Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware

>If I had to wager I'd always bet on national security agency of any powerful country lying, I don't see how anyone could come to another conclusion given their history.

Let's not pretend the FSB and MSS don't also lie constantly. That you're more familiar with the CIA lying is a testament to the free press of the US, not the other way around.

The point of the previous post is that it could easily be another security agency.

Sure, but isn't that true for any intelligence organization? CIA, NSA, FSB, MI5, Mossad, BND, etc?

I've come to a conclusion that, from the evolutionary standpoint, lying (and stealing) is one of the most important forms of the intelligent behavior. We see it in the animal world, so this unavoidably should be seen as such in the world of humans...

> If I had to wager I'd always bet on the CIA lying...

If an idea is reasonably feasible, I just assume someone, somewhere is already doing it.

The practical benefit is lowering my cognitive overhead, transaction costs.

Instead of guarding against every possible attack vector, I take basic precautionary measures, and then decide if any action is worth the risk, knowing full well it'll likely go terribly wrong.

So I always wear a mask, use a password wallet, drive just under the speed limit. Etc. It's habit, routine. Then when I step outside my personal safety bubble, it's an affirmative choice.

> Here is just one example:

Here's an example that in major parts contributed to a civil war going on to this day: The existence of a US military operation that manipulates social media trough sock-puppet accounts [0] was revealed around the same time Syrians were riled up to regime change trough.. social media [1].

Said social media presence kept announcing "Days of Rage" protests in Syria which initially no Syrian even showed up to.

These operations predate anything noteworthy Russia did on the same front, as most of that only started in the wake of the Ukraine revolution, which also saw plenty of blatant US interference [2]. Back then Russia was diplomatically very vocal about how unprecedented the foreign interference in Ukraine was.

What followed was St. Petersburg troll farms heavily targeting the US.

> We also know that hundreds of thousands of foreign-sponsored accounts on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc, have been banned over the years. (Please fact check by googling!)

How many domestic sponsored accounts have been banned? Zero, which means that on US based social media these kind of outfits are fighting with a heavy home game advantage [3], yet in most of these places that never comes up, it's always "Look out for the Russian/Chinese propagandist!", just like you are doing here. Which usually ends up targeting skeptical people not wholeheartedly endorsing the "Good vs Evil" narrative and not any actual propagandists.

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope...

[1] https://www.france24.com/en/20110203-syria-democracy-protest...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/john-mccain-uk...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...

Meanwhile all you people stoking nationalist fervor keep the global population of generally-well-meaning humans divided and hating each other instead of uniting into a whole that demands a better life for everyone. Please stop.

Eh, we are at a apoint where every self respecting political party has thousands of fake twitter accounts.

Russia has been pretty damn effective at this. (I took note of this when moderating r/europe on reddit when things started churning in ukraine)

China on the other hand not so much. I might go trough the effort of finding them again but someone here shared some American studies that showed china initially didn't really have such a presence of bots and the like on twitter, fb, etc like Russia at that point (i think around 2016 or 2017) but there were notable networks of bots targeting chinese people with anti china stuff.

A second study showed that i think 3 years later China had also gotten into this but that it was comparatively small scale and notably incompetent.

Yea, I cautiously share this viewpoint. I don’t want a cyber "Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!" event.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)

I think they're suggesting that a Russian security service (FSB?) might have asked Kaspersky to sit on it until the time was right. I don't think they were referring to the CIA, since yeah, that wouldn't make much sense.

Occam's razor hardly ever applies to stuff like this (news in the intelligence space) because deception is the whole game. A tendency to believe simpler explanations is something they exploit.

I think Occam's razor is often misapplied in this way. It's for explaining natural phenomena, not for surmising the intent of an intelligent entity with an incentive to deceive.

The timing is very sus given recent and ongoing spy mania in eastern europe (if you’ve been following)

not needed. if this was FSB or PSB then...

The Bloomberg articles are definitely the closest I've seen coming to substantive evidence, that is for sure.

I do, however, think that there is a big difference between being "affiliated with Russian intelligence" and providing an anti-DDOS service to the FSB, which is what this article is discussing, and really all it gives evidence for. Kapersky also provided services to the US intelligence services, I don't think it would be described as "affiliated with American intelligence."

This is not compelling evidence - the contractor had the "upload suspicious files" flag on and it uploaded flagged malware - this is consistent with pretty much every AV I've ever heard of and not evidence of a "Russian plot."

ur account is literally a cia simping one, hows Langley this time of year? make up any new lies about WMD yet?

I would like to point out that a russian security company almost certainly has ties with the russian government. Particularly a very large, well respected one. It would be like accusing oracle or amazon of having ties with the US government.

What is a C2?

Honest question, how do we know that this wasn't faked? What makes the 2014 date more problematic, and what would it be faked to be?

The year was given. Suppose it was found as early as 2014 on a device that had since been retired. That's one way to ballpark its creation year.

Similarly, the KGB (as later exposed by VENONA) had their fingers in extremely sensitive pies during the early cold war period.

I find stuff like this very interesting and hadn't heard of LITEMPO before, thanks!

That was part of it.

The other part was "Do what we tell you, or you'll be Joe Nacchioed"

In a 2013 interview, Marissa Meyer made it abundantly clear this is why Yahoo "voluntarily" joined PRISM. One can assume the rest were similarly influenced.

> Yeah, I highly doubt there's any targeting there. The big tech Co.s are practically fronts for the US Gov.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket (1935).

History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme.

It seems to be the natural state that centres of power co-operate with each other lest they lose their power.

Churches with Kings, Corporations with Government.

> Even then there will almost always be evidence if you log network traffic.

You'd need to know what to look for though. It was shown that the CIA can hide its communication in metadata of legitimate traffic which is then recovered at intermediate hops to the target. So, do you know precisely what an innocent DNS packet looks like to detect this anomaly?

Won't it led to an instant annihilation?