RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theepochtimes.com/hack-of-federal-government-larger-than-previously-thought-warns-cisa_3623466.html?utm_source=news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2020-12-17-5

The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said Thursday that the hacking campaign that targeted the federal government is larger than what was previously known.

The alleged foreign actors gained backdoor access in more ways than through the SolarWinds software, which was publicly disclosed by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) earlier this week.

“One of the initial access vectors for this activity is a supply chain compromise of the following SolarWinds Orion products. CISA has evidence of additional initial access vectors, other than the SolarWinds Orion platform; however, these are still being investigated,” CISA said in a statement on Thursday.

But it stressed that the “SolarWinds Orion supply chain compromise is not the only initial infection vector this advanced persistent threat actor leveraged.”

The agency also furthermore warned that the threat “poses a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities” as well as the private sector.

Foreign hackers, whose country of origin is not known, compromised “government agencies, critical infrastructure entities, and private sector organizations” starting in March 2020 or before, according to CISA.

The cybersecurity agency noted that it “expects that removing this threat actor from compromised environments will be highly complex and challenging for organizations,” adding: “It is likely that the adversary has additional initial access vectors and tactics, techniques, and procedures that have not yet been discovered.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/soft-targets-chinese-spies-have-been-targeting-us-

A report that a suspected Chinese spy spent years cozying up to local and national-level politicians reveals that Beijing is investing significantly in long-term espionage operations to infiltrate U.S. politics, an expert said.

From 2011 to 2015, Christina Fang, a Chinese student at California State University–East Bay, cultivated extensive ties with local politicians in the Bay Area by volunteering in fundraising campaigns and attending political events. U.S. intelligence officials believe she was working under the direction of China’s top spy agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), according to a recent investigation by Axios.

Fang developed close ties to Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who in early 2015 became a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. She first knew Swalwell when he was a local city council member. Fang later fundraised for the congressman’s 2014 reelection campaign, and facilitated the placement of an intern in his office, the outlet reported.

She also had romantic or sexual relationships with two unnamed mayors of Midwestern cities, Axios said.

The operation was “beautifully handled” in the way it combined both intelligence gathering and political influence, said Nicholas Eftimiades, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and author of the book “Chinese Intelligence Operations,” in an interview with The Epoch Times.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/foreign-government-backed-hackers-breach-u-s-treasury-report

A “sophisticated hacking group” backed by the Russian government reportedly infiltrated the Department of Treasury’s systems and stole information related to internet and telecommunications policymaking as part of a broader campaign that also hacked the Commerce Department and other government agencies.

The FBI is investigating the attacks and is looking into the Russian hacking group APT29, also known as Cozy Bear, as a potential culprit, according to the Washington Post. The foreign-backed hack was first reported by Reuters. An FBI spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that the bureau “is aware of today’s reporting and is appropriately engaged, however, we decline to comment further.”

As a result of the hack, the National Security Council held a meeting at the White House on Sunday.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency confirmed the incident in a statement but did not suggest who was behind the attack.

“We have been working closely with our agency partners regarding recently discovered activity on government networks,” the agency said. “CISA is providing technical assistance to affected entities as they work to identify and mitigate any potential compromises.”

SolarWinds, an IT company, runs network management systems that were breached by the hackers, as first reported by the Washington Post.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16853/espionage-china-spying-us

Given the emergency, Washington should immediately close down all of China’s bases of operation in the U.S., including its four remaining consulates — Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco — and substantially reducing the staff of the embassy. The embassy, in reality, needs only the ambassador, immediate family, and personal staff, not the hundreds currently assigned there.

China’s New York consulate is also an espionage hub. James Olson, a former CIA counterintelligence chief, “conservatively” estimated that China, in the words of the New York Post, “has more than 100 intelligence officers operating in the city at any given time.” New York City, he said, is “under assault like never before.”

Will Beijing merely transfer spies to Chinese banks and businesses operating in the U.S.? Probably, but that will take time and, in any event, Washington can order the closure of non-diplomatic outposts as well.

Others will say American businesses in China need consular support. Of course they do. My reply is that it is in America’s interest to get its companies out of that country, for moral as well as other reasons. The loss of consular support will be one more reason for them to pack their bags in a hurry.

Revelations this month about U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, highlight Beijing’s complete penetration of American society.

China’s influence, intelligence and infiltration attempts are overwhelming America. Given the emergency, Washington should immediately close down all of China’s bases of operation in the U.S., including its four remaining consulates.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the news about Swalwell is that Fang Fang, a suspected Chinese Ministry of State Security agent also known as “Christine,” first contacted him not while he was sitting on the House Intelligence Committee but when he was a councilmember in Dublin City, California.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2020/12/13/bombshell-leaked-list-of-2-million-chinese-communist-party-members-shows-how-vulnerable-the-west-is-n1208832

Sky News reported a list of nearly two million members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who are operating worldwide and in dozens of companies based in the United States and other Western nations. According to the report, the list was compiled in 2016 by Chinese dissidents who extracted the data from a Shanghai server.

In mid-September, the data was leaked to a newly formed international group called the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC). This is a group of 150 legislators whose mission is stated on their website:

IPAC’s mission is to foster deeper collaboration between like-minded legislators. Its principal work is to monitor relevant developments, to assist legislators to construct appropriate and coordinated responses, and to help craft a proactive and strategic approach on issues related to the People’s Republic of China.

IPAC provided the data to four independent media outlets for verification. It is believed to be the first leak of its kind and gives a detailed look at how the party operates under Chairman Xi Jinping. The data shows that party members are embedded in some of the world’s largest companies and inside government agencies.

“Communist party branches have been set up inside western companies, allowing the infiltration of those companies by CCP members – who, if called on, are answerable directly to the communist party, to the Chairman, the president himself,” she said. “Along with the personal identifying details of 1.95 million communist party members, mostly from Shanghai, there are also the details of 79,000 communist party branches, many of them inside companies”.

One of the media outlets that investigated the list was the Daily Mail. They published additional details on their findings and report:

Loyal members of the Chinese Communist Party are working in British consulates, universities and for some of the UK’s leading companies, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2020/12/14/the-morning-briefing-apocalypse-soon-brush-up-on-your-mandarin-for-the-biden-years-n1208835

You Can Spell Biden Without “CCP” but Why Would You?

Happy Monday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Am I oozing enthusiasm for the start of a new week? Yes, yes I am.

The sobering reality of Joseph “The Masked Groper” Biden being sworn in as President of the United States  next month is finally starting to hit me. I’ve mostly been approaching the possibility like it’s a bad SNL skit that I’m being forced to watch with those A Clockwork Orange thingies propping my eyelids open. It was all a bit surreal but it’s just a bad dream, right?

Apparently, this nonsense is actually going to happen now and, honestly, I don’t think even I can drink my way through this. Sure, I’ll give it a try, but I have some things I need to accomplish next year and I can’t get any of them done if I am meandering through a Biden-avoidance alcoholic haze every day.

A central component to my denial has involved my assessment about who the power behind the throne will be. At the beginning of the month I wrote about the looming tug-of-war between DOCTOR OR SOMETHING Jill Biden and Miss Congeniality Kamala Harris for control of the empty space in Drooling Joe’s head. That’s a battle that is definitely still on and might even be worth pay-per-view.

They’re only bit players in the Joe Biden’s puppeteer sweepstakes. As my friend and colleague Stephen Green is fond of saying, Joe Biden is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party.

There’s the real problem that I’ve been trying to keep buried in the back of my mind.

Of course, I’m not doing as good of job burying reality as the mainstream media is, as Jeff wrote over the weekend:

Hunter Biden was the October Surprise that wasn’t—a report so explosive, so potentially damaging, so dangerous for national security that it should have destroyed Joe Biden’s bid for the White House. In any other election, fleets of investigative reporters would have been unleashed to verify the claims in the report. Instead, in the ultimate expression of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a major media company set out to personally destroy the man they thought put the report together and thereby discredit the report to the point that the entire media complex in America took turns ridiculing the story instead of investigating it. The results could have dire implications for national security.

But hey, at least they got rid of the Bad Orange Man.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/chinas_leaders_understand_all_too_well_how_to_control_america_from_their_own_historical_experience_use_compradors.html

There is a very large, rich, and influential class of Americans who owe their wealth and standing to China, having mightily prospered through business ties to the Middle Kingdom.  Every educated person in China understands the way such ties linking a wealthy elite beholden to foreign interests can be used to bring down even the mightiest of nations.

The word “comprador” (买办, pronounced mǎi bàn), referring to the Chinese businessmen who allied themselves with Western imperialists, becoming wealthy and, in the view of the Chinese Communist Party, betraying the nation, is a curse word among Communists.

[T]here are two kinds of bourgeoisie — the national bourgeoisie and the comprador-bourgeoisie[.] … The comprador-bourgeoisie is always a running dog of imperialism[.] 

—Mao Tse-tung  Some Experiences in Our Party’s History, 1956

Dex Bahr, elsewhere in American Thinker today, correctly ties minimal media coverage of (and the previous suppression of) the story of the Swalwell spy scandal to the business interests of their corporate and individual masters:

What does Google/YouTube have in common with media outlets that have ignored the Swalwell Chinese spy scandal? CNN (WarnerMedia), NBC, MSNBC (Universal/Comcast), ABC/ESPN (Disney) and CBS (National Amusements) are all owned by companies that have been reported extensive business ties with Chinese Corporations which in turn are tied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  The owners of the New York Times, which include Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim who as of 2018 had a 15.4% stake, and perhaps as much as 17.4% if this account has it right, and at the Washington Post, where Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought it outright, also have business ventures with China based companies (Read this May 2020 story from the Federalist for further details)