Pipl ne habayet! They don’t buy it!
These nicely printed handwritten letters look more like the exercise in calligraphy than the hand movements of the half-literate Moscow cab driver who is always in a hurry. – M.N.
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Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks
Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks |
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Волна разоблачений агентов российских спецслужб все никак не кончится. Вчера выяснилось, что еще в апреле из Нидерландов депортировали четырех россиян с дипломатическими паспортами, которые пытались взломать компьютеры Организации по запрещению химического оружия в Гааге – в то самое время, когда эта организация расследовала применение “Новичка” в Солсбери. У одного из этих россиян, Алексея Моренца, нашли при себе квитанцию на такси в Шереметьево от воинской части, связанной с ГРУ. После публикации этих данных издание The Insider установило паспортные данные еще 305 сотрудников ГРУ – именно столько в базе ГИБДД нашлось граждан, чьи автомобили приписаны к адресу той же военной части, которую на Западе обвиняли в самых скандальных хакерских атаках последних лет. Злорадных комментариев в Сети по этому поводу хоть отбавляй.
Илья Красильщик Артем Рондарев |
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| The Autumn Leaves By Nat King Cole – YouTube | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Autumn Leaves By Nat King Cole |
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| Auburn – Color Words For Autumn Foliage | Merriam-Webster | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Prior to the 16th century, auburn would not have been an ideal word to describe an autumn color. It derives ultimately from the Latin word albus, meaning “white,” and originally designated a yellowish or brownish white color. |
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| The Sacramental Question: Mr. Putin, are all those Dumb Blondes – Dumb Bonds YOURS???!!! – 10:55 AM 10/6/2018 | Russia News | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Sacramental Question: Mr. Putin, are all those Dumb Blondes – Dumb Bonds YOURS???!!!Where Did You Get Them???!!!Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks
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| sajid javid deutsche bank trump loan – Google Search | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Tory minister Sajid Javid challenged to ‘tell all’ on role at Deutsche Bank after it is hit with £10BILLION fine | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tory minister Sajid Javid has been challenged to lift the lid on his role at Deutsche Bank after USauthorities hit it with a potential £10billion fine.
The former Business Secretary was in a high-level position there in 2008, the period the fine covers, writes Keir Mudie for the Sunday People . Labour MP Karl Turner said: “It is deeply concerning that a senior member of this Tory Government was on Deutsche Bank’s payroll at the time when wrongdoing on this scale occurred. “Sajid Javid must now come clean and tell if his role was in any way linked to revelations on the bank’s mortgage misconduct.” Mr Javid, now Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, joined the bank as a director in 2000. He held a number of key positions before leaving for politics in 2009. Deutsche Bank gave no details of the fine but sources say it relates to the sale of mortgage securities in the 2008 financial crisis. |
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| dumb Bond – Google Search | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Mr. Putin, are all those Dumb Blonds – Dumb Bonds YOURS???!!! – Google Search | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| The Novi Chuckle Question: Mr. Putin, are those Dumb Blonds, I mean Dumb Bonds, yours or some other guy’s? People want to know! – 10:31 AM 10/6/2018 | Vladimir Putin’s bungling spies outed 300 Russian agents because their Lada was registered to top-secret cyber HQ | Global Security News | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Novi Chuckle Question:Mr. Putin, are those Dumb Blonds, I mean Dumb Bonds, yours or some other guy’s? People want to know!–
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| Vladimir Putin’s bungling spies outed 300 Russian agents because their Lada was registered to top-secret cyber HQ | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Поздравление с Днём учителя • Президент России | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
События
Поздравление с Днём учителя
Владимир Путин поздравил всех российских учителей с Днём учителя.
В поздравлении, в частности, говорится:
«Нелёгкий, но благородный и востребованный труд учителя и наставника во все времена пользовался в нашей стране особым почётом. Именно от вас, вашей мудрости, терпения, самоотдачи во многом зависит личностное и профессиональное становление подрастающего поколения, активная общественная и жизненная позиция юных граждан. Государство и впредь будет делать всё для повышения статуса учителя, укрепления социальных гарантий тех, кто трудится в сфере образования – ключевой для будущего России». |
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| The coordinated witch-hunts do not solve the problems, the coordinated communications do. The pervasive, constantly present, the distinguishing, the defining, the hallmark feature of the recent operations is this “ham-handedness”. – M.N. – 6:08 AM 10/6/2018 | Global Security News | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The coordinated witch-hunts do not solve the problems, the coordinated communications do. The pervasive, constantly present, the distinguishing, the defining, the hallmark feature of the recent operations is this “ham-handedness”. – M.N. – 6:08 AM 10/6/2018
“The ham-handed attempted break-in — involving hacking equipment in the trunk of a car and a trail of physical and virtual clues — was the most stunning operation revealed Thursday. It was so obvious, in fact, that it almost looked like the Russians didn’t care about getting caught… What Dutch authorities found seemed to be the work of an amateur. A taxi receipt in the pocket of one of the agents showed he had hired a cab to take him from a street next to GRU headquarters to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. A laptop found with the team appeared to tie them to other alleged GRU hacks.” M.N.: This “ham-handedness”, the deliberate, demonstrative sloppiness, as if it were the invitation to be discovered, is the pervasive, constantly present, the distinguishing, the defining, the hallmark feature of ALL recent operations, including, very much so, the Operation Trump. This feature has to be addressed and investigated thoroughly, it might contain one of the main clues. It might indicate the possible set-up or the number of other explanations, which have to be explored. The “Russianness”, the Russian ethnic origins and the history of the service in the military or the GRU of the implied, suspected operators does not mean at all that they work for the GRU presently, or that their acts were authorised, approved, or specifically planned by the GRU. Importantly, they might have been selected by the third party (which I call the New Abwehr, under its leader, the Demiurge), and specifically for these traits: “Russianness” and the history of the GRU service. These suspects might be the completely unwitting semi-professional actors acting as the cover for the true designers. GRU is the very sophisticated and experienced, highly professional intelligence service, just like her counterparts, and they have their own professional ways of doing things without being ostentatious, also just like the others. However, everything is possible, and the version of the “face value”, “what you see is what you get” is legitimate and has to be investigated first of all, despite the lack of the credibility factor. My respectful recommendation to Gen. Gerasimov and Gen. Korobov is to try to reach out to their colleagues and to discuss these issues frankly and openly, in their broad range and in all the possible depth. The similar respectful recommendation to their colleagues, Gen. Dunford and Gen. Ashley, is to have these discussions and to try to make them productive. GRU is often compared with CIA, although nominally its counterpart is DIA. These interventions have to be approved on the highest levels, of course. By the way, I think that the non-travel sanctions specifically against Korobov and the others in this circle, who are not involved in commercial activities, are counterproductive and should be waved or cancelled. People need to travel, to meet, and to talk; and the present crisis is the result of the insufficient communications, not their abundance. Technically, it is also easier to keep track of them when they travel freely rather than clandestinely, which they do anyway. The coordinated witch-hunts do not solve the problems, the coordinated communications do. “Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov of Russia said in a statement that the U.S. is taking a “dangerous path” by “deliberately inciting tensions in relations between the nuclear powers,” adding that Washington’s European allies should also think about it.” Mr. Ryabkov, stop your nuclear dingle-dangle. You sound more like a fire-setter than a firefighter or diplomat. Do not threaten the others yourself, you sound excessively defensive. Try to comprehend, to truly understand the situation, and to find the ways of resolving it on the basis of this understanding. The delusional-grandiose attempts on Mr. Skripal’s part to influence the personnel policies of the GRU; as his revenge (if they exist), should also be considered as a factor, although, obviously, it will be left without any consequences. Mr. Skripal himself appears to be the highly intriguing, mysterious, complex person who might also contain many hidden clues. Michael Novakhov 10.6.18 Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks
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| Семен Слепаков рассказал кто и почему удалил его скандальный клип о геях из ГРУ – О Солсберецком шпиле – отравление Скрипаля – новости шоу-бизнеса | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Популярный российский комик и певец Семен Слепаков объяснил, почему из YouTube удалили его скандальное видео с песней “О Солсберецком шпиле”, которую он посвятил агентам ГРУ и отравителям Скрипаля.
Артист объяснил, что ролик о Руслане Боширове и Александре Петрове был незаконченной рабочей версией, которая просочилась в сеть через друзей. Об этом он написал на своей странице в Instagram, но вскоре удалил свой пост, сообщила Lenta.Ru. По словам Слепакова, он накануне отправил друзьям закрытую ссылку, чтобы те оценили еще не вышедший клип, не публикуя его в открытом доступе. Кто именно слил композицию, он не знает. “Это был мой рабочий материал. Незаконченный. В открытом доступе песни никогда не было. Через кого-то (он теперь, конечно, не признается) произошла утечка. Я попросил техподдержку удалить ссылку, чтобы остановить этот процесс, но все уже расползлось”, – отметил Семен, добавив, что компания “Газпром-медиа”, которую ранее заподозрили в требовании удалить видео, не при делах. “Ролик удаляли по моей просьбе, как мою авторскую собственность”, – уточнил шоумен.
Видео с песней Слепакова об отравителях Скрипаля удалено из сети
2/2 Как сообщал OBOZREVATEL, Сергея Скрипаля и его дочь отравили в Британии 4 марта нервно-паралитическим веществом “Новичок”. Официальный Лондон заявил, что за этим стоит Москва. Несмотря на то, что Скрипалей удалось спасти, инцидент спровоцировал международный скандал – многие страны мира начали высылку российских дипломатов. |
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| Госпогранслужба подтвердила возможное участие Чепиги в событиях на Майдане | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Подразделение полковника спецназа ГРУ РФ Анатолия Чепиги во время Революции Достоинства могло находится в Киеве и принимать активное участие в эскалации событий на Майдане.Об этом Guildhall сообщил собственный источник вГосударственной пограничной службе Украины. «В Государственной пограничной службе, к сожалению, нет прямых доказательств пребывания полковника спецназа ГРУ РФ Анатолия Чепиги в Украине во время событий Революции Достоинства», — сообщили в ГПСУ. В то же время, источник подтвердил, что полковник Анатолий Чепига мог быть участником кровавых событий на Майдане, так как подразделения спецназа ГРУ РФ в период с января по февраль 2014 года находились в Украине и принимали активное участие в эскалации процессов Революции Достоинства. «По нашей информации, подразделения российского спецназа с января по февраль (2014 года — ред.) находились в Киеве и проживали в отдельном доме на базе «Альфы». Полковник Анатолий Чепига, вероятно, был в их числе, но точно установить мы этого не можем, так как по указанию тогдашнего руководства страны, по прибытию, российские спецназовцы не проходили пограничного контроля, или каких-либо осмотров. Спецназ ГРУ РФ принимал активное участие в противоправных действиях против участников Революции, после чего, под видом украинских правоохранителей выехал на территорию Крыма», — сообщил источник в Госпогранслужбе Украины. Напомним, ранее эту информацию в комментарии Guildhall подтвердил экс-руководитель Главного управления разведки Украины генерал-лейтенант Александр Скипальский. |
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| The Nazi Downstairs: A Jewish Woman’s Tale of Hiding in Her Home | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Elsa Koditschek was living in a prosperous section of Vienna, near the foothills of the Alps, when the Nazis, who had annexed Austria, confiscated her home in 1940. A German officer, a squad leader in the SS, soon moved in.
Mrs. Koditschek, a Jew, was allowed to stay on, in an upstairs apartment, a tenant in her own house for about a year, until a deportation edict arrived ordering her to a bleak, uncertain future in a Polish ghetto. She fled instead, leaving behind her life’s possessions including the only major artwork she had ever purchased, a landscape by Egon Schiele. For years, she hid in the homes of non-Jewish friends, according to an account she gave in dozens of letters written during and after the war. But she was ultimately desperate enough to seek refuge in the house the Nazis had seized from her, sneaking back in to live there in secrecy and silence with an upstairs tenant. From there, she spied on the SS officer, Herbert Gerbing, watching through a window as he sat in the garden with his family. Probably unbeknown to her, while she hid upstairs, he was helping with the deportation of Jews across Europe.
“Who would think I would find myself sharing a roof with an SS officer?” she wrote later in a letter to her son, Paul, who had moved to New York years earlier.
Mrs. Koditschek’s Schiele was ultimately sold during the war, while she struggled to survive, and it has been sold several times since.
But her letters, handwritten on onionskin and intact after having been carefully packed away in a relative’s basement, helped the Koditschek family and researchers at Sotheby’s piece together the provenance of the painting. So this fall in New York, when it goes up for auction with an estimated value of $12 million to $18 million, Mrs. Koditschek’s heirs will share in the proceeds with its current owners. “It’s so unusual to have a victim of Nazi theft or expropriation who writes everything down,” Lucian Simmons, the worldwide head of restitution at Sotheby’s, said. “Usually you’re trying to join the dots, but the dots are far apart.”
Mentions of the Schiele painting in the letters buttressed the provenance research by Mr. Simmons, who had approached the family in 2014 after independently finding indications that it had lost an important painting during the war. What followed were several years of negotiation with the current owners of the Schiele, Europeans who had bought it in the 1950s, that led to an agreement that will govern the sale next month of the work, “City in Twilight (The Small City II)” painted in 1913.
“It’s an important painting with a wonderful revolutionary abstract form,” Mr. Simmons said. Perhaps more remarkable than the painting is the tale that accompanies it: the account of woman made vagabond by the Nazis who ended up returning to the very house from which she had been evicted, and living out the war there, just feet above one of her persecutors. Mrs. Koditschek survived the war, and related her account in many letters to her son, who died in 1974. But he seldom discussed those experiences in any detail, so relatives have only recently begun to unravel Mrs. Koditschek’s history by sifting through the correspondence. (Sotheby’s provided translations of excerpts from the letters.) Their tone deepens as events evolve, according to Sarah Whites-Koditschek, a great-granddaughter, and turns grim in 1941 when the deportation order arrives. At that point, Ms. Whites-Koditschek said, “She’s just writing about whether she can find any way to escape.”
Steven Luckert, a historian with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, said that Mrs. Koditschek’s experience stood out even among the startling tales of Jews who had lived through the war hiding in Nazi-occupied cities. “The fact that she was living in the same house as someone who was in charge of deportations makes it even more extraordinary,” he said.
Mrs. Koditschek, the widow of a banker, had sent her son and daughter away to safety before Europe became engulfed in war. But she stayed behind in Vienna, living in the three-story home her husband had built in 1911. She lived on the first floor, below her longtime tenant, Sylvia Kosminski, who was known as “Aunt Sylvia” though she was not a relative.
When the Nazi and his family took over the first floor, Mrs. Koditschek moved to the second to share quarters with Aunt Sylvia, bringing with her, the Koditschek family believes, the Schiele painting.
The letters do not indicate that Mrs. Koditschek was particularly fearful of the Nazi she was living with. He occasionally summoned her to explain how things in the house worked. She described his demeanor as civil, even after she received “an ominous card” directing her to show up at a school to be deported to German-occupied Poland. When she asked the officer if the trip could be delayed, he replied that it could not, she wrote. But he painted a glowing portrait of what life would be like in the Lodz ghetto and offered a word of advice, suggesting she bring a minimum of belongings. “This was a kind thing for him to say,” Mrs. Koditschek wrote, “because the luggage of most Jews was robbed even before they arrived at their destination. Also of course their lives.” It does not seem, based on her letters, that Mrs. Koditschek had an inkling of Mr. Gerbing’s larger role in the deportation of Jews. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance center, describes him as a key player in executing those policies and said he “participated in raids and arrests, and was reported to have been exceedingly brutal, at one case causing grievous injuries to detainees.”
When Mrs. Koditschek fled, she lived with a family named Heinz and spent virtually all of her time indoors, often hiding for hours behind a cupboard inside their apartment. She passed the lonely hours by practicing her English or playing chess against herself.
But her life there was disrupted in 1943, Mrs. Koditschek wrote, when Mr. Heinz came home one day “under the escort of some strange men” who began searching the apartment. She slipped away though an open door.
“I must have been wearing a magic cap of invisibility because the plainclothes men did not notice me,” she wrote, adding that as she roamed the streets that night, “people stared at me as if I was a ghost from another time.” Under cover of darkness Mrs. Koditschek met Aunt Sylvia, and they returned to her home, rushing inside, she said in a letter, “when the coast was all clear.” For the next two years she lived a clandestine life there, sleeping on a makeshift bed and hiding whenever the doorbell rang. Mr. Gerbing was not often home, she wrote. Historians have recorded that he had a role in deportation efforts in Paris, Slovakia and Thessaloniki. When he was away, Mrs. Koditschek noticed, Jewish laborers, marked by badges, would carry the plunder of war — furniture, a piano, clothing — into her home. “Wherever he stays,” Mrs. Koditschek wrote, “in Greece, in France, in Slovakia, he sends big boxes back with goods from each country.” “If there was something that had to be repaired in the house,” she wrote, “the Jews came again, and they also labored in the garden.”
As compelling as the letters are, they leave much unanswered. How did Mrs. Koditschek completely avoid notice? Was Aunt Sylvia Jewish, and if so, how did she escape persecution?
Still, Ted Koditschek, Mrs. Koditschek’s grandson and a history professor emeritus at the University of Missouri, said in an interview that the correspondence is an invaluable resource for the family. “It is like a Rosetta Stone for a small group of people,” he said, adding, “There are still many questions that are unanswered and will remain that way.”
Just when the Schiele was sold is unclear, though Sotheby’s said it seems to have happened between 1941 and 1943. One of Mrs. Koditschek’s letters describes how Aunt Sylvia, who had supplied her with food while she hid, arrived one day at the Heinz apartment to say that she too now needed money and wanted permission to sell “the pictures.” In a letter after the war, Mrs. Koditschek wrote to her son: “Aunt Sylvia sold your microscope, as well as the Schiele and the two Rugendas,” adding “Aunt Sylvia was actually repaid her loans to me twice over.” Sotheby’s, which will earn a commission on the sale of the painting, has negotiated several similar deals between the heirs of Jews who lost art during the Holocaust and the current owners of paintings, solutions often meant to address complicated issues of ownership, ethics and international law. The auction house did not identify the current owners of the Schiele, who wanted to remain anonymous. Mrs. Koditschek was still in her house in 1944 when the Allies bombed Vienna and in 1945 when she heard rumors that Mr. Gerbing had been killed by a mob in Prague. He never returned from that trip and the Russian army entered Vienna that year, ransacking her house, she wrote, as they passed.
Eventually, Mrs. Koditschek made her way to safety in Bern, Switzerland, where she died in 1961.
Mrs. Koditschek’s instincts about Poland probably saved her life, said Ms. Whites-Koditschek who believes her great-grandmother had somehow figured out what was happening to those people who were deported to the Lodz ghetto. “She must have heard what was happening there through her community,” she said. Indeed, most of the Jews who lived or were shipped to Lodz went to death camps before the close of the war. By the time the Russians entered, a prewar Jewish population of about 250,000 had been reduced to fewer than 1,000. A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Jew In Hiding, Above A Nazi |
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| West Accuses Russian Spy Agency of Scores of Attacks | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
LONDON — The West unleashed an onslaught of new evidence and indictments Thursday accusing Russian military spies of hacking so widespread that it seemed to target anyone, anywhere who investigates Moscow’s involvement in an array of criminal activities — including doping, poisoning and the downing of a plane.
Russia defiantly denied the charges, neither humbled nor embarrassed by the exceptional revelations on one of the most high-tension days in East-West relations in years. Moscow lashed back with allegations that the Pentagon runs a clandestine U.S. biological weapons program involving toxic mosquitoes, ticks and more. The nucleus of Thursday’s drama was Russia’s military intelligence agency known as the GRU, increasingly the embodiment of Russian meddling abroad. In the last 24 hours: U.S. authorities charged seven officers from the GRU with hacking international agencies; British and Australian authorities accused the GRU of a devastating 2017 cyberattack on Ukraine, the email leaks that rocked the U.S. 2016 election and other damaging hacks; And Dutch officials alleged that GRU agents tried and failed to hack into the world’s chemical weapons watchdog, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
The ham-handed attempted break-in — involving hacking equipment in the trunk of a car and a trail of physical and virtual clues — was the most stunning operation revealed Thursday. It was so obvious, in fact, that it almost looked like the Russians didn’t care about getting caught.
“Basically, the Russians got caught with their equipment, people who were doing it, and they have got to pay the piper. They are going to have to be held to account,” U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis said in Brussels, where he was meeting with NATO allies. Mattis said the West has “a wide variety of responses” available. Britain’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Peter Wilson, said the GRU would no longer be allowed to act with impunity. Calling Russia a “pariah state,” British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson said: “Where Russia acts in an indiscriminate and reckless way, where they have done in terms of these cyberattacks, we will be exposing them.” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov of Russia said in a statement that the U.S. is taking a “dangerous path” by “deliberately inciting tensions in relations between the nuclear powers,” adding that Washington’s European allies should also think about it.
While the accusations expose how much damage Russia can do in foreign lands, through remote hacking and on-site infiltration — they also expose how little Western countries can do to stop it.
Russia is already under EU and U.S. sanctions, and dozens of GRU agents and alleged Russian trolls have already been indicted by the U.S but will likely never be handed over to face American justice. Still, to the Western public, Thursday may have been a pivotal day, with accusations so extensive, and the chorus of condemnation so loud, that it left little doubt of massive Russian wrongdoing. A wealth of surveillance footage released by Western intelligence agencies was quickly and overwhelmingly confirmed by independent reporting. The litany of accusations of GRU malfeasance began overnight, when British and Australian authorities accused the Russian agency of being behind the catastrophic 2017 cyberattack in Ukraine. The malicious software outbreak knocked out ATMs, gas stations, pharmacies and hospitals and, according to a secret White House assessment recently cited by Wired, caused $10 billion in damage worldwide. The British and Australians also linked the GRU to other hacks, including the Democratic Party email leaks and online cyber propaganda that sowed havoc before Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election. Later Thursday, Dutch defense officials released photos and a timeline of GRU agents’ botched attempt to break into the chemical weapons watchdog using Wi-Fi hacking equipment hidden in a car parked outside a nearby Marriott Hotel. The OPCW was investigating a nerve agent attack on a former GRU spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter in Salisbury, England, that Britain has blamed on the Russian government. Moscow vehemently denies involvement. Photographs released by the Dutch Ministry of Defense showed a trunk loaded with a computer, battery, a bulky white transformer and a hidden antenna; officials said the equipment was operational when Dutch counterintelligence interrupted the operation.
What Dutch authorities found seemed to be the work of an amateur. A taxi receipt in the pocket of one of the agents showed he had hired a cab to take him from a street next to GRU headquarters to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. A laptop found with the team appeared to tie them to other alleged GRU hacks.
The men were expelled instead of arrested, because they were traveling on diplomatic passports. The Dutch also accused the GRU of trying to hack investigators examining the 2014 downing of a Malaysian Airlines jetliner over eastern Ukraine that killed all 298 people on board. A Dutch-led team says it has strong evidence the missile that brought the plane down came from a Russia-based military unit. Russia has denied the charge. Later Thursday, the U.S. Justice Department charged seven GRU officers — including the four caught in The Hague — in an international hacking rampage that targeted more than 250 athletes, a Pennsylvania-based nuclear energy company, a Swiss chemical laboratory and the OPCW. The indictment said the GRU targets had publicly supported a ban on Russian athletes in international sports competitions and because they had condemned what they called a state-sponsored doping program by Russia. U.S. prosecutors said the Russians also targeted a Pennsylvania-based nuclear energy company and the OPCW. The seven were identified as: Aleksei Morenets, 41; Evgenii Serebriakov, 37; Ivan Yermakov, 32; Artem Malyshev, 30; and Dmitriy Badin, 27; who were each assigned to Military Unit 26165, and Oleg Sotnikov, 46, and Alexey Minin, 46, who were also GRU officers. The U.S. indictment says the hacking was often conducted remotely. If that wasn’t successful, the hackers would conduct “on-site” or “close access” hacking operations, with trained GRU members traveling with sophisticated equipment to target their victims through Wi-Fi networks.
The World Anti-Doping Agency, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and the Canadian anti-doping agency were all identified by the U.S. indictment against the Russians.
WADA said the alleged hackers “sought to violate athletes’ rights by exposing personal and private data — often then modifying them — and ultimately undermine the work of WADA and its partners in the protection of clean sport.” Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. anti-doping agency and a prominent critic of Russian athletes’ drug use, says “a system that was abusing its own athletes with an institutionalized doping program has now been indicted for perpetrating cyberattacks on innocent athletes from around the world.” Russia denied everything. Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the foreign affairs committee in the upper house of Russian parliament, said the accusations were fake and intended to “delegitimize” a resurgent Russia. The West has picked up the GRU as “a modern analogue of the KGB which served as a bugaboo for people in the West during the Cold War,” he said. Russia countered with accusations of their own: The Defense Ministry unveiled complex allegations that the U.S. has a clandestine biological weapons lab in the country of Georgia as part of a network of labs on the edges of Russia and China that flout international rules. Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon called the accusations “an invention” and “obvious attempts to divert attention from Russia’s bad behavior on many fronts.” The Associated Press, meanwhile, independently corroborated information that matches details for two of the alleged Russian agents named by the Dutch authorities.
An online car registration database in Russia showed that Aleksei Morenets, whose full name and date of birth are the same as one of the expelled Russians, sold his car in 2004, listing the Moscow address where the Defense Ministry’s Military University is based.
Alexey Minin, another Russian whose full name and date of birth match the Dutch details, had several cars, including an Alfa Romeo, that were registered and sold at the address where the Defense Ministry’s GRU school is located. In some of the filings, Minin listed the official military unit number of the GRU school as his home address. ___ Balsamo reported from Washington and Casert from Brussels. Raphael Satter in London, Nataliya Vasilyeva and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow, Lorne Cook in Brussels and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed. |
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| The Kavanaugh hearing seems designed to fail. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
On Thursday morning, the Department of Justice announced it was charging seven Russian intelligence agents—employed by the Russian Central Intelligence Agency equivalent, commonly known as the GRU—with hacking. The move came hot on the heels of British and Dutch officials accusing GRU agents of hacking investigations looking into chemical weapons attacks in Syria and the 2014 downing of an airliner over Eastern Ukraine.
The same morning, Bloomberg published a blockbuster report alleging that Chinese spies had pulled off a far-reaching hardware hack using microchips planted on the motherboards made by a company called Supermicro, which ended up being used by more than thirty firms. Bloomberg describes the hack as “the most significant supply chain attack known to have been carried out against American companies.” Taken together, the three news stories illustrate that cyber-war is now a major battlefront between great powers. In a press statement, the Department of Justice claimed that “beginning in or around December 2014 and continuing until at least May 2018, the conspiracy conducted persistent and sophisticated computer intrusions affecting U.S. persons, corporate entities, international organizations, and their respective employees located around the world, based on their strategic interest to the Russian government.” Three of the seven Russian intelligence agents charged by the Department of Justice were also charged by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for alleged hacking as part of Russian interference in the 2016 election. At a NATO meeting in Brussels, British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson condemned alleged Russian cyber attacks on Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which Dutch officials claimed took place in April and were disrupted. Holland has expelled four Russian intelligence officers allegedly involved in the attack. “This is not the actions of a great power,” Williamson said. “This is the actions of a pariah state, and we will continue working with allies to isolate them; make them understand they cannot continue to conduct themselves in such a way.” The Bloomberg story on Chinese microchips shows that Russia is not the only cyber-war threat. As Bloomberg reports, when Amazon investigated servers sold to them by Elemental Technologies, which used the serves of Supermicro, they made a startling discovery: “Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.” |
Радио Свобода.
Russia News.
Global Security News.
The Sun.
Mirror – The People.
GuildHall.
