No trust without independent control

ik ging geen afscheid nemen zonder nog 1 keer te overlopen wat de afgelopen 10 jaar via Belsec werd uitgevoerd en al dan niet verwezenlijkt of aangepakt en wat de belangrijkste strijdpunten zijn en blijven.

Zonder statuut of bescherming van securityresearchers zelfs als bloggers is het de laatste maanden steeds moeilijker geworden om zonder kleerscheuren dit soort activiteit te blijven voortdoen. Na 10 jaar inzet werd het dan ook tijd om dit soort stress en risico's aan me te laten voorbijgaan. 

De Financieel Economische Tijd van morgen. 

hopelijk iets dat de discussie zal kunnen voeden 

It is easy to say that and to look like the big defender of press freedom and the freedom of speech but it is another thing to do it and to withstand the pressure, threats and insinuations 

I cried for the people of Charlie Hebdo, a paper I have known and loved and with which we grew up and even if we didn't read it or didn't always agree with it we were happy to see that it was still there 

The editor - who was the main target - said he didn't care what happened to him because he didn't have a mortgage, money or a family to care for. He just lived for his paper and his work and thoughts and those of others. This gave him an enormous freedom and you see by the reactions of other papers and press agencies that not everybody has that freedom or that courage. 

So after ten years in which we several times had professional threats, lawyers and were just walking on a rope between two buildings without a safety net, being confronted with a psychological operation against me because some-one out there thought that this was the way to get to my sources. 

And even than as a blogger I was not protected as journalists are against lawsuits, as a security-activists I had only the relationships of trust and confidence with the different people I was working with but there was no formal statue or procedure, I was totally on my own 

All those years, we just kept going, sometimes retreating to protect ourselves or our sources (because people are always more important thatn 'causes') or myself. 

I thought that I had to be more afraid of amateurs than of professionals because you never know what they want to do next and how they are going to try to execute it. The attack on Charlie Hebdo is clearly the work of amateurs that were maybe well trained in the military execution of a firefight but not in the preparation of an operation. 

So the closing down of this blog and more specificially the Belsec operations and .be monitoring and the actions with the cert, privacycommission and other institutions is a virtual death which is so little compared to the carnage in Paris. 

So the question is not  how can we find the attackers, keep Charlie Hebdo going and protect our official media against such attacks, but how can we extend the rights of investigation and publication in all the media platforms - officially recognized or not. 

http://observing.skynetblogs.be/

this is NOT an infosecurityblog it is a security-risk-war blog of which infosecurity is only a small part (and not even necessarily important)

we are NOT watching the Belgian internet for leaks and vulnerabilities anymore, this is the job of the state and the state has to do its work as it has to

this is just some observations, links and informations I share while I am reading

and this only because i am so bored reading the belgian press - sorry guys (but I know you don't have the resources and space you need to make reading belgian press more interesting)

have patience with closing down this blog and service

and moving over to the other one

if you are in belgium and interested about belgian infosecurity we are closing with a bang and if you thought that the presentations on tv and radio and in the press were a bang

await the final exclusive interview about 10 years of fighting for a more secure belgian internet

gloves are off

the archives will be coming online in the coming weeks

all this work will be finished by the end of january - stay on this blog

we have stopped

monitoring pastebin for belgian leaks

monitoring zone-h for belgian hacks

monitoring securityreports for belgian insecurity or compromised sites

monitoring the belgian web with googledorks for insecurity and unresponsable datacollection

we will just be reading and analyzing and thinking and having fun

stay tuned

we can't publish the link due to harrassment by lawyers of Mensura but you can find it easily if you are a little webwise (which shows how stupid these lawyers are)

it also shows what I have said on tv - once on the web always somewhere on the web

so the banks, paypal and others should have taken already all the dispositions to protect the people

new are the old ones of buyway.be (you know that nobody is responsable for overseeing the security and their financial balances of online creditcompanies in Belgium - NO ONE)

update 21/12

1. my sources will stay online and may stay updated

the netvibes are a few hundred RSS feeds

the diigo are a nearly 200.000 links of which we will be liberating a few thousand that will be liberated in the coming days - they were private awaiting treatment

the lists with leaks and insecure belgium are a nice list of leaked data and insecure belgium sites that were hacked or are hackable - if you like to read than you should look at the list documents

the torguide is one of the best around

the twitterlist of leaks and other sources are a nice collection to start with

in January we will close down the following older blogs  insecure.skynetblogs.be, scams.skynetblogs.be be-hacked.skynetblogs.be -  we will place here the links to the pdf archives and others

2. I thank everybody for the support and I thank those who have enough trust in me to understand that I have always been truthful and that the only way to work with sources and contacts is by being totally open about your intentions and the information you have and I won't change that

3. in january I will help with some of the biggest breakthroughs in the fight for privacy in Belgium of the latest 10 years. But not in the limelight

4. meanwhile we are sliding to 2015 and we can only hope that it may only become better because it can't get worse with cybersecurity in Belgium than has been 2014

-------------------------------

Some people have been playing a trick on me and my family

this is not worth it

you don't play with my family

after ten years, I have done enough

I have also a life

and other priorities 

It is for the state to invest and to do its work

not me and surely not against my family 

bye

and a happy 2015

I am not coming back. Not this time

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

just to make some things clear

* I never hacked, I don't know hackers and I am not Rex Mundi, never was and I don't know who he is

* I am open for new opportunities or possibilities to work for a safer internet or network somewhere - only serious offers this time - but this blog will not be updated again but we will update through this post about the clean-up actions and what we will make or not make available

* I am available for other freelance work

what is the scenario they are doing all those exercises for ?

situation getting more nervous and dangerous in that region every week

when I started on the internet I had lists with IP numbers of servers on a page

dns and domainnames only came later

the copyrightholders want to go back to that

they want to marginalize copyrightinfringing sites like that

but it can bring down one of the most essential parts of the internet as we know it today

"The MPAA’s legal argument centers on the claim that DNS records are working as an index or directory rather than simply routing data. If that argument holds, then the DNS links could be vulnerable to the same takedown notices used to strike torrent links from Google searches. The net effect would be similar to site-blocking, making it as easy to unplug a URL as it is to take down a YouTube video. It would also cast DNS providers as legally responsible for all the sites on the web, the same way YouTube is responsible for every video uploaded to its network. For many providers, simply managing the flood of notices might create a logistical nightmare.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/16/7401769/the-mpaa-wants...

why Russia thinks it can bully its borderstates militarily

into becoming a member of their socalled security alliance

in which you see why Ukraine is the missing domino as are uzbekistan, Georgia and azerajan

while trying to keep them from joining NATO

and also here you will that the whole geopolitical map changes when Ukraine joins NATO or is linked to it

because if you are linked to it, you are linked to the US and the US has the biggest military machine (even if it doesn't want to use it so massively as it did several times)

and you don't have to be afraid anymore of all those Russian troops at your border because there is a much greater and better shield once they begin to understand that that is necessary to keep the peace - even a cold war peace

and luckily Putin is doing is utter best the last year to convince even the most outspoken defenders of appeasement that it won't work and that Putin is clearly looking for a fight somewhere - the only question is where and when

source http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/16/7403535/apple-halts-online-sales-to-russia-as-the-ruble-plunges-in-value

it means that if this continues trust in anything Russian will be gone - this is the speed with which things can change - as we have seen in 2008 here during the financial crisis - wednesday you were still a major bank and on friday you were broke

sorry guys if you are still living in dreamland but it is time the hard reality begins to settle in

"I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not. The Ohio Replacement Program was conceived to modernize the sea-based part of the nation’s nuclear force — the only part of that force that is certain to survive if Russia, China or some other major nuclear power launches a surprise attack in, say, 2050. The reason why is that the Navy’s ballistic-missile subs patrol silently beneath the surface of the world’s oceans, where enemies cannot find them; the Air Force’s bombers and silo-based missiles, on the other hand, are in known locations that can be easily targeted
http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2014/12/15/supe...

you don't need to put it into writing and even not in a law

that functionality will be in all telecom technology quite soon - because it has been asked by so many not so telco's in not so democratic countries or where this has become standard practice since ever

source http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2014/12/government-documents-reveal-canadian-telcos-envision-surveillance-ready-networks-2/

from the technical documents (you can download withoiut becoming member) https://www.scribd.com/doc/250135436/Public-Safety-ATIP-Telecom-Equipment

the technical information has been blackened so you can't know what these new standarts will be as each of the firms (and one of the heads of Huwai in Belgium told me personally) will say that officially these interception backdoors are NOT in their infrastructure

Huwai is installed in the Belgacom and Telenet networks although some have serious questions about that

well, imagine the passwords of this kind of emailboxes being published on the web and nobody tries to take down the link and so everybody has access to these boxes

this is but one publication but the same team published other leaks also in revenge

and about the takedown

the piratebay said that because they were using 12 virtual servers in 12 different locations it would be impossible to take them down ..... but this is the theory of virtualisation but in reality there is always a mother or a server that takes all the load while the rest just thinks that you will never try to take them down and that they will never need so much power (and keep down the costs)

another thing is that if you work with domainnames than you have to control the dns server and the ip addresses to which they are linked but if you take down one ip address and it is not possible to add another one than you are cooked

taking down infrastructure like this and TOR takes much more time but in the end you will take it down - except as with Wikileaks several years ago thousands of people start serving a copy on their own servers

maybe this is a model for piratebay to follow

"Yesterday, Bloomberg News reported that hackers, likely from Russia, caused a 2008 explosion on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline in Turkey. According to Bloomberg, the BTC pipeline attack “Opened [a] New Cyberwar Era,” two years before the Stuxnet worm derailed Iranian nuclear centrifuges. The report is significant because it moves back the timeline for alleged state-sponsored cyber attacks that caused destruction in the physical world. (I use “attack” throughout this post in the colloquial sense, without reference to whether an “attack” is an “armed attack” for purposes of international law.)

But the pipeline explosion report also highlights another important issue. It took six years for the explosion to be publicly revealed as a cyber attack, and confusion about whether an incident is an accident or a cyber attack may be a common problem going forward. Although lot of attention focuses on cybersecurity attribution as a question of who carried out an intrusion, the BTC explosion exemplifies an analytically prior attribution question: what caused an incident, a cyber attack or a simple malfunction?http://justsecurity.org/18334/cyber-attribution-problems-...

and so if people get the right to respond immediately to such a cyberattack, the chance that they will be responding to the wrong country and are falling into a second trap is much bigger than anybody realises

in the US there is even talk of responding with military attacks

source http://www.icij.org/blog/2014/12/i-acted-conviction-pwc-whistleblower-speaks-out

the article shows some interesting things.

First it was said that these agreements were so secret that they were hardly communicated about in PWC but here we have some-one who had access to them in a database and was not implemented in setting them up becasue he was disgusted by them.

Secondly he took them with him when he left the firm (like Snowden) but nobody checked what he did, what he knew and what he took with him, even if there were documents that were considered highly secret

third he lost control over the documents and who got them and who did something with them just as Snowden lost control over his documents in which parts are going around the world

fourth there are others and they are hunting them down, one after another and I only hope for them that those who have used the documents have found all the obvious and secret indicators that will facilitate their job (one stupid but efficient trick is to change a letter in each copy)

source http://theantimedia.org/playlist-used-by-the-cia-to-torture-detainees/

I imagine listening to Sesame street for 18 hours every day makes you so mad you just want to get out of there

Deicide: Fuck Your God

Dope: Die MF Die, Take Your Best Shot

Eminem: White America, Kim

Barney & Friends: theme song

Drowning Pool: Bodies

Metallica: Enter Sandman

Meow Mix: commercial jingle

Janeane Garofalo/Ben Stiller: chapter from the Feel This Audiobook

Sesame Street: theme song

David Gray: Babylon

AC/DC: Shoot to Thrill, Hell’s Bells

Bee Gees: Stayin’ Alive

Tupac: All Eyez On Me

Christina Aguilera: Dirrty

Neil Diamond: America

Rage Against the Machine: unspecified songs

Don McLean: American Pie

Saliva: Click Click Boom

Matchbox Twenty: Cold

(hed)pe: Swan Dive

Prince: Raspberry Beret

very interesting idea

but they are not a million .....

but in present days you don't need to be with millions to have an impact (you need to have the attention of the media - even for the wrong reasons)

source http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/15/dresden-police-pegida-germany-far-right

it is easier if they are just plain nazi's and difficult if they have gone into deep undercover (of the simple people who are not nazi's but disturbed by ISIS and militant islamic priests and movements)

here you can follow those rewrites https://twitter.com/RuGovEdits_en

some cloudproviders have been hacked over the last days

this is an alert, read more on the problem by following the link

"Shellshock is far from "over", with many devices still not patched and out there ready for exploitation. One set of the devices receiving a lot of attention recently are QNAP disk storage systems. QNAP released a patch in early October, but applying the patch is not automatic and far from trivial for many users[1]. Our reader Erich submitted a link to an interesting Pastebin post with code commonly used in these scans [2]

The attack targets a QNAP CGI script, "/cgi-bin/authLogin.cgi", a well known vector for Shellshock on QNAP devices [3]. This script is called during login, and reachable without authentication. The exploit is then used to launch a simple shell script that will download and execute a number of additional pieces of malware:
https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Worm+Backdoors+and+Secu...

and this comment shows why automatic patching is so important

"I have one of the affected units. In the firmware update section of the admin interface, the closest thing I can find for an auto-updater is a checkbox that reads, "Automatically check if a new version is available when logging into the NAS web administration interface." From there, you have to manually tell the system to update -- as far as I can tell, there is no option to automatically update the unit. And the manufacturer doesn't send out emails to notify users when there is an update.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/12/worm-exploits-nas...