GRU OPSEC Sucks Because They Don’t Care

 

Recently there have been more revelations on GRU active measures campaigns being halted, agents being PNG’d, and a naming and shaming of operatives lack of OPSEC in general. Many people have been debating the reasons why the GRU has been so messy in their operations allowing so much to be dug up on them as well as allow for the compromise of ongoing operations like the attacks on the Porton Down facility. I myself am tired of all the debate but I have had a good running back and forth with Horkos @WylieNewmark on the matter and the gist of it is this;

“The Russians don’t care.”

Basically the Russians now are the honey badger of all things spooks. Tradecraft it seems is not really all that necessary when your targets (the rest of the world) are impotent to do anything about your actions other than name and shame. It’s really that simple! Of course I could go into a long diatribe on how the Russians a la Putin have pushed the envelope so much, succeeding with the Trump win in 2016. Along with Trumps successive fragmentation of the norms that attempted to hold Russia in check, we now have a world where no one can do much of anything against Putin and have a meaningful negative impact on Russia.

But hey, why bother huh?

Look, here’s the deal, When the world comes up with a concerted means to stop Putin and or inflict damage upon him by stopping all his operations as well as put sanctions on him and Russia, nothing will change… Ok ok ok, since Bellingcat and others have been able to throw sunshine on operations and operatives maybe they will change their modus operandi some. In fact I would say the Dutch operations against them recently and their being put on the world stage (name and shame) will be the one thing that will likely make the GRU change tactics. That change will be to mind their OPSEC and do a better job at operations to not get caught out in the middle of them and stop them.

That’s it.

The tempo will be the same if not accelerated because Putin needs to keep the pressure on to fracture the geopolitical world to allow him to do what he wants.

Sow chaos.

So there you have it. That’s all I have to say on it. Don’t expect them to stop, expect them to get better at it and continue to carry on.

K.

 

PS… Another reason they don’t care? Most of the targets are soft targets. DNC? DCCC? Come on…. Fish in a barrel kids.

USA Really: New IRA Troll Farm Site and Twitter Account

So this morning I saw a tweet come across the feed by RVAWonk that was proclaiming that the IRA was back with a new site and the fuckery was pretty much just naked on their part. In the article she goes over the salient technical details of the site and the accounts. It also has another nice linked post that does a bit more in that area as well and I recommend you all read that too. However, I took a bit of a deeper dive looking at the site itself and it’s coding as well as did some Maltego mapping of it and the Twitter account. My overall take on all of that is pretty much “meh” … What really intrigues me and has been bothering me for some time now is that everyone is busy mapping all this shit but the fact of the matter is that mapping does not stop the cognitive dissonance that the Russians are playing on to win this game.

The Russians here are basically at a point where they aren’t even trying to hide the fact that the site is a Russian propaganda/disinformation effort and this is the important fact we all seem to be missing in this community. This shit works and even though most people do not have the technical abilities to look deeper into the code and the domains, it is pretty plain when you look at the site itself where they use Cyrillic and Russian in their image names and such that it is in fact a Russian operation.

We will all likely go down the rabbit hole on the how many followers they have on Twitter and who they follow. We will collate all the data and sift it and parse it all to put out reports on how they did this. My problem though is that we can investigate the shit out of this all we want but unless we come up with strategies to deny, degrade, or destroy the content, it will reach those tribalists out there who want it and the damage of 2016 will continue on unabated. What’s even more galling here is that the Russians have basically pulled a Babe Ruth by announcing this site and putting it out there so flagrantly with cyrillic in it and on domains owned by a russian domain hosting service. In reality they just gave us the bird and we are now going to just have to sit by and watch as they inflame the Trumpists to hopefully affect the mid terms with this crap.

 

Of course maybe Twitter will catch on here and swat this account offline? You hear me Jack? … *tap tap* this thing on?

 

Oh well, so there’s a new site and it seems they have also employed an SEO in there as well. The site has a lot of means to track posts, likes, geolocations etc as well. I have mirrored the whole site and am still poking through the code. The SEO is a new old site too with an anonymous domain resister back in April of this year that likely is also the Russian’s doing as well. I am sure many of the community will keep an eye on it as we go along so someone will eventually write about this as well with rapt verbiage not really doing anything about the problem as well.

 

So here’s my thing, we are all spending all this time nattering on about it but what can we do to stop such propaganda sites and Twitter accounts from spreading the mind virus? If we cannot stop them, how can we innoculate the general public from the effects of such mental plagues? These are the questions we should be asking and I just don’t hear it happening. I know that it is a rich and difficult problem dealing with the psyche and cognitive dissonance but we really need to lay off all the techno babble and focus on real solutions. Solutions that conern the human animal, not the technology kids. The Russians already know this and they are leveraging it. I mean, how much more blatant do they have to be? How about they just post billboards now in Cyrillic for Trump in all those Trump states?

Focus people.

K.

The Consultant Was a Spy

Heathfield was also pitching a software program he claimed to have developed, called FutureMap. He described it to sources and in writing as a program that would reside on a company’s internal computer network. Users could plug in variables such as election results and technological breakthroughs to see how events might affect their businesses and future strategies. A screen capture of FutureMap shows a timeline tracking events over the course of many years in a variety of categories, including “Energy and Environment” and “Medicine & Biogenetics.”

Sources who met with Heathfield about FutureMap now believe the software could have been used to steal corporate information and send it back to Russian intelligence officials without the companies’ knowledge. . . . . . Sources were unnerved by how sophisticated and polished Heathfield’s pitch was. If not for the FBI’s intervention, one source speculated, Heathfield could have made a successful sale, installed the software, and started sending information home. “If he had a few more customers and better marketing, he could have really pulled off something tremendous.” . . . .

Full article here:

Back when I was a road warrior for IBM, many people who knew me (friends and family) actually half thought that I was not an IBM employee, but some kind of spook. I have to admit that due to the nature of what I was doing I couldn’t really talk about exactly what I was doing, but I could tell them I was here or there etc.. Unlike real spooks. In the case of Heathfield, well, he turned out to be a real spook and gee, look at that, he was a self branded “consultant” whod’a thunk it huh?

The fact is that the CIA often uses NOC agents in the role of consultants or reps for “front companies” or even legit companies as a cover for their NOC (Non Operational Cover) identities or “legends” They go into places under the guise of business like an Oil company that may in fact be the target of their collection activities. It’s an old trick and it always will be the case, there is nothing new here save that this guy was in fact perhaps peddling software that was pre-pwn3d and could tunnel the “clients” data out to mother Russia. A rather nifty idea really but again, nothing new.

So, won’t you now look on the new consultant as not only perhaps a Bob (oblique Office Space reference) but also maybe the next corporate spy?

THIS is what should happen but I am sure will not. You see, the vetting process for employing people oftentimes is too weak if at all in place at companies. All too many times people do not check references nor do they do the criminal background checks on new hires or prospectives. Never mind the fact that most of the time its easy enough to get onto a corporate facility with faked credentials or none at all and gain access to data, terminals, hardware etc. Hell, just how many places have a separate vlan or drop for internet access for visiting consultants or perspective clients?

Put it this way.. Can anyone just plug in and get a DHCP address on your network? If they can, well game over man.. Even more so if you have a weak AP system for wireless (can you saw WEP?) So that “consultant” whether or not they are meant to be there or have just socially engineered their way into the building may already be on your network and tunneling out gigs of data as you read this…

So one of them turned out to be a real bona fide Russian illegal WOOO HOOO! Worry about all the others out there from ever other land as well as corporate entity looking to steal your shit.

Pay attention! So can the DHL Guy, the I.T. Guy, The Mail Man, The Temp, The Plumber, Janitor, etc etc etc…

CoB

Russian Kulturny: Espionage Old School Meets the New Tech Comrade

But many things shown even in bad movies are unfortunately true: Yes, the Russians like to wear fur hats, drink vodka, eat caviar, take pretty girls to the sauna. And, apart from some modern innovations like ad hoc networks, burst transmissions and steganography, the old proven tradecraft is pretty much the same. It is good and it normally works well (except in cases, when somebody is already being shadowed – then nothing works).

Boris Volodarsky: Former GRU Officer

Los Illegals.. Comrade…

With all of the hubub over the capture of the illegals, and of course all the rattling on about the “swallow” known as Anna Chapman, one has to cut through the dross to get to the real importance of the story. The fact is, that though the wall has fallen (long ago) and W looked into the “soul” of ol’ Pooty Poot and saw teddy bears and rainbows, the reality of it is that the “Bear” never went away or to sleep.

We are still a target, a rather rich one still, for collection of intelligence as well as corporate IP as Putin has pointed out in statements he has made over the years. It was Putin who actually said that Russia needed to step up its game in industrial espionage (I am paraphrasing) and created the means to do so within the new FSB *cough* KGB. This type of infiltration in hopes of collection never went away and I suspect that even with out own dismantling of the HUMINT departments of CIA, we still had a reasonable amount of assets and agents within Russia as they transitioned from the Sov bloc to today’s powerhouse of malware and Russian Mafia run state apparatus.

So, while reading all the news sites, it became clear to me that people really do not have a grasp of the realities surrounding the nature of espionage today. Everyone thinks that its all shiny technologies and protocols within the hacker scene that the next gen of spies are using and that old school techniques called “tradecraft” are outdated and useless.

Nope… It’s not just that. This is said rather well here by Boris again:

The public and writers alike do not really realise that this is NOT a film — a very large group of very experienced FBI agents and watchers spent a very considerable sum of taxpayers’ money and plenty of time to uncover a REAL group of the Russian undercover operators who brazenly operated in the United States, as they had been absolutely sure that no one would ever catch them because their education, training, intelligence tradition, and the belief that the wealth of the country behind them is much superior than the FBI. They forgot that the FBI of 2010 is much different from the Bureau of the 1950s.

It is highly likely that these agents were outed by a defector back in the 90’s. The defector was a Directorate S operative who worked within the UN in the NYC area and it is possible that he gave up the program. The FBI then was tasked with either finding them all blindly, or, they had at least one couple in their sites and steadily built their case by watching the illegals to get at their handlers. You see, the same logic applies to the FBI as does the perception of the KGB. The FBI is seen as slow witted and usually in the media, the blue sedan with guys in suits and sunglasses inside watching you ever so not subtly.

This is not necessarily the case as has been seen in some areas of the FBI’s counterintelligence unit. They really can do a good job at surveillance and counterintel collection.. They are not as bumpkin as they used to be in the 50’s… Nor the 80’s for that matter. Unfortunately though, it really took the Hanssen’s of the world to force them to be better.. But I digress..

Why Were They Here?

I think that there has been a basic misunderstanding in the press and the populace from reading poor press reports on the nature of the “illegals” program. Yes, they were tasked at times with getting data that could be readily available through open source (OSINT) channels such as the news or Google. However, their main task was to insert themselves into our culture, economy, and social strata in order to get “at” people of interest. Basically they were talent spotters.

These people got on to Linkedin and other social networks for the exact reason of making friends and gaining access to those who might be “of use” later on for their handlers and masters. They were facilitators really. You see, like the whole Robin Sage affair that is ongoing now, these folks already knew about the vulnerabilities within social networking and the social nature of human beings from the start. They were trained on this by the SVR and its not something that common people tend to think about. This is where the hacker world and the spy world meet (well they meet in many other places too but go with it for now) The hackers take advantage of the same flaws in our “systems” (cognitive as well as technical) to get what they want.

In this case, these illegals actually did gain some traction and some had access to potential sources that I think, had yet to be plumbed. Perhaps they were getting close to someone and this is what tripped the arrest cycle. Perhaps there are other more arcane reasons for that… As you may be seeing now that there is a prisoner swap with Russia in the works. Once again I direct you to Boris’ comments on their aegis:

What Russian intelligence in striving to get is secret information (political, economic, industrial, military, etc) and have a chance to influence decision-making and public opinion in favor of Russia. This is why agents are recruited or penetrated into sensitive or politically important targets.

The role of illegals is threefold:

1. to act as cut-outs between important sources and the Centre (directly or via the SVR station);
2. to serve as talent-spotters finding potential candidates for further intelligence cultivation and possible recruitment (a rather long and complex process, where the illegals only act at its early stage); and
3. to establish the right contacts that would allow other intelligence operators (members of the SVR station) or the Centre (visiting intelligence officers under different covers, journalists, diplomats or scientists tasked by the SVR) to get intelligence information and/or receive favors that the Centre is interested in.

These illegals are really, like I said, facilitators for the real spies that are sent to our shores.They were practiced in the old school tradecraft of spying and were they not already under surveillance, they may not have been noticed at all by our counterintelligence services. Which brings me to another issue with all the reporting on this espionage round up.

Tradecraft VS High Tech Espionage:

As mentioned by Boris, the tradecraft angle is not only history for the SVR, KGB, or the GRU. Much as I believe that it is still in play for ALL of the intelligence services throughout the world. These practices are tired and true. They have been used to great effect by all spies and only are really heard about in books, film, or news stories like the ones today when the spies were busted.

Since the days of 007 on the screen, we have seen the Q branch and all their toys as a high profile part of “spying” when in reality there is some of that (see H. Kieth Melton’s books) but mostly, it has been the old school that has won the day for spies. The use of things like a Shortwave radio and a “One Time Pad” are still used today because they cannot easily be broken. The use of rapid burst radio transmissions too was a bit of a shock to me in the current case, but once I thought about it, the use of a rapid burst to a local “rezidentura” makes a lot of sense given the amount of RF we have placed into our landscape today. It would easily be lost in the noise and thus, a good way to go about secret communications.

Meanwhile, the use of “Brush Passes” “Chalking”, “Pass Phrases” and other old school techniques for communicating and passing intelligence never have lost their usefulness. Just because one can create an email dead drop on Gmail today pretty easily, does not infer that it is at all safer than meeting someone on the park bench, or leaving a postal stamp on a kiosk as a marker that “somethings up” These things hide within the static of every day life and often, because of “situational awareness” levels, go totally un-noticed. The other means via the “technology” of today’s internet is more circumspect because of so many factors. One of the primary of those being the hacking and cyberwar issues that are ongoing.

Even today, the news is full of “Perfect Citizen” an uber protection plan and technology that the NSA wants to use to protect the national infrastructure. How will it do this? By monitoring ALL of the traffic that it can and look for anomalous behavior. As the technology becomes more prevalent so too are the chances of your secret communications being discovered. It made sense that given the NSA’s power, the illegals and the SVR decided that old school was still the best bet. It was however, that the more technical approaches (i.e. netbooks, crypto, and adhoc networks) failed them, only proving my hypothesis above.

As an aside to LizzieB, the old bury the money under or near the bottle thing.. It still does work *heh*

The Final Analysis:

Much has yet to be told about these illegals as well as the reasons why this group was busted 10 years later. Why now? Why this sudden trade for spies? What tipped the FBI off to these spies in the first place? Was it indeed the defector I spoke of? We may never know. What we can deduce though, is this:

• Spies never went away
• Spies aren’t just stealing IP from corporations
• Hey you, you with the access to the important people… You are a target
• Technology does not always win the day, sometimes it is the weakest link
• We have not seen the last of the SVR, KGB, Mossad, MI5 etc etc…
• Russian spies do like their Vodka and sauna’s but they aren’t all Boris and Natasha caricatures

A full text of the cited Boris interview can be found HERE

CoB