RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly warned today that Islamic terrorism “is threatening us today in a way that is worse than we experienced 16 years ago on 9/11” because of how terrorists’ operations have “metastasized and decentralized.”

Speaking at George Washington University, Kelly emphasized “we are under attack every single day” and “the threats against us are relentless.”

“We are under attack from criminals who think their greed justifies raping young girls at knifepoint, dealing poison to our youth, or just killing some of us for fun,” he said. “We are under attack from people who hate us, hate our freedoms, hate our laws, hate our values, hate the way we simply live our lives. We are under attack from failed states, cyber-terrorists, vicious smugglers, and sadistic radicals.”

In the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the DHS chief said, “we’ve grown somewhat accustomed” to the terror threat and “now question all the security, all of the issues that we have put in place to secure the nation, because it’s a little bit of an inconvenience at an airport, or a little bit of an inconvenience as you pass onto an airplane.”

“The threat to our nation, our American way of life, has not diminished… As I speak these words, the FBI has opened terrorism investigations in all of our 50 states. And since 2013, there have been 37 ISIS-linked plots to attack our country.”

Kelly noted estimates that as many as 10,000 Europeans fought with ISIS in Iraq and Syria, in addition to thousands more foreign fighters representing the rest of the globe including the Western Hemisphere, and “they have learned how to make IEDs, employ drones to drop ordnance, and acquired experience on the battlefield that, by our reports, they are beginning to increasingly bring home.”

“Many of these holy warriors will survive, come back to their home countries, where they will wreak murderous havoc in Europe, Asia, the Maghreb, the Caribbean and the United States,” he added.

Because many ISIS foreign fighters hail from countries that have a visa waiver agreement with the United States, “they can more easily travel to the United States, which makes us and continues to make us the prime terrorist target.”

But, he said, “few of the challenges we face from a terrorism point of view are even close to as difficult” as homegrown terrorism, which has seen an “unprecedented spike.”

“In the past 12 months alone, there have been 36 homegrown terrorist cases opened in 18 states. These are the cases we know about,” Kelly said. “Homegrown terrorism is notoriously difficult to predict, detect, and certainly almost impossible to control… if you are a terrorist with an innocent internet connection like the one on your ever-present cell phone, you can recruit new soldiers, plan your attacks and upload a video calling for jihad with just a few clicks.” CONTINUE AT SITE

American armed forces consistently perform so well that their effectiveness is taken for granted. Complaints about military spending cuts during the Obama years are such a cliche that they have been yawned at by our political leaders and completely ignored by the media.

But those years have taken us from cliche to crisis. Three factors have combined to create an emergency in airpower. First is the wear and tear imposed by nearly 16 years of combat. Second are with the massive, reckless cuts in defense spending imposed by President Obama which, under the Budget Control Act of 2011, are scheduled to continue for at least four years. Third is the near-criminal neglect of our forces by Mr. Obama’s generals and admirals. As a result, so many of our combat aircraft are incapable of flying combat missions that the president is deprived of options that may be critical to any war, large or small.

Air power — the ability to clear the skies of enemy aircraft and destroy the enemy’s ground forces — has been a critical element of warfare for nearly a century. Offensively and defensively, air power is the sine qua non of military action.

Constant pilot training and American technological advantages have meant that every generation of American fighter pilots since World War II has inherited air supremacy — domination of the skies — as a birthright. That is no longer the case.

In February, the Navy confirmed that 74 percent of the Marines’ F/A-18s — 208 of 280 aircraft — are incapable of flying combat missions.

Two Illinois men were arrested Wednesday on a federal complaint charging them with conspiring and attempting to provide material support to an associate joining ISIS on the battlefield in Syria. According to the complaint, the men had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, advocated for terrorism on social media, and even shared photos of themselves in terrorist get-ups holding the Islamic State flag at the Illinois Beach State Park in suburban Zion.

Joseph D. Jones and Edward Schimenti, both 35 and from Zion, were charged with “conspiring and attempting to provide material support and resources to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).” Jones is also known as “Yusuf Abdulhaqq” and Schimenti goes by the name of “Abdul Wali.”

According to the charges, the investigation began in September 2015, “when an undercover agent posing as a motorist arrested in a traffic-related incident approached Jones at the Zion Police Department, where Jones was being interviewed about the recent slaying of a friend.”

That agent introduced Jones and Schimenti to other undercover agents posing as ISIS supporters, including an informant whom they believed was planning to travel to the Middle East to join the Islamic State. Jones and Schimenti worked out with the purported jihadist at a Zion gym to help get him into combat shape. They also bought cell phones at a local store, thinking that they would be used as bomb detonators, according to the complaint. CONTINUE AT SITE

WASHINGTON — In his first public remarks since taking the helm of the Central Intelligence Agency, Director Mike Pompeo assured the American public that the CIA is not spying on them and tore into WikiLeaks as a morally bankrupt “non-state hostile intelligence service” that sides with global tyrants.

Speaking today at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Pompeo also implied that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would have sided with the Nazis during World War II.

Pompeo said he’s “surrounded by talented and committed patriots” in his new job at the agency, who “quietly go about their work and try not to get too worked up over the headlines, including the fanciful notion that they spy on their fellow citizens via microwave ovens” — a jab at White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway’s interpretation of WikiLeaks’ March data dump about CIA methods.

“But they are not at liberty to stand up to these false narratives and explain our mission to the American people,” he said of his workforce, adding “it is time to call these voices out — the men and women of CIA deserve a real defense.”

“…We are a foreign intelligence agency. We focus on collecting information about foreign governments, foreign terrorist organizations, and the like — not Americans. A number of specific rules keep us centered on that mission and protect the privacy of our fellow Americans. To take just one important example, CIA is legally prohibited from spying on people through electronic surveillance in the United States. We’re not tapping anyone’s phone in Wichita.”

Pompeo, a former Kansas congressman, added that “regardless of what you see on the silver screen, we do not pursue covert action on a whim without approval or accountability… there is oversight and accountability every step of the way.”

President Trump praised WikiLeaks repeatedly on the campaign trail as stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta were published. Pompeo noted today that “we at CIA find the celebration of entities like WikiLeaks to be both perplexing and deeply troubling.”

“Because while we do our best to quietly collect information on those who pose very real threats to our country, individuals such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden seek to use that information to make a name for themselves. As long as they make a splash, they care nothing about the lives they put at risk or the damage they cause to national security,” he said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Mr. Chuck Brooks – one of the world’s most known experts and the cyber security guru, shares his thoughts about Industry 4.0 and cyber threats in an interview with Ludmila Morozova-Buss.

As the capabilities and connectivity of cyber devices have grown exponentially, so have the cyber intrusions and threats from malware and hackers requiring restructuring of priorities and missions.

According to Chuck Brooks, a successful 4.0 cyber threat consequences strategy requires stepping up assessing situational awareness, information sharing, and especially resilience. Cyber resilience is an area that must be further developed both in processes and technologies because no matter what, breaches will happen.

Currently, Ransomware mostly via Phishing activities is the top threat. In the recent past, 2014 code vulnerabilities such as Heartbleed, Shellshock, Wirelurke, POODLE and other open source repositories caused chaos and harm. There is a growing understanding the seriousness and sophistication of the threats, especially denial of service and the adversarial actors that include states, organized crimes, and loosely affiliated hackers.

In the US, most (approximately 85%) of the cybersecurity critical infrastructure including defense, oil, and gas, electric power grids, healthcare, utilities, communications, transportation, banking, and finance is owned by the private sector and regulated by the public sector. DHS has recognized the importance of private sector input into cyber security requirements across these verticals and along with NIST in developing a strategy to ameliorate shortcomings.

The Strategic Grid, in the US and Europe, is in great need for enhanced security. An accelerated effort to fund and design new technologies to protect the utilities from natural or man-made electromagnetic surges; further, harden hardware and software in SCADA networks from cyber-attack, and provide enhanced physical security for the grid.

Mobile management that involves securing millions of BYOD devices is currently a challenge for information security both in government and in the private sector. Cloud computing has also taken center stage and securing cloud applications. There is always a need for better encryption, biometrics, smarter analytics and automated network security in all categories.

Supercomputing, machine learning, and quantum computing technologies are an exciting area of current exploration that may remedy many of the threats.

Chuck’s Brooks list of future cyber security 4.0 priorities includes:

Internet of Things (society on new verge of exponential interconnectivity)
Wearables
Drones and Robots
Artificial intelligence
Smart Cities
Connected transportation

The full interview by Ludmila Morozova-Buss can be read here.

Editor’s Note: This Article originally appeared on IIOT World, and is featured here with Author permission.

Once again the U.S. government has failed to protect sensitive personal information, this time highly sensitive information on 4,000 Air Force officers. This information, contained in extensive 127-page individual security questionnaires known as SF-86 were found on a backup hard drive that was neither password protected or encrypted. In addition, extensive information on high-profile visitors to sites in Afghanistan was also on the same drive along with gigabytes of Outlook emails whose content has yet to be assessed.

This follows a number of other similar cases, the most notorious was the highly successful penetration of SF-86 files and other data held by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in June, 2015. In that case, 21.5 million American’s personal data was compromised, again involving the SF-86 security questionnaire. On top of that, 5.6 million fingerprints were also stolen. In applying for a security clearance, the government collects fingerprint data and photos.

Full disclosure: my personal data was also compromised in the OPM hack and I received an OPM letter and some worthless “free for a year” coverage of my personal data going forward.

Does the government have any responsibility to protect sensitive information?

Apparently, anyone who believes that the government has this responsibility is sadly misguided. Not only does the government not protect personal information, it hands it around to other agencies routinely and gives it to private contractors for “processing.”

Like your passport! You go to a passport office, fill out all the information, provide a birth certificate and all the requisite contact information, and you give the passport office photos, one of which will wind up embossed into your passport. Then the Passport Office sends all that (how, by mail?) to a private contractor to “process.” Who has access to it is anyone’s guess. The information is not classified and therefore is not formally protected in any manner.

The same holds true for your tax return, which you send in to the IRS. nowadays electronically. Maybe it is semi-encrypted when you electronically transmit the form, or your accountant does it for you, but when it arrives at the IRS it is stored as an ordinary file with no protection.

The SF-86 form is an especially pernicious example because it contains a vast amount of information, everything from every place you may have worked, who your friends and colleagues are, to your business involvements and who your family members and relatives may be. All of this provides hugely valuable information to potential adversaries who may be nation-states, but who also could be terrorist organizations.

Everyone is shocked, shocked by WikiLeaks’ latest exposé that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been exploiting software vulnerabilities in our digital and electronic devices. All those “shocked” should have known better by now.

After the publications of files stolen by former National Security Agency’s contractor, Edward Snowden, on U.S. military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures, and surveillance details, President Obama announced, “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.”

In the spring of 2016 — months before Hillary Clinton’s and John Podesta’s emails were published by WikiLeaks — the Pew Research Center survey showed that many Americans “do not trust modern institutions to protect their personal data — even as they frequently neglect cybersecurity best practices in their own personal lives.”

For well over a decade, cyber experts have been testifying in open and closed Congressional hearings on the escalation of hacking into United States government agencies and private industries, communication, websites, and email. All without exception issued warnings on the short-term damages and the long-term threat posed by such hacking to U.S. national security and interests, and the American people by Chinese, Iranian, Russian, and other cybersavvy intelligence agencies, criminal and terrorist organizations. All the while very few, if any, warned of the proliferation of ground-based jammers and their growing interference with GPS timing and locations services, or data corruption and insertion.

In 2010, then Former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Jim Miller lamented, “The scale of compromise, including the loss of sensitive and unclassified data, is staggering. We’re talking about terabytes of data, equivalent to multiple libraries of Congress.” (The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, archiving millions of books, photographs, maps, and recordings.)

Successive governments and the private sector have failed to secure our communications, exposing our personal and national secrets, costing untold economic damage to individuals, companies, and our national security.

While the Obama administration oversaw the accelerated pace of moving to wireless communications — leaving very few alternatives, if any, for a time when those will be unavailable due to attack or natural disaster — it has adopted a slow knee-jerk cybersecurity policy. In 2014, the Obama administration was tasked by Congress to develop cyber countermeasure policies. But in response to Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) question “Is it correct that these are policy-decisions that have not been made?” U.S. Cyber Command Commander Admiral Michael S. Rogers responded: “The way I would describe it is, we clearly still are focused more on” an “event-by-event” approach to cyber incidents.” He urged to “accelerate debate on how to balance security and privacy in the ever-changing digital realm.” Otherwise, Rogers warned, “an enemy could change and manipulate data — rather than enter a computer system and steal — that action would be a threat to national security.”