APT28

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Now that you know what bit.ly is

Is this the email that hacked John
Podesta's account?
By Gregory Krieg and Tal Kopan, CNN

Updated 8:45 PM ET, Fri October 28, 2016

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  • Clinton campaign staffers believed attempted hack email was "legitimate"
  • Cybersecurity experts see direct link to Russian cyberespionage group

(CNN)A phishing email sent to Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta may have been so sophisticated that it fooled the campaign's own IT staffers, who at one point advised him it was a legitimate warning to change his password.

The stolen email thread, released by WikiLeaks Friday, also provides the most direct evidence yet that the Russian government was behind the damaging hack into the Clinton campaign, according to a private cybersecurity company.

The thread shows a Clinton campaign staffer writing that a phishing email sent to Podesta's Gmail account on March 19, 2016, is "legitimate," though the staffer advises him to go through Google's official procedures to update his password. It's not clear if Podesta gave hackers his password before he was advised by his staff, or if the email in question was the one that led to the hack.

The Clinton campaign has not commented directly on the hacked emails and CNN cannot independently verify their authenticity.

On its face, the source of the potentially dangerous email is Google, but a closer look at the actual mailing address shows an unfamiliar or bogus-looking account: "no-reply@accounts.googlemail.com."
The subject line warns, "Someone has your password" and the body of the message says "someone" in Ukraine tried, but was stopped, from signing into Podesta's account.

"You should change your password immediately," the email warns. The words "CHANGE PASSWORD" then appear -- inviting Podesta to click on them -- as a way to do just that. But the address did not link to a secure Google web page, instead directing the user blindly via bit.ly, a service used to shorten or conceal web addresses....

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/28/polit...-podesta-hillary-clinton-wikileaks/index.html

 

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Google taught artificial intelligence to encrypt messages on its own
12 / 42

Quartz
Dave Gershgorn 8 hrs ago

© Provided by Quartz Bots behind the cryptographic wheel.

A team at Google has built a system to show that artificial intelligence can build its own form of encryption. While not very complex currently, this research could set the table for encryption that gets stronger as hackers attempt to crack it.

To see if the artificial intelligence could learn to encrypt on its own, the AI researchers at Google Brain, a unit of the search company focused on deep learning, built a game with three entities powered by deep neural networks: Alice, Bob, and Eve.

Alice was designed to send an encrypted message of 16 zeroes and ones to Bob, which was designed to decrypt the message. The two bots started with a shared key, a foundation for the message’s encryption.

Eve was placed squarely in the middle, intercepting the information and attempting to decrypt it as well. To avoid Eve working out the encryption, Alice started transforming the message in different ways, and Bob adaptively learned how to shift his decryption to keep up. The researchers measured Eve’s success by how close it got to the correct message, Alice’s by whether Eve’s answer was further from the original message than a random guess, and Bob’s by whether he met a certain threshold for arriving at the right answer.

The three networks were designed as generative adversarial networks, meaning they weren’t taught anything about encryption or shown examples of encrypted and decrypted messages. They learned by trying to outsmart each other.

Bob, in red, quickly adapted to learn new encryption while Eve, in green, was unable to keep up.

© Provided by Quartz Bob, in red, quickly adapted to learn new encryption while Eve, in green, was unable to keep up. For the first 7,000 messages, Alice and Bob started out simply. Alice’s encryption was easy for Bob to figure out, but that meant it was easy for Eve to guess as well. But over the next 6,000 messages, Alice and Bob devised a kind of encryption that Eve simply couldn’t crack. Bob was able to reliably decrypt the message with no errors, while Eve consistently got seven or eight of the 16 characters wrong. Since the answers were either a zero or one, Eve would have had the same chances if it just flipped a coin...

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techn...ypt-messages-on-its-own/ar-AAjBov3?li=BBnbcA1

 

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Silicon Valley is seriously worried about a cyber attack on Election Day
by Seth Fiegerman @sfiegerman October 31, 2016: 5:58 PM ET

How Russian hackers could influence the election
Imagine a major attack against the Internet on Election Day with a singular goal: disrupt voter turnout.

It sounds like pure paranoia, but that's the gist of a debate that started on Twitter this weekend and quickly drew in some big names in Silicon Valley.

Adam D'Angelo, Facebook's (FB, Tech30) former chief technology officer and founder of Quora, tweeted on Sunday he believes there's a "good chance of major internet attack Nov 8th."

"Many groups have the ability and incentive. Maps outage alone could easily skew the election," D'Angelo wrote.

Put another way: If an organized group could somehow take down a service like Google Maps though a brute-force attack or security hole, perhaps it would prevent some voters from finding their voting locations. After all, many big services like Twitter (TWTR, Tech30), Netflix (NFLX, Tech30) and Spotify suffered outages this month from a prolonged cyberattack.

Such an attack might disproportionately affect "young people who rely on phones" and lean Democrat, at least according to D'Angelo.

Many on Twitter dismissed D'Angelo's comments as "conspiracy theories" that lacked "sources" to back it up, but one group appeared to take it surprisingly seriously: the tech industry.

"Is there anything to be done about it?" Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook cofounder and billionaire backer of Hillary Clinton, tweeted in response to D'Angelo.

Mike Vernal, a venture capitalist at Sequoia, called it a "scary thought." Elad Gil, a former Twitter exec, suggested it "would be great if major internet cos had maps available either in products or offline."

"There's often chatter here and there [about election cybersecurity in Silicon Valley], but since Nov. 8 is so close, the volume has definitely turned up a bit," says David Byttow, a former Google engineer and founder of Secret, who also joined the Twitter debate.

Byttow tossed out other blockbuster targets that that would be particularly disruptive, including Google's search engine (yes, Google (GOOG) again) and cell providers like AT&T (T, Tech30) and Verizon (VZ, Tech30) that connect millions to online services....

http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/31/tec...tion-day/index.html?iid=ob_homepage_tech_pool

 

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https://github.com/fireeye/iocs/tree/master/APT28

 

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Donald Trump is about to control the most powerful surveillance machine in history
Russell Brandom
1 Hour AgoThe Verge
46COMMENTSJoin the Discussion

Getty Images

The seals of the U.S. Cyber Command, the National Secrity Agency and the Central Security Service greet employees and visitors at the campus the three organizations share March 13, 2015 in Fort Meade, Maryland.

The US intelligence agencies are among the most powerful forces to ever exist, capable of ingesting and retaining entire nations' worth of data, or raining down missiles on targets thousands of miles away. As of January 20th, all that power will be directly answerable to Donald Trump.

It's still early, but a picture is starting to emerge of how the president-elect could use those powers — and it's not a pretty sight. Since the September 11th attacks, the US government gives the president almost unlimited discretion in matters of national security, with few limitations or mechanisms for oversight. That includes NSA surveillance, as well as the expanding powers of the drone program. And from what Trump has said on the campaign trail, his targets for using those powers may cut against some of America's most important civil rights....

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/14/dona...powerful-surveillance-machine-in-history.html

 

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