Car Registrations May Point to Massive GRU Security Breach
bellingcat.com
bellingcat.com
Pretty sure the OPM breach holds that record.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/0...
Former NSA senior counsel Joel Brenner called the material “a gold mine for a foreign intelligence service,” declaring, “This is not the end of American human intelligence, but it’s a significant blow.” (Points to the CIA, which refused to have anything to do with the OPM and thus kept its own employees’ information safe.)Also, some interesting tidbits here: https://twitter.com/alexgabuev/status/1048153070956367873
bellingcat is basically the opposite of wikileaks. rather than repackaging leaks from insiders, they just repackage information that is there for everyone to see. can't fault em for that.
Are you implying that someone might slip some polonium into the punch at the office holiday party?
while i have no idea whether they are intentionally partisan or not, their analyses so far have been highly damaging to russian interests, going all the way back to when they found the russian proxy group in ukraine that shot down that airliner. they're also stepping on russia's toes in their analyses on the syrian war.
the thing that worries me is that bellingcat reports on strategically relevant tactical-level things. if they just reported on everyday tactical stuff -- which they do too -- it might disrupt russian narratives regarding their involvement in certain conflicts or whatever, but that wouldn't ever be a problem for bellingcat itself.
russia couldn't give a damn if bellingcat ruins their narratives regarding who is fighting where because they can maintain deniability, but if it's ruining their operational capabilities i assume they take it more seriously.
How long has this been known? The time between this information becoming available to the time all public databases are searched for this address matches is probably measured in minutes.
They are so poor.
If you run an org with that level of security, you'd want to obfuscate public databases with some fake details.
Pretty sloppy. Anyone know if the blurred text has any interesting information?
They were the leading grass-roots org that covered the eastern Ukrainian conflict really well.
I'm not claiming they're not - I have no idea. Thus the question.
This is a common misconception; to properly verify their investigative work (not just the specific findings), you also have to know what they possibly found and didn't show. That basically means replicating their work, and being more informed about their subjects than themselves.
E.g. for the MH17 investigation where they disprove many of the lies from the Kremlin and decisively identify the specific BUK system used, the route it took, who was at command and their specific role within the Russian MoD all via open sources, social media, etc: https://www.bellingcat.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/mh17-3...
The Russian government made many claims after MH17 was shot down, some attributing the anti-aircraft attack to Ukraine and some categorically denying their involvement. Bellingcat with their supporters gathered tons of evidence that shows dispositive proof which contradicts both sides of the Russian story. It's common knowledge now that the Russians carried out the attack and Bellingcat is largely to thank for that being public -- I'm sure various security services were performing their own attribution work, but it's nice to have plain reading material to prove so.
Though they've expanded now:
>"Up until about a year ago, we were mostly volunteers and I had three or four people working with me," he says. "Over the last year we have expanded to 10 members of staff plus a translation team and our volunteers. So we've expanded quite significantly."
Although I won't link to it, you may be entertained by the paranoid ramblings RT.com shares about him. Higgins is most certainly neither an altruistic white knight (western view) or amateur propagandist (Russian view), the truth as usual is a bit more complex and lies buried somewhere in between.
But does it matter? The point of the story is humor, i.e. the collective stupidity of the entire unit! Appearantly none of these cyber-geniuses realized that if their personal car was registered to the base, then maybe everyone else’s was too, and that might not be a good idea.
I’m not sure how the fact that this wasn’t some random youtube “citizen journalism” makes it any less funny.
At the time of that he was mostly analysing internet footage though the latest stuff seems a bit more like Wikileaks type tips from insiders.
Burn.
Plus, it’s probably safe to assume this will be a gift that keeps giving. Presumably there are other GRU locations where whoever was in charge of registering GRU vehicles made the brilliant decision to register them all at. Identify one, and you get them all.
July 2018 Robert Mueller indictments: https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download
Name top of list: Viktor Borisovich Netyksho
Viktor's dissertation ["Mathematical and program support of computers, complexes and computer networks"]: http://www.dissercat.com/content/vosstanovlenie-parametrov-d...