You just know there are some tech geeks in the Military who are so stoked that we’re not focusing on the Taliban anymore. It’s a lot harder to stage this kind of attack on people who don’t have computers.
best quote is at the end.
“Cyber Command has been around seven years now,” one former officer said, “and I think they’re under pressure to do something.”
Imagine the pressure all the folks behind the $1.5 trillion (and counting) Joint Strike Fighter program must be feeling.
They’ve found the nirvana of government jobs.
They do nothing even remotely useful, and thus face absolutely no criticism from the “fiscally responsible” wing of American politics.
I hear they managed to break into the HBO Go account of the #2 man in ISIS, and changed his password. That’ll show 'em.
“cyber bombs”
That’s what happens when I hit the street taco truck to many times.
Shaking my head. If this is true (and I expect it is), why are we broadcasting our success with this? It just lets the enemy know what we are up to. It mirrors the time one Senator tried to sound important and stated publicly that we had been tracking Bin Laden by his cell phone (or satellite phone) usage, and immediately, that source of intel went dark…
Why are you asking such a dumb question on a crypto-ISIS message board?
#Death to America!
There is surely a psyops component to this: “you can’t hide from us”. The chances are that IS doesn’t have a SECOPS team to manage all the devices used in the field anyway.
Or they will frantically start searching all their computers for malware that isn’t in fact there at all.
Propaganda is an essential part of modern warfare. This is simple propaganda, mostly meant for the home front. Unlike the phone example, it’s generic enough to be basically useless from an adversarial perspective, but it scores points for the domestic agenda.
has the capability to identify when someone is using an encrypted application and then target the communications infrastructure to make it harder, if not impossible, to use that application.
That sounds very close to simple bandwidth throttling.
I’d imagine that, aside from the possibility of pure preening, paranoia and people shutting things down may be the intended result:
One objective of signals intelligence is gleaning useful information from what the opponent is emitting, intentionally or otherwise. The other objective is to force the opponent to deny themselves useful capabilities because of the risk that you are able to gather enough information from the emissions of those systems that the danger outweighs the benefits.
If you are really just hoping to go data mining, yes, you want to be as quiet as possible about it to avoid spooking the herd. If that is only part of your plan, or if the herd is already spooked, vague-but-alarming reports of your capabilities have the potential to force the opposition to go to increasingly cumbersome measures to avoid possible compromise.
Since you can’t ‘just fix’ many vulnerabilities(either it’s something intrinsic to the system, like ‘yeah, a cellphone is a pretty decent RF beacon, if you actually want to be able to make and receive calls with it…’ or just because basically all software is awful and odds are that your enemies know of at least some flaws that you don’t); plausible assertions that you are exploiting someone’s vulnerabilities leave them with the choice of either risking continued exploitation, or sacrificing parts of their own infrastructure because the risk is just too high that it isn’t…really their infrastructure anymore.
This doesn’t mean that just any combination of secrecy and bombast is the correct solution in a given situation; just that bragging about your capabilities is actually a long-recognized and quite useful other half of just spying on stuff.
Comcast is running our national security now? Kee-rist, I’d hate to see what Uncle Sam pays those fuckers.
And once ISIS starts reading BB, then it’s all over but the crying.
Why aren’t you doing something about ISIS?
At som point, the government needs to justify its existence, so that the American people can make an informed decision at the ballot box. If everything that is important is secret, then what oversight can there truly be?
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