Team of American Hackers and Emirati Spies Discussed Attacking The Intercept (theintercept.com) 49
The Intercept: Operatives at a controversial cybersecurity firm working for the United Arab Emirates government discussed targeting The Intercept and breaching the computers of its employees, according to two sources, including a member of the hacking team who said they were present at a meeting to plan for such an attack. The firm, DarkMatter, brought ex-National Security Agency hackers and other U.S. intelligence and military veterans together with Emirati analysts to compromise the computers of political dissidents at home and abroad, including American citizens, Reuters revealed in January. The news agency also reported that the FBI is investigating DarkMatter's use of American hacking expertise and the possibility that it was wielded against Americans.
The campaign against dissidents and critics of the Emirati government, code-named Project Raven, began in Baltimore. A 2016 Intercept article by reporter Jenna McLaughlin revealed how the Maryland-based computer security firm CyberPoint assembled a team of Americans for a contract to hone UAE's budding hacking and surveillance capabilities, leaving some recruits unsettled. Much of the CyberPoint team was later poached by DarkMatter, a firm with close ties to the Emirati government and headquartered just two floors from the Emirati equivalent of the NSA, the National Electronic Security Authority (which later became the Signals Intelligence Agency).
The campaign against dissidents and critics of the Emirati government, code-named Project Raven, began in Baltimore. A 2016 Intercept article by reporter Jenna McLaughlin revealed how the Maryland-based computer security firm CyberPoint assembled a team of Americans for a contract to hone UAE's budding hacking and surveillance capabilities, leaving some recruits unsettled. Much of the CyberPoint team was later poached by DarkMatter, a firm with close ties to the Emirati government and headquartered just two floors from the Emirati equivalent of the NSA, the National Electronic Security Authority (which later became the Signals Intelligence Agency).
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OpenBSD is only ultra secure in it's default configuration. That, of course, lets you start out rather secure and carefully assess the security risk in every piece of software you build or install onto the base system. But for everyday regular use, many users would almost immediately change something up that compromises the system.
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For ordinary users a better option is Qubes OS. It's Linux based. Every app runs in its own VM. The network stack runs in a separate VM. Data can only be moved between them by user interaction.
These days though the bigger risk is online accounts, particularly email which is used as the key to many others. Presumably staff at The Intercept have decently secure email, with proper 2FA and the like.
What is The Intercept? (Score:1)
The summary should tell us what The Intercept is. When I search for it at Google, all I am finding is stuff about football interceptions.
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RTFA and you, too, can go right to it.
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Not the point. You said (I assume it was you) you wanted to know what Intercept was. Well, click on the damn link and it takes you to, ta da! Intercept! where you can find out for yourself. Here the damn magazine is being presented to you right in front of your face and you want to Google it? Good Lord!
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Yeah, it's not like there's a link in the summary title, or anything...
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He got a lot of authoritarians mad at him.
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It's a thing owned by ebay's Pierre Omidyar. That should make you suspicious of anything they print. There's always big money behind it.
And there's not big money behind the UAE?
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Not really. Arabs don't have the same sort of dynasties as European royalty. The Saud family, who run Saudi Arabia, for instance, are just the pikers who made the best deal with the Westerners at the right time.
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The summary should tell us what The Intercept is.
The correct question is, "Who is The Intercept . . . ?"
And the answer is, "You are . . . number 6."
Be seeing you.
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Nah, it's definitely 'what'. Then once we know 'what' it is, we can start asking 'who' if it happens to be a 'who'. We are still trying to figure out 'what'.
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