Friday, March 28, 2008

Chinese 4GW and cyber informants

It appears that Chinese government hackers are attacking Tibetan protest networks. The goal is clearly to infiltrate their computer systems and likely to gain access to all protest contacts, mapping the social networks of connections between them.

Groups sympathetic to anti-Chinese protesters in Tibet are under assault by cyber attackers who are embedding malware in email that appears to come from trusted colleagues.
The email is being sent to members of human-rights groups. The messages include attachments in PDF, Microsoft Word and Excel formats, that install keyloggers and other types of malware once they're opened. The malicious payloads have been disguised to evade detection by anti-virus scanners.

In effect, compromised computers become cyber informants.

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Dirty bombs and cocaine

The recent news out of Reuters is potentially alarming:

Colombia's FARC guerrilla movement was trying to get hold of radioactive material to make a "dirty bomb", Colombian Vice-President Francisco Santos said on Tuesday.

That itself is a vague claim. If we go back to October, we find a likely connection between cocaine and plutonium by following the money. FARC is big in the cocaine trade, so this is one possible route by which FARC could have sought a dirty bomb.

Authorities in Italy are investigating a mafia clan accused of trafficking nuclear waste and trying to make plutonium.
The 'Ndrangheta mafia [...] has been accused by investigators of building on its origins as a kidnapping gang to become Europe's top cocaine importer, thanks to ties to Colombian cartels. But the nuclear accusation, if true, would take it into another league.

It's not clear to me why FARC would want a dirty bomb in the first place. Their apparent ally in Venezuela, Chavez, could want one in order to deter potential US invasion.