British Spy Agency GCHQ Performed DDoS Attack Against Anonymous -Snowden Documents Transpired

British Spy Agency GCHQ Performed DDoS Attack Against Hacktivist Anonymous & LulzSec -Snowden Documents Transpired

While excavating the past, it was always found that cyber criminals, large hacker collective groups were the culprits for engaging voluminous denial of service attack. But this widely transfusing story get a one eighty degree reverse turn, when the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed another trade secret. Recently a lurid story get spot lighted, as the whistle blower Snowden unfold yet another breathtaking stealthy  documents taken from the National Security Agency. The clandestine documents taken the mask from the so called good guys, unveiling British spy agency GCHQ had launched a secret war against the infamous hacktivist collective Anonymous and a splinter group known as LulzSec several years ago. Many of you guessed right, this was happened when Anonymous were targeting various UK companies and government websites. The documents disclose that GCHQ carried out seemingly illegal DDoS attacks against the collective, flooding their chatrooms with so much traffic that they would become inaccessible – and all with the approval of the British government. The revelations come less than a year after several LulzSec activists were jailed by a British court for carrying out similar DDoS attacks against targets including the CIA, the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), News International, Sony and the Westboro Baptist Church, among others. 

This sensational issue was made public by NBC News deferentially with the help of none other than Edward Snowden. In their exclusive report headed 'War on Anonymous: British Spies Attacked Hackers,' NBC said -The blunt instrument the spy unit used to target hackers, however, also interrupted the web communications of political dissidents who did not engage in any illegal hacking. It may also have shut down websites with no connection to Anonymous. According to the documents, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a “denial of service” (DDOS) attack – the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites – making the British government the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack.

The documents, from a PowerPoint presentation prepared for a 2012 NSA conference called SIGDEV, show that the unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, boasted of using the DDOS attack – which it dubbed Rolling Thunder -- and other techniques to scare away 80 percent of the users of Anonymous internet chat rooms. 

The existence of JTRIG has never been previously disclosed publicly. The documents also show that JTRIG infiltrated chat rooms known as IRCs and identified individual hackers who had taken confidential information from websites. In one case JTRIG helped send a hacktivist to prison for stealing data from PayPal, and in another it helped identify hacktivists who attacked government websites. 

As soon as this story getting all the spot lights, immediately the GCHQ responded to this saying all their movements and operations were lawful. “All of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensure[s] that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All of our operational processes rigorously support this position.” -GCHQ said the press. To know more detail about this story, don't forget to stay tuned with VOGH. 

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Twitter & Yahoo Tightening Their Security to Prevent Eavesdropping of NSA

Twitter & Yahoo Tightening Their Security to Prevent Eavesdropping of NSA & Other Govt Agencies 

Last month a untold and sensational story came to light, when the whistle blowers Edward Snowden unveiled one of the top secret program of NSA called called “Muscular” Former NSA contractor Snowden himself disclosed that the National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world in order to collect and snoop the private data of millions of internet users. NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records including “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video. Both Yahoo & Google said that they had never gave access to nay Govt agency to their data centers. Yahoo spokeswoman said, “We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.” Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond said “We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform,” 

But the matter of fact is that NSA has indeed sniffed the personal & private communication of million internet users of tech giants like Yahoo and Google. To get rid of this kind of privacy breach, now the tech giants who hold the personal record and credential of mass, are tightening and enhancing their existing security system. According to Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo "We’ve worked hard over the years to earn our users’ trust and we fight hard to preserve it." Yahoo also says it will encrypt all information moving between its data centers by the end of the first quarter, and it will work on getting international partners to enable HTTPS encryption in Yahoo-branded Mail services.Yahoo says it will give users an option to encrypt all data flow to and from Yahoo. "Yahoo has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency ever. There is nothing more important to us than protecting our users’ privacy. To that end, we recently announced that we will make Yahoo Mail even more secure by introducing https (SSL - Secure Sockets Layer) encryption with a 2048-bit key across our network by January 8, 2014." added Marissa Mayer.

Not only Yahoo, but the social networking giant Twitter, who have registered users of almost 550 million with an active user of 250 million across the globe has also taken immediate steps after this breathtaking story of spying by NSA get the spot light. Twitter is implementing new security measures that should make it much more difficult for anyone to eavesdrop on communications between its servers and users. The entire security mechanism has been taken to tighten the data privacy of its users. According to a blog post of twitter the company has implemented "perfect forward secrecy" on its Web and mobile platforms, which made eavesdropping almost impossible. "As part of our continuing effort to keep our users’ information as secure as possible, we’re happy to announce that we recently enabled forward secrecy for traffic on twitter.com, api.twitter.com, and mobile.twitter.com. On top of the usual confidentiality and integrity properties of HTTPS, forward secrecy adds a new property. If an adversary is currently recording all Twitter users’ encrypted traffic, and they later crack or steal Twitter’s private keys, they should not be able to use those keys to decrypt the recorded traffic." -said the blog post.

While talking about Muscular program of NSA, we would also like to remind you that couple weeks ago we came to know about 'Royal Concierge' another secret program of GCHQ & NSA to spy foreign diplomats through hotel bookings uncovered by Edward Snowden.

-Source (CIO & PC World) 

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'Royal Concierge' Secret Program of GCHQ to Spy Foreign Diplomats Through Hotel Bookings Unveiled By Edward Snowden

'Royal Concierge' Secret Program of GCHQ to Spy Foreign Diplomats By Hotel Bookings Unveiled By Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden the American whistle blowers who is currently living in Russia under temporary asylum, after Snowden is considered a fugitive by American authorities who have charged him with espionage and theft of government property  yet again uncovered what it called sensational information. This time he unfold a top secret program of Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency & US National Security Agency (NSA). In which they infiltrated the reservation systems of around 350 luxury hotels popular among diplomats and government officials with the help of a sophisticated program code-named "Royal Concierge" Royal Concierge designed to keeps tabs on foreign diplomats by monitoring their hotel bookings. This can include monitoring a hotel room and its guest by wiretapping the telephone and fax machine, gaining access to computers hooked up to the hotel network, or eavesdropping on the diplomat in the hotel bar. This surveillance program, uses a logo with a penguin -- meant to stand for the black and white uniforms worn by staff at top hotels -- wearing a crown, a purple cape and holding a wand. The top secret program automatically checked whether the e-mail address of a visitor on the hotel booking system matched with the address of his government and with this information the GCHQ could take the necessary steps to bug the concerned hotel room, to tap its telephones or to eavesdrop into the electronic data transfer, the news weekly said. Snowden said GCHQ has been using the search and analyse program for more than three years to track diplomats and government officials among hotel guests. 

The above breathtaking information first came on a German magazine 'Der Spiegel' on Sunday. And this exciting leaks been provided by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. After this lurid information came to light, press asked questions to GCHQ, in response an official of GCHQ said "We are not going to comment on this report". But the entire conversation with Der Spiegel reporter with GCHQ officials came to the conclusion of GCHQ "neither confirms nor denies the allegation". On th other hand Britain's top spy chiefs reacted angrily to leaks by Snowden, a fugitive former analyst for the US National Security Agency, in an appearance this month before a parliamentary committee. Denying Britons were under mass surveillance, the heads of the foreign spy agency MI6, the domestic intelligence service MI5 and GCHQ warned that al-Qaeda and other enemies were "lapping up" intelligence revelations by Snowden and using them to change the way they operate.

-Source (AFP, News 24)

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Pentagon Assigning More Experts to Boost Cyber Security & Protect U.S. Computer Networks

Pentagon Assigning More Experts to Boost Cyber Security & Protect U.S. Computer Networks

Cyber security has become one of the most sophisticated area of National security and defense, and in order to implement that Pentagon has increased their estimated expense on cyber security. And this deceleration has been made while publishing the budget late in last year. Now that implementation is getting executed as the Pentagon is moving toward a major expansion of its cyber security force to counter increasing attacks on the nation’s computer networks, as well as to expand offensive computer operations on foreign adversaries. This confirmation has came from defense officials. The expansion would increase the Defense Department’s Cyber Command by more than 4,000 people, up from the current 900, an American official said. Defense officials acknowledged that a formidable challenge in the growth of the command would be finding, training and holding onto such a large number of qualified people. The Pentagon “is constantly looking to recruit, train and retain world class cyberpersonnel,” a defense official said Sunday.

As part of the expansion, officials said the Pentagon was planning three different forces under Cyber Command: “national mission forces” to protect computer systems that support the nation’s power grid and critical infrastructure; “combat mission forces” to plan and execute attacks on adversaries; and “cyber protection forces” to secure the Pentagon’s computer systems. Cyber Command’s connections to the NSA are also leading some officials to ask how much of the expansion will be focused domestically, especially considering the opening of the NSA’s new, $2 billion Utah Data Center, scheduled to go live later this year. An unnamed "senior defense official" said that the agency’s efforts would remain focused outside US networks, unless it were asked to assist "another agency with domestic authority, such as the FBI." There is significant overlap between Cyber Command and the NSA — until recently, some employees of the former had nsa.gov email addresses, for instance — and there is some doubt that the nascent offshoot of US Strategic Command will be able to achieve true independence under NSA Director Alexander.

-Source (NY Times, Washington Post)

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NSA Refused to Disclose Obama's Secret Cyber Security Directive

NSA Refused to Disclose Obama's Secret Cyber Security Directive

The cyber security directive of United States President Barack Obama has been twisted a little as the National Security Agency (NSA) has refused to release details of a secret presidential directive document that would establish a broader set of standards that would guide federal agencies in confronting Cyber threats. Several experts are presuming that the cyber security directive could allow the military and intelligence agencies to operate on the networks of private companies, such as Google and Facebook. According to the last week report by Washington Post, cited several U.S. officials saying that Obama signed off on the secret cyber security order, believed to widely expand NSA’s spying authorities, in mid-October. “The new directive is the most extensive White House effort to date to wrestle with what constitutes an “offensive” and a “defensive” action in the rapidly evolving world of cyber war and cyber terrorism,” the report states.  

The Electronic Privacy and Information Center (EPIC), filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to make the document public because it said the measure could expand NSA’s Cyber security authority. “Transparency is crucial to the public’s ability to monitor the government’s national security efforts and ensure that federal agencies respect privacy rights and comply with their obligations under the Privacy Act,” said EPIC’s request.
EPIC said that NSA denied the request on Nov. 21 arguing that it doesn’t have to release the document because it is a confidential presidential communication and contains information that is classified “Secret” and “Top Secret” by the agency. NSA said disclosure of the order could “reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” The agency said EPIC could file an appeal with the NSA/Central Security Service denial and EPIC said it plans to do so. The privacy group said it is litigating similar FOIA requests with NSA, including the release of NSPD 54, a 2008 presidential directive setting out the NSA’s cyber security authority. The group called NSA a “black hole for public information about cyber security” in an official statement to Congress earlier this year. National Security Agency whistle blower William Binney said in Mid July that the U.S. government is secretly gathering information “about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country”, in “a very dangerous process” that violates Americans’ privacy.
Former President George W. Bush signed a presidential order in 2002 allowing the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor without a warrant the international (and sometimes domestic) telephone calls and e-mail messages of hundreds or thousands of citizens and legal residents inside the United States. The program eventually came to include some purely internal controls -- but no requirement that warrants be obtained from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as the 4th Amendment to the Constitution and the foreign intelligence surveillance laws require.

-Source (GSN Magazine & Press TV)

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NSA Calls Defcon The "World's Best Cybersecurity Community" & Asks for Their Help

NSA Calls Defcon The "World's Best Cybersecurity Community" & Asks for Their Help

A week ago DEFCON confirmed the presence of National Security Agency Director General Keith B. Alexander at DEFCON 20 in Las Vegas.  “I’ve spent 20 years trying to get someone from the NSA” to speak at Defcon, said Defcon founder Jeff Moss, who serves on the U.S. Homeland Security Advisory Council and is chief security officer for ICANN. Moss added “On the NSA’s 60th anniversary and our 20th anniversary this has all come together.” Here comes a double boom, Mr. Alexander not only attended the world's largest annual party but also greets Defcon the "world's best cybersecurity community" and asks for their help to secure cyberspace. Hackers can and must be part, together with the government and the private industry, of a collaborative approach to secure cyberspace, he said. Hackers can help educate other people who don't understand cybersecurity as well as they do, the NSA chief said. "You know that we can protect networks and have civil liberties and privacy; and you can help us get there."

Gen. Alexander congratulated the organizers of Defcon Kids, an event dedicated to teaching kids how to be white-hat hackers, and described the initiative as superb. He called 11-year-old Defcon Kids co-founder CyFi to the stage and said that training young people like her in cybersecurity is what the U.S. needs.

He encouraged hackers to get involved in the process. "We can sit on the sidelines and let others who don't understand this space tell us what they're going to do, or we can help by educating and informing them" of the best ways to go forward. "That's the real reason why I came here. To solicit your support," he said. "You have the talent. You have the expertise." The hacker community has built many of the tools that are needed to protect cyberspace and should continue to build even better ones, he said during his keynote at Defcon. He gave the example of Metasploit and other penetration testing tools. 

VOGH Reaction:-

On behalf of VOGH team I personally thanks Mr. Keith B. Alexander for his presence at DEFCON. I do believe that such approach will encourage young hackers, and will surely give them extra enthusiasm, by which in coming future we will get a better and much secured cyber space. 

-Source (PCW)

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Director of National Security Agency Will Join DEFCON 20 Hacking Conference

Director of National Security Agency Will Join DEFCON 20 Hacking Conference

Great news for hackers and security professionals who will attend the most awaited & the world's largest annual hacking party "DEFCON 20" in Las Vegas next week will have a rare chance to rub shoulders with the head of the U.S. National Security Agency. The Defcon 20 official page is saying that the director of the spy agency, Mr. General Keith Alexander will speak at the Defcon conference, marking the highest-level visit to date by a U.S. government official to the colorful gathering. 

The founder of Defcon and renouned hacker Mr. Jeff Moss said who is known as the Dark Tangent said "We're going to show him the conference. He wants to wander around". Still, Moss said he expect there could be some controversy over Alexander's presence among the diverse hacker crowd that attends the conference. The NSA plays both offense and defense in the cyber wars. It conducts electronic eavesdropping on adversaries, in addition to protecting U.S. computer networks.

"I expect some people will say 'You are a sellout for having someone from the NSA speak" Mossed added.

He said he's spent a decade trying to get the head of the NSA to speak at Defcon, but he never imaged it would actually happen: "To me this is really validating of the whole culture."

Defcon offers a side conference for children, Defcon Kids, which Alexander will likely visit. It also trains hackers to pick locks and has an annual contest to measure who is best at persuading corporate workers to release sensitive data over the phone. Moss said he invited federal agents to the first Defcon conference, but that they politely declined. They showed up anyway, incognito. They kept coming, in bigger numbers, sometimes in uniform. "We created an environment where the feds felt they could come and it wasn't hostile," Moss said. "We could ask them questions and they wanted to ask the hackers about new techniques."

-Source (Huffington Post)

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