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Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Start your day with intelligence. Get The OODA Daily Pulse.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
The Baltimore Sun reports that Gen (Ret) Clapper is dusting off his fishing pole: After clashing with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the director of the government’s third largest intelligence agency will be leaving his position in June, according to current and former government officials. For the past four years, James R. Clapper Jr. has…
The Washington Times updates us on the latest with former colleague Russ Tice: Russ Tice, a whistleblower who was dismissed from the NSA last year, stated in letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees that he is prepared to testify about highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that were improperly carried out by…
Just in case you thought CIA officers were in danger of not being able to set foot in Rome any time soon . . . The mainstream U.S. media outlets have failed to report a major terrorist plot against the U.S. – because it would tend to support President Bush’s use of NSA domestic surveillance,…
I really enjoy reading William Arkin’s Early Warning blog. Our opinions on the intel business don’t always jibe (96Bs and 98Cs will never get along all that well) but in his latest post he hits what I think is a home run: And sorry for being cynical, but when I lived in Washington, from 1978-1993,…
Very clever. Makes me wish I’d kept up my script-writing skillz. http://www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks
Thomas Joscelyn writes in the Weekly Standard about James Risen and his sources: On NBC’s “Today” show this morning, New York Times scribe Jim Risen told Katie Couric that he hopes he will not have to reveal his sources to a grand jury and declared his story to be the exact opposite of the Plame…
Given my background I may be slightly biased, but I’ve never been a big fan of leakers of classified information. The whole point of keeping stuff classified is that it isn’t supposed to be out on the front page of the NY Times. That we tend to over-classify things is another issue. The bottom line…
From Newsday: Letters home filled with tales of death and danger, bravery and boredom are a wartime certainty. And now, as hundreds of soldiers overseas have started keeping Internet journals about the heat, the homesickness, the bloodshed, word speeds from the battlefront faster than ever. More and more, though, U.S. military commanders in Iraq and…
And they said that no one from the JTF would ever amount to anything: The spookiest venture capital firm on the planet has hired a new CEO. In-Q-Tel – the CIA’s venture capital unit – has tapped Amit Yoran as the successor to Gilman Louie, according to a report in the Washington Business Journal.…
Such an effort is almost a waste of time (almost) since you’re starting long after the gun has gone off, but it is a nice way to reboot the mental OS out of hibernation and get back into the swing of things. So, where to begin?This gem from Reuters is a nice starting point: A…
. . . another reason why the polygraph isn’t a very good tool for screening out potential spies and leakers: Clearly the people who are leaking about Plame, the rendition program, NSA interceptions, etc. are in positions that require periodic testing. Either their kung fu is so strong they can’t be accurately read by the…
A month is what the House thinks is appropriate: The House of Representatives agreed to extend a controversial domestic surveillance law this afternoon, but it limited the extension to one month and rejected a carefully brokered compromise from the Senate that had given the law a six-month reprieve. Prediction I: Post-holiday showdown takes place on…
A great start to what is going to be a multi-part series on DHS in the WaPo today: Born out of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, DHS was initially expected to synthesize intelligence, secure borders, protect infrastructure and prepare for the next catastrophe. For most of those missions, the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission recently…
Much rending of hair and gnashing of teeth has been taking place since a leak in the New York Times revealed the existence of a Presidentially authorized secret program to intercept and exploit the communications of suspected terrorists that might be operating in the US. Under a presidential order signed in 2002, [NSA] has monitored…
Via Judeoscope: [Hezbollah] — regarded by many as even more sophisticated than al-Qaeda — has sharpened its counterintelligence expertise over the years by keeping a step ahead of Mossad, Israel’s secret service. [They have] become ever more adept at intercepting electronic surveillance, penetrating cellphone networks and recruiting computer science technicians. “Hezbollah has a long history…
No one likes to lose their hard-earned money from their cryptocurrency investments, however, some unforeseen events do manage to wipe out investors’ wealth from their trade wallets. One of the popular practices would be hackers luring investors into appealing offers on social media platforms making them look like clickbait in a certain cryptocurrency. Just one…
Ronin hackers have transferred the stolen assets from Ethereum to the Bitcoin network, according to new findings by blockchain investigator and developer ₿liteZero. Recall that after the Ronin bridge hack in March, the attackers moved the $625 million worth of USDC and ETH to Ethereum-based crypto mixer Tornado Cash, making it difficult for authorities to trace…
Cybersecurity analyst Serpent has revealed his picks for the most dastardly crypto and nonfungible token (NFT) scams currently active on Twitter. The analyst, who has 253,400 followers on Twitter, is the founder of artificial intelligence and community-powered crypto threat mitigation system, Sentinel. In a 19-part thread posted on Aug. 21, Serpent outlined how scammers target inexperienced crypto…
Hackers have exploited a zero-day vulnerability in General Bytes Bitcoin ATM servers to steal cryptocurrency from customers. When customers would deposit or purchase cryptocurrency via the ATM, the funds would instead be siphoned off by the hackers. General Bytes is the manufacturer of Bitcoin ATMs that, depending on the product, allow people to purchase or sell…
The irony about needing accountants who understand digital assets is that blockchains themselves are transaction ledgers with automated record-keeping—a blockchain is a giant check register. The technical properties of blockchains means data can never be deleted, only added or read, while transactions and balances can be instantly verified with 100% certainty through the protocols themselves.…
There is a major earthquake happening in the sphere of digital assets, which is expected to create shockwaves that will impact tech not only in the real world but also in the metaverse. These potentially revolutionary changes appear in an innocuous-looking, if lengthy, consultation paper titled “Digital Assets: Consultation paper,” published by The Law Commission of…
It’s going to take more than a months-long cryptocurrency free fall to squash the mounting ransomware problem, cyber incident responders and threat analysts tell Axios. Why it matters: Companies have been struggling to fight off an abundance of ransomware hackers in recent years, but recent optimism over a crypto-crash-fueled drop in attacks might be short-lived. During a…
Interoperability protocol Celer Network has asked its users to revoke the approval for several contracts after shutting down its cBridge over a suspected Domain Name System (DNS) hijacking. According to the project’s initial analysis, there was suspicious DNS activity around 7:00 pm UTC on Wednesday. However, at the time of writing, the platform is still…
Infamous North Korean hacking group Lazarus is attempting to target Apple Inc. Mac users via fake job offers. Detailed Aug. 16 by security researchers at ESET s.r.o on Twitter, the new Lazarus campaign involves phony emails impersonating Coinbase Inc. developer job listings. The fake job emails include an attachment containing malicious files that can compromise both…
On Wednesday, March 9, President Joe Biden released an executive order regarding cryptocurrency and how his administration intends to approach the rapidly growing industry in 2022. However, after the release of this executive order, the question remains: Is mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency imminent in the U.S.? It’s evident that Joe Biden and his administration are…
If 2018 was the Year of the Hack for centralized crypto exchanges, decentralized blockchain bridges seem destined to win that honor this year. Over $1.9 billion was stolen in cross-chain hacks in the first half of 2022, according to a new blog post by crypto analytic firm Chainalysis. Cross-chain bridges have come under fire in recent weeks…
sudoswap is making NFT trading even easier. Launched in May 2022, sudoswap is crypto’s first NFT automated market maker. The Ethereum-based platform functions similarly to Uniswap, letting users trustlessly trade assets through user-funded liquidity pools. However, instead of trading between two fungible tokens, sudoswap users can trade between NFTs and ETH. At first glance, it might be…
Earlier this week a new type of stablecoin (aUSD), built on a platform (Acala), which itself was built on a blockchain (Polkadot), fell from its $1 peg to $0.009 (which rounds to zero as far as I’m concerned), following an attack on one of the platform’s liquidity pools. If the words following “attack on” seem…
Hackers suspected to be from the North Korean Lazarus group tried their luck at stealing cryptocurrency from deBridge Finance, a cross-chain protocol that enables the decentralized transfer of assets between various blockchains. The threat actor used a phishing email to trick company employees into launching malware that collected various information from Windows systems and allowed the…
According to a recent study conducted by the University of Technology Sydney, researchers estimated that insider trading occurs in 10% to 25% of cryptocurrency listings. In deriving the conclusion, researchers first sampled 146 token listing announcements on cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase between September 25, 2018, and May 1, 2022. Afterward, researchers examined the price movements of the…
From Eminem to Snoop Dog, Tony Hawk to Lionel Messi, William Shatner to Brie Larson, music, sports, and Hollywood celebrities have eagerly jumped on the NFT (non-fungible token) bandwagon. Whether launching their own collections, purchasing an expensive profile pic, or simply endorsing new artists, celebrities have embraced blockchain technology and have been extolling the virtues…
While most of the best Wi-Fi 6 routers have built-in security, Gryphon’s new Wi-Fi 6E router is one of just a few that will use Blockchain for this purpose; through a project called MetaSafe, it will protect passwords and other valuable information. Although a single Gryphon 6E can provide a strong Wi-Fi signal to a 3,000…
The next generation web — Web3 — has been hailed as more secure than the current incarnation of cyberspace, but a report released Tuesday warns that may not be so. While Web3 may be difficult to subvert on an infrastructure level, there are other points of attack that may offer threat actors more opportunity for mischief…
Losses arising from cryptocurrency hacks jumped nearly 60% in the first seven months of the year to $1.9 billion, propelled by a surge in funds stolen from decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, according to a blog post from blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis released on Tuesday. In the same period last year, stolen funds from hacking amounted…
The U.S. Federal Reserve on Tuesday issued additional guidance for banks considering activities involving cryptocurrencies, emphasizing that firms must notify the Fed beforehand and make sure whatever they do is legally permitted. The Fed said in a statement that while cryptocurrencies could present “potential opportunities” to banks, firms needed to make sure they had systems in…
2022 has been a lucrative year for hackers preying on the nascent Web3 and decentralized finance (DeFi) spaces, with more than $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency fleeced in several high-profile hacks to date. Cross-chain protocols have been particularly hard hit, with Axie Infinity’s $650 million Ronin Bridge hack accounting for a significant portion of stolen…
Earlier this year, Roman Semenov, co-founder Tornado Cash, a mixing service for cryptocurrencies, said that it would be “technically impossible” for sanctions to be enforced against decentralized protocols. “All we do is write code and publish it on GitHub,” Semenov told Bloomberg, referring to the internet hosting service. “This is pretty close to the definition of…
Monero, the privacy-oriented decentralized cryptocurrency project, underwent a planned hard fork event on Saturday, introducing new features to boost its privacy and security. The network upgrade was delayed from July 13, when it was first planned for release, due to multi-sig security fixes, critical security patches, and more time needed to resolve hardware wallet incompatibility issues. Completed…
When it comes to crime, illicit activity is still abundant regardless of crypto volatility, according to a new Chainalysis report. “Cryptocurrency transaction volumes this year for both illicit and legitimate entities are tracking behind 2021 through July,” the report stated. “Overall, criminal activity appears to be more resilient in the face of price declines: Illicit volumes…
The now bankrupt Three Arrows Capital (3AC) presented signs of mismanagement before the cryptocurrency hedge fund’s ultimate collapse. A report from New York Magazine reveals that 3AC co-founders Kyle Davies and Su Zhu faced criticism from banks and other traders before the company even entered the crypto market. In its early days, the Singapore-based 3AC got…
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence