persistence vectors so once found it was pretty easy to attribute a certain group to a certain series of malware. The CIA understood this and decided that it was a bullet they were going to have to bite because if your 0day works and you're paying companies/groups to not patch it, you'll deal with the legal and political reprocussions with bribes, sex, or if you're really a pain in the ass they'll just kill you. They also decided that they could use this 'fingerprinting' (attributing an attack to a group based on identifiers in c2 or malware or other clever bits) to pull off 'Cyber False Flags' and frame anyone in the world for their attacks.
>But Problem 3 says Physics can still rat them out
True, and it's a very tough problem to solve, and one that cannot be solved (with current technology) perfectly if you have the time, money, tools and jurisdiction to look into it. But very few people have had all of those things in the past making what is somewhat easy to see now virtually impossible to prove prior to a Trump Presidency. Never the less let me introduce you to my current working hypothesis for the meaning of Vault 7 and what Assange is trying to tell us and what is likely going down in some Grand Jury shit somewhere in the country. Here it goes:
>AWS was created to address the growing 'cyber logistic' needs of the CIA.
Through the use of shell companies that own and operate their datacenters worldwide. This makes it difficult to attribute things to AWS.
>Google was created to get CIA info-dragnets into Universities, Corporations, and Phones
Allows the CIA to map professional and personal relationships, Google and Android allow constant physical surveillance of everybody. (Same with Apple and Iphones)
Allows the CIA to map familial relationships, also allows constant physical surveillance of everybody.
AWS has worldwide datacenters (china included, many in china) and it would easily allow the CIA to give itself some more plausible deniablility with regards to Problem 3. It's interesting to note that there are many in China. It is interesting because the information collected by HIVE is not technically classified. The tools used by the CIA are also not technically classified making it legal to share and sell all the information collected by HIVE. Everything that goes through HIVE ends up in China, courtesy of the CIA.
I think the Russians know this as well. They blocked AWS from operating in their country at all. MSM spun it as trying to block a single service (Telegram) but a nation state surely has the tools to circumvent that cryptosystem one way or the other. They banned AWS because it's CIA or an extremely prominent tool used by the CIA.