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Wikileaks releases Finfisher malware to help developers defend against it

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WIKILEAKS HAS RELEASED Finfisher "weaponised malware" that it claims is being used by governments around the world to spy on journalists and activists, in order to help developers defend against it.

Finfisher, which was first revealed in Wikileaks documents published in December 2011, can be used to intercept data from Mac OS X, Windows and Linux computers, as well as mobile devices running Android, Blackberry, iOS, Symbian and Windows Phone.

Wikileaks editor in chief Julian Assange said, "Finfisher continues to operate brazenly from Germany selling weaponised surveillance malware to some of the most abusive regimes in the world. The Merkel government pretends to be concerned about privacy, but its actions speak otherwise.

"Why does the Merkel government continue to protect Finfisher? This full data release will help the technical community build tools to protect people from Finfisher including by tracking down its command and control centers."

In its latest internet splash, Wikileaks has decided to make the weaponised malware available to download, so developers and security researchers can build defences against it. According to Wikileaks, the software is still being used by governments and other organisations across the world to spy on journalists, activists and political dissidents.

"In order to challenge the secrecy and the lack of accountability of the surveillance industry, analyzing the internals of this software could allow security and privacy researchers to develop new fingerprints and detection techniques, identify more countries currently using the Finfisher spyware and uncover human rights abuses," Wikileaks said.

Wikileaks added that Finisher's revenues from sales of its malware to such organisations totals around 50m with its customers including law enforcement and government agencies in Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Mongolia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa and Vietnam.

Privacy International deputy director Eric King praised Wikileaks' latest move in a statement seen by The Guardian. He said, "These new documents from Wikileaks give us greater insight into how companies like Finfisher and the governments they supply compromise our personal devices, and spy on the most private parts of our lives.

"More transparency is needed to hold companies like Finfisher to account, as well as the governments purchasing such equipment. Without public scrutiny of the surveillance technology industry, activists will continue to be targeted by repressive regimes and the damaging practices of Finfisher will be allowed to continue unabated."

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Wikileaks releases Finfisher malware to help developers defend against it

Chelsea Manning Breaks Silence to Criticize U.S. Airstrikes on ISIS

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Chelsea Manning, the U.S. soldier currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking government documents to WikiLeaks, wrote a column for The Guardian criticizing Obama's approach to ISIS. "Based on my experience as an all-source analyst in Iraq during the organization's relative infancy, ISIS cannot be defeated by bombs and bullets," she writes.

Manning wrote the article from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she's in military custody. She explains:

Attacking ISIS directly, by air strikes or special operations forces, is a very tempting option available to policymakers, with immediate (but not always good) results. Unfortunately, when the west fights fire with fire, we feed into a cycle of outrage, recruitment, organizing and even more fighting that goes back decades. This is exactly what happened in Iraq during the height of a civil war in 2006 and 2007, and it can only be expected to occur again.

Manning recommends a policy of containment instead: "Let ISIS succeed in setting up a failed 'state'in a contained area and over a long enough period of time to prove itself unpopular and unable to govern. This might begin to discredit the leadership and ideology of ISIS for good."

This is the first time she's spoken out since entering custody. She's in the process of appealing her sentence.

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Chelsea Manning Breaks Silence to Criticize U.S. Airstrikes on ISIS

From military prison, Chelsea Manning offers punditry on Iraq

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The simmering debate about the evolving U.S. military strategy in Iraq and Syria was joined on Tuesday by an unlikely pundit: Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning.

Manning, a former U.S. intelligence analyst convicted last year of leaking classified U.S. information to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, argues in a new piece for the Guardian newspaper that the United States cannot defeat the Islamic State militant group by bombing them, and should focus on containing them instead.

The piece says only that the writer, who joined the Army as a man known as Bradley Manning, was in Fort Leavenworth, and does not mention her conviction or passing of military secrets. In a separate piece, the Guardian reports Tuesday that Manning wrote the Guardian article in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she is in military custody.

Mannings piece was published as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared on Capitol Hill for a hearing on the U.S. strategy against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Dempsey said that U.S. military advisers could find themselves involved in ground combat missions if needs dictate it.

Conversely, Manning argues in herpiece that the Islamic State should be allowed to set up itsown region to control. Doing so is a stated goal for the militants, who want to establish a caliphate, a state under the control of strict Islamist law.

Let Isis succeed in setting up a failed state in a contained area and over a long enough period of time to prove itself unpopular and unable to govern, Manning argues. This might begin to discredit the leadership and ideology of Isis for good.

Manning argues for the U.S. to pursue three other initiatives. They include countering the narrative the militants have pushed in online recruitment videos and setting up clear, temporary borders that would discourage Isis from taking certain territory where humanitarian crises might be created.

Herfourth initiative to pursue includes a series of measures to cut off funding from the militants, including establishing a moratorium on anyone paying ransom for hostages and preventing the Islamic State from stealing valuable artifacts and taking over oil reserves in Baiji, Iraq.

Writes Manning:

The Islamic State (Isis) is without question a very brutal extremist group with origins in the insurgency of the United States occupation of Iraq. It has rapidly ascended to global attention by taking control of swaths of territory in western and northern Iraq, including Mosul and other major cities.

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From military prison, Chelsea Manning offers punditry on Iraq

Chelsea Manning offers punditry on Iraq from prison

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By Dan Lamothe The Washington Post September 17, 2014

The simmering debate about the evolving U.S. military strategy in Iraq and Syria was joined on Tuesday by an unlikely pundit: Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning.

Manning, a former U.S. intelligence analyst convicted last year of leaking classified U.S. information to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, argues in a new piece for the Guardian newspaper that the United States cannot defeat the Islamic State militant group by bombing them, and should focus on containing them instead.

The piece says only that the writer, who joined the Army as a man known as Bradley Manning, was "in Fort Leavenworth," and does not mention her conviction or passing of military secrets. In a separate piece, the Guardian reports Tuesday that "Manning wrote the Guardian article in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she is in military custody."

Manning's piece was published as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared on Capitol Hill for a hearing on the U.S. strategy against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Dempsey said that U.S. military advisers could find themselves involved in ground combat missions if needs dictate it.

Conversely, Manning argues in her piece that the Islamic State should be allowed to set up its own region to control. Doing so is a stated goal for the militants, who want to establish a caliphate, a state under the control of strict Islamist law.

"Let Isis succeed in setting up a failed 'state' in a contained area and over a long enough period of time to prove itself unpopular and unable to govern," Manning argues. "This might begin to discredit the leadership and ideology of Isis for good."

Manning argues for the U.S. to pursue three other initiatives. They include countering the narrative the militants have pushed in online recruitment videos and setting up clear, temporary borders that would "discourage Isis from taking certain territory where humanitarian crises might be created."

Her fourth initiative to pursue includes a series of measures to cut off funding from the militants, including establishing a moratorium on anyone paying ransom for hostages and preventing the Islamic State from stealing valuable artifacts and taking over oil reserves in Baiji, Iraq.

Writes Manning:

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Chelsea Manning offers punditry on Iraq from prison

Middle-School Dropout Codes Clever Chat Program That Foils NSA Spying

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The National Security Agency has some of the brightest minds working on its sophisticated surveillance programs, including its metadata collection efforts. But a new chat program designed by a middle-school dropoutin his spare time may turn out to be one of the best solutions to thwart those efforts.

Prompted by Edward Snowdens revelations about the governments intrusive surveillance activities, loosely knit citizen militias of technologists and security professionals have cropped up around the world to develop systems to protect us from government agencies out to identify us online and grab our communications.

John Brooks is now among them.

Brooks, who is just 22 and a self-taught coder who dropped out of school at 13, was always concerned about privacy and civil liberties. Four years ago he began work on a program for encrypted instant messaging that uses Tor hidden services for the protected transmission of communications. The program, which he dubbed Ricochet, began as a hobby. But by the time he finished, he had a full-fledged desktop client that was easy to use, offered anonymity and encryption, and even resolved the issue of metadatathe to and from headers and IP addresses spy agencies use to identify and track communicationslong before the public was aware that the NSA was routinely collecting metadata in bulk for its spy programs. The only problem Brooks had with the program was that few people were interested in using it. Although hed made Ricochets code open source, Brooks never had it formally audited for security and did nothing to promote it, so few people even knew about it.

Ricochet is idiot-proof and anonymous.

Then the Snowden leaks happened and metadata made headlines. Brooks realized he already had a solution that resolved a problem everyone else was suddenly scrambling to fix. Though ordinary encrypted email and instant messaging protect the contents of communications, metadata allows authorities to map relationships between communicants and subpoena service providers for subscriber information that can help unmask whistleblowers, journalistss sources and others. Its not just these kind of people whose privacy is harmed by metadata, however; in 2012 it was telltale email metadata that helped unmask former CIA director and war commander General David Petraeus and unravel his affair with Paula Broadwall.

With metadata suddenly in the spotlight, Brooks decided earlier this year to dust off his Ricochet program and tweak it to make it more eleganthe knew hed still have a problem, however, getting anyone to adopt it. He wasnt a known name in the security world and there was no reason anyone should trust him or his program.

Enter Invisible.im, a group formed by Australian security journalist Patrick Gray. Last July, Gray announced that he was working with HD Moore, developer of the Metasploit Framework tool used by security researchers to pen-test systems, and with another respected security professional who goes by his hacker handle The Grugq, to craft a secure, open-source encrypted chat program cobbled together from parts of existing anonymity and messaging systemssuch as Prosody, Pidgin and Tor. They wanted a system that was highly secure, user friendly and metadata-free. Gray says his primary motivation was to protect the anonymity of sources who contact journalists.

At the moment, when sources contact a journalist, theyre going to leave a metadata trail, whether its a phone call record or instant message or email record [regardless of whether or not the content of their communication is encrypted], he says. And that data is currently accessible to authorities without a warrant.

When Brooks wrote to say hed already designed a chat program that eliminated metadata, Gray and his group took a look at the code and quickly dropped their plan to develop their own tool, in favor of working with Brooks to develop his.

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Middle-School Dropout Codes Clever Chat Program That Foils NSA Spying

NSA spying can’t be ruled out: PM

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Stuff.co.nz

John Key says journalist Glenn Greenwald got it wrong over mass surveillance taking place in New Zealand.

Prime Minister John Key cannot rule out that the United States National Security Agency is undertaking mass surveillance of New Zealanders' data but has rejected claims New Zealand spies would have access to such information.

"What I can say is the GCSB [Government Communications Security Bureau] does not have access to any information through XKeyscore or any other database, unless they basically comply with the New Zealand law, and the New Zealand law forbids that unless there is a warrant to do so," he said.

Asked whether that was an admission GCSB spies on occasion used the controversial XKeyscore programme, Key declined to elaborate.

"I don't talk about whatever programmes they have," he said.

* Beehive Live

* NZ spied on allies: Greenwald

*Opinion: We deserve answers on spying

* Opinion: Spy scandal impact on election far from certain

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NSA spying can't be ruled out: PM

Snowden Leaks Didn’t Make Al Qaeda Change Tactics: Report

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There is no evidence that Edward Snowdens revelations about NSA spying inspired Islamic terror groups to hide their electronic communications behind more sophisticated encryption software, according to a new analysis that challenges other recent research and assertions by U.S. officials about the impact of the leaks.

The analysis by Flashpoint Global Partners, a private security firm, examined the frequency of releases and updates of encryption software by jihadi groups and mentions of encryption in jihadi social media forums to assess the impact of Snowdens information. It found no correlation in either measure to Snowdens leaks about the NSAs surveillance techniques, which became public beginning June 5, 2013.

Click Here to Read the Full Report

Evan Kohlmann, a Flashpoint partner who also is a NBC News terrorism consultant, acknowledged that there has been a flurry of releases of encryption software by al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups, including ISIS, since Snowden went public, but said most have simply extended the existing scheme to new devices or technologies, such as cell phones, chat software and SMS messaging (texting).

Nothing has changed about the encryption methodologies that they use, he said. Its difficult to reconcile with the claim that they have dramatically improved their encryption technology since Snowden.

Follow NBC News Investigations on Twitter and Facebook.

Al Qaeda and its affiliates have developed and used different types of encryption software since at least 2007, beginning with a product known as Asrar al-Mujihideen (Secrets of the Mujahideen) that was released by administrators of a now-defunct al Qaeda web forum known as al-Ekhlaas, according to the Flashpoint analysis.

The software was quickly endorsed by al Qaeda affiliates like al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Shabab in Somalia. When al-Ekhlaas collapsed, a prominent online jihadi media unit called the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF) took over its development and began strengthening its capabilities. It also introduced new products, including Asrar al-Dardashan (Secrets of Chatting) in February 2013, four months before the Guardian newspaper broke the first Snowden story.

The report appears certain to add fuel to the debate over what U.S. officials say was significant damage to national security caused by Snowdens disclosure of classified spying programs by the NSA.

U.S. government officials have consistently invoked the terrorist groups to dramatize the damage allegedly caused by the leaks.

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Snowden Leaks Didn't Make Al Qaeda Change Tactics: Report


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