Real News for Journalists: Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal
March 11, 2020
DarkCyber spotted the ad below in a recent Wall Street Journal, dead tree edition. We clipped the ad during the week of March 3, 2020. The ad explains that “Journalists don’t just write stories.” That is true.
The image on the left is the ad from the WSJ for the Dow Jones News Fund. Sincere. Nice person. Picture ID. Word salad. (Note: DarkCyber understands that a foundation is different from a real news operation. But …)
Left, a little bit of revisionism. Right, history, a multi-year history at that.
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The ad asserts, “They record history.” No, that is semi true. Journalists make history.
One quick reminder. The article on the right explains a multi year phone hacking operation by a Murdoch entity. Does the Murdoch DNA infuse the Wall Street Journal? DarkCyber is in the dark.
Whom does DarkCyber believe, the ad for the Dow Jones (Murdoch owned) entity, or the report in CNN whose headline reads:
UK Phone Hacking Scandal Fast Facts?
What’s DarkCyber take? History is history. Journalists who generate confections about the wonders of certain publishing enterprises may want to know history. One cannot restate it or reinvent it without a glimmer of awareness of who, what, when, where, and why?
Oh, the why? Money.
Stephen E Arnold, March 11, 2020
Dropped Ball. Are Regulators in the Game?
March 10, 2020
Several stories appeared in the DarkCyber Overflight news feed this morning. None was directly related to the others, but they formed what some Yalies might call a leitmotif. Let’s look at each news item briefly and then try to figure out if there is a recurrent theme associated with a person, concept, or entity. Sounds fun on a Covid 19 infused day, right?
First, navigate to “Popular VPN And Ad-Blocking Apps Are Secretly Harvesting User Data.” The story published by the real news outfit Buzzfeed states:
Sensor Tower, a popular analytics platform for tech developers and investors, has been secretly collecting data from millions of people who have installed popular VPN and ad-blocking apps for Android and iOS, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found.
Let’s assume the information is accurate. The write up discloses what might be called covert data collection. Others might use different terminology. What’s interesting is the VPNs or virtual private networks are supposed to be secure. Maybe not then?
Next, take a look at “Ransomware: These Sophisticated Attacks Are Delivering Devastating Payloads, Warns Microsoft.” The main idea is that “Ransomware attackers are using common tools to take down big enterprise with human operated attacks.”
Let’s again take the statement at face value. The smart attacks of which some cyber defense firms speak are being supplemented by human attacks. Spoofs allow the humans to enter a system. Once inside, humans take advantage of “servers that have antivirus software and other security intentionally disabled which admins may have done to improve performance.” So humans attack, and humans create vulnerabilities. Interesting.
Finally, consider “How Smart Tech Masks an Emerging Era of Corporate Control.” This write up reports:
smart” means a thing is embedded with digital technology for data collection, network connectivity, and enhanced control.
What connects these separate stories? Here are some thought starters:
- Deception seems prevalent, based on these three stories
- Oversight or control seems non existent
- The digital environment cultivates behaviors which may be characterized as clever, deceptive, or dishonest.
I don’t know about leitmotifs, but I do know that the light of ethical behavior seems quite dim if these stories accurately reflect the “now” digital reality.
Stephen E Arnold, March 10, 2020
LiveRamp: Data Aggregation Under the Marketing Umbrella
March 10, 2020
Editor’s Note: We posted a short item about Venntel. This sparked some email and phone calls from journalists wanting to know more about data aggregation. There are a number of large data aggregation companies. Many of these work with diverse partners. If the data aggregation companies do not sell directly to the US government, some of the partners of these firms might. One of the larger data aggregation companies positions itself as a specialist, a niche player. We have pulled some information from our files to illustrate what data aggregation, cross correlation, and identify resolution contributes to advertisers, political candidates, and other entities.
Introduction
LiveRamp is Acxiom, and it occupies a leadership position in resolving identity across data sets. The system can be used by a company to generate revenue from its information. The company says:
We’re innovators, engineers, marketers, and data ethics experts on a mission to make data safe and easy to use.
LiveRamp also makes it easy to a company to obtain certain types of data and services which can be made more accurate via LiveRamp methods. The information is first, second, and third party data. First means the company captures the data directly. Second means the data come from a partner. Third means that, like distant cousins, there’s mostly a tenuous relationship among the source of the data, the creator of the data, the collector of the data, and the intermediary who provides the data to LiveRamp. There’s a 2016 how to at this link.
According to a former LiveRamp employee:
LiveRamp doesn’t actually provide intelligence on the data, it just moves the data around effectively, quickly, seamlessly, and accurately.
The basic mechanism was explained in “The Hidden Value of of Acxiom’s LiveRamp”:
An alternative approach is to designate a single company to be the hub of all ID syncs. The hub can collect IDs from each participating ad tech partner and then form mutual ID syncs as needed. Think of this as a match maker who knows the full universe of eligible singles and can then introduce couples. LiveRamp has established itself as this match maker…
This is ID syncing; that is, figuring out who is who or what is what via anonymized or incomplete data sets.
There’s nothing unusual in what LiveRamp does. Oracle and other firms perform onboarding Why? Data are hot mess. Hot means that government agencies, companies, digital currency providers, and non governmental organizations will license access to these data. The mess means that information is messy, incomplete, and inaccurate. Cross correlation can address some, but not all, of these characteristics.
The Business: License Access to Data
Think of LiveRamp as an old-school mailing list company. There’s a difference. LiveRamp drinks protein shakes, follows a keto diet, and makes full use of digital technology.
We have a unique philosophy and approach to onboarding [that’s the LiveRamp lingo for importing data]. It’s not just about bringing offline data online. It’s about bringing siloed first-, second-, and third-party data together in a privacy-conscious manner and then resolving it to a single persistent identifier called an IdentityLink.
DarkCyber is no expert in the business processes of LiveRamp. We can express some of these ideas in our own words.
Onboarding means importing. In order to import data, LiveRamp, a Fiverr worker, or smart software has to convert the source data to a format LiveRamp can import. There are other steps to make sure the data is consistent, fields exist, and are what the bringer of the data says they are; for example, the number of records matches what the data provider asserts.
Siloed data are data kept apart from other data. The reason for creating separate, often locked down sets of data separate from other data is for secrecy, licensing compliance, or business policies; for example, a pharma outfit developing a Covid 19 treatment does not want those data floating around anywhere except in a very narrow slice of the research facility. Once siloed data appear anywhere, DarkCyber becomes quite curious about the who, what, when, where, why, and the all important how. How answers the question, “How did the data escape the silo?”
Privacy conscious is a phrase that seems a bit like Facebook lingo. No comment or further explanation is needed from DarkCyber’s point of view.
IdentityLink is essentially an accession number to a profile. Law enforcement gives prisoners numbers and gathers data in a profile. LiveRamp does it for the entities its cross correlative methods facilitate. Once an individual profile exists, other numerical procedures can be applied to assign “values” or “classifications” to the entities; for example, sports fans or maybe millennial big spender. One may be able to “resolve identity” if a customer does not know “who” an entity is.
Cookie data are available. These are useful for a range of specialized functions; for example, trying to determine where an individual has “gone” on the Internet and related operations.
In a nutshell, this is the business of LiveRamp.
Open Source Contributions
LiveRamp has more than three dozen repositories in GitHub. Examples include:
- Cascading_ext which allows LiveRamp customers to build, debug, and run simple data workflows.
- HyperMinHash-java. Cross correlation by any other name still generates useful outputs.
- Munkres. Optimization made semi-easy.
People
The LiveRamp CEO is Scott Howe, who used to work at Microsoft. LiveRamp purchased Data Plus Math, a firm specializing in analyzing targeted ads on traditional and streaming TV. Data Plus Math co-founders, CEO John Hoctor and Chief Technology Officer Matthew Emans, allegedly have work experience with Mr. Howe and Microsoft’s advertising unit.
Interesting Customers
- Advertising agencies
- Political campaigns
- Ad inventory brokers.
Stephen E Arnold, March 10, 2020
Facebook: A Blunder Down Under?
March 10, 2020
DarkCyber noted “Australia sues Facebook over Cambridge Analytica, fine could scale to $529BN.” The modest fine imposed by Britain has not dissuaged Australia from boosting the cost of data impropriety. Facebook — yes, the Cambridge Analytica matter — may incur a hefty fine. The write up states:
The suit alleges the personal data of Australian Facebook users was disclosed to the This is Your Digital Life app for a purpose other than that for which it was collected — thereby breaching Australia’s Privacy Act 1988. It further claims the data was exposed to the risk of being disclosed to Cambridge Analytica and used for political profiling purposes, and passed to other third parties.
The potential fine is sufficiently large to catch the attention of the “connect everyone” company. In NBC News’ math that is about $20.00, right?
On the other hand, nothing has applied the brakes to Facebook’s activities for years. Money alone may not press the pedal to the metal.
Stephen E Arnold, March 10, 2020
Factoids about the Cloud Battles
March 10, 2020
DarkCyber noted “Stress Test the Cloud: Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, GCP.” The write up presents “factoids” and observations based on these factoids in a helpful way. Here are the points which captured DarkCyber’s attention:
The cloud will be the way of the future in computing. The meltdown of Robinhood’s trading platform was pegged on stress. When a cloud system is stressed, it may and will fail.
Amazon Web Services
- “Amazon’s e-commerce business is the market leader in the U.S., Europe, and close to number 1 in India”
- “AWS is very much battle-tested and constantly “stressed out” by its parent company’s core e-commerce operation. It has moved all of its businesses onto AWS, and off of other systems like Oracle, after a multi-year effort.”
- Amazon’s businesses are generally not prone to unexpected spikes in traffic, which happens more to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo.”
Amazon’s system may not be optimal for surprise spikes.
Alibaba Cloud
- “Alibaba’s core e-commerce business has many similarities to Amazon’s…”
- “This accomplishment is well-deserved; Alibaba has basically created and survived the mother of all stress tests.” The reference is to the large volume of sales on Singles Day.
- “Alibaba Cloud’s technical and operational expertise can certainly be applied in regions outside of China, but only until there’s customer demand and the data centers to serve it.”
Alibaba dumped American vendors as part of its journey.
Google Cloud
- “Google has arguably the only, truly global infrastructure, because its services and users are global.”
- “Google‘s services cannot anticipate traffic spikes, unlike a planned shopping holiday, and must be ready wherever, whenever it happens.”
- “Google’s products do not naturally lead to processing many complex transactions, like online shopping orders, offline delivery, or payments.”
Google can accommodate stress, but it’s not so good in Amazon-style transaction complexity.
Microsoft Azure
- “None of these [Microsoft] businesses have to be “always on”, in the same way that an e-commerce marketplace or a search engine needs to be on.”
- “Azure is still doing amazingly well from a revenue and market share standpoint. This success has more to do with Microsoft’s years of experience in selling products into large enterprises and aggressively moving users of its non-cloud license-based products onto the same products that are now on-cloud and subscription-based. Microsoft is very good at being “enterprise ready”, but not that good at being “Internet ready”.”
- “It [Microsoft] has by far the most number of Single-AZ Regions, which has led to outages and issues that could’ve been avoided with a multi-AZ design. Multi-AZ Region is the default in AWS, GCP, and most of Alibaba Cloud.”
Microsoft is good at sales, not so good at the cloud.
Net Net
Alibaba is darned good. At any time the company can push into other markets and create some pain for the American companies it seems.
Stephen E Arnold, March 10, 2020
DarkCyber for March 10, 2020, Now Available
March 10, 2020
DarkCyber for March 10, 2020, includes four stories. The first is a look at how BriefCam’s smart software generates video synopses of surveillance viden. The second presents information about the geotracking capabilities enabled by aggregated data from vendors like Venntel and Oracle, among others. The third story dips bnack into phishing-rich data flows. There’s is a reason why bogus email exploits are increasing. Watch to find out the reason. The final story discloses the Amflyfi and Deep Web Technologies mergers. Is a new intelware giant taking shape. Check out this week’s video to learn what DarkCyber thinks.
Kenny Toth, March 10, 2020
India Finance: Sharia Issue
March 9, 2020
DarkCyber found the information in “Sharia Fintech”: Startups Race to Tap Indonesia Growth by Aligning with Islam” suggestive. Is the information spot on? Possibly, the source makes a great effort to explain trust. The main point of the write up strikes DarkCyber as:
Winning over conservative Muslims like Iswara in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country is both a challenge and multi-billion dollar opportunity for fintech firms that are riding its mobile internet boom and aim to sell financial services. Of Indonesia’s 270 million population, half lacks bank accounts but most now have mobile phones.
Implications? A handful.
Stephen E Arnold, March 9, 2020
Tech Experts Branching Out: No Different from MBAs Who Can Manage Any Business
March 9, 2020
Elite or self-perceived elite have some fascinating characteristics.
“The Prodigal Techbro” explores a related idea in terms of those with technical expertise. The subtitle of the article provides a little more color on the idea:
The tech executive turned data justice warrior is celebrated as a truth-telling hero, but there’s something a bit too smooth about this narrative arc.
The article states:
The Prodigal Tech Bro is a similar story, about tech executives who experience a sort of religious awakening. They suddenly see their former employers as toxic, and reinvent themselves as experts on taming the tech giants. They were lost and are now found. They are warmly welcomed home to the center of our discourse with invitations to write opeds for major newspapers, for think tank funding, book deals and TED talks.
The write up explains:
The moral hazard is clear; why would anyone do the right thing from the beginning when they can take the money, have their fun, and then, when the wind changes, convert their status and relative wealth into special pleading and a whole new career?
The reveal in the article is:
Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse. But the bit where you say you got things wrong and people were hurt? That’s the most important part. It’s why these corporatized reinventions feel so slick and tinny…
For the most part, I think the write up is insightful.
OHave you heard the assertion. “An MBA equips a person to manage any business.” Whether the business school accomplishes this depends upon one’s point of view. The more prestigious the business school, the more confidence some MBAs have in their abilities. Accountants and lawyers share this characteristic. If I am correct, there is a challenge facing business and social institutions because tech bros — at least some of them — have the same hubris about “we can do anything.”
What’s fueling this? Maybe three factors:
- Opportunism. Remember the fine leader Martin Shkreli and the 5,000 percent drug price hike. Pushing Daraprim’s price up was logical, and clever, entitled people can just do things.
- Intelligence. Because some people are smarter than others, the thrill of being smart leads to more adventurism. Is that why the Google VP Forrest Hayes took drugs, engaged with an interesting female, and left a family to figure out what’s what. Does smart expand what William James called “a certain blindness”?
- Indifference. When one is logical, facts trump emotions. When Facebook executives evade questions about Cambridge Analytica type activities, perhaps these individuals are indifferent to the impact of their actions or inactions? And Libra? Same VCR tape.
The alleged tech bros, by the way, are not all men. The behaviors of female executives evidence this tendency as well. One recent example is the Sheryl Sandberg NBC interview. Fascinating word exhaust.
Net net: The conversion from high tech superstar to social media mentor is similar to Jonathan Edwards’ Great Awakening; that is, a convenient redemption.Yep, that’s what the elite have delivered: A mindset for the top one percent. Outstanding.
Stephen E Arnold, March 9, 2020
Hacking Team Write Up Contains Dicey Tricks and Possibly Useful Information
March 9, 2020
One of the problems DarkCyber encounters is figuring out what’s true, what’s shaped, and what’s off base. DarkCyber worked its way through a comparatively long write up about specialized service providers called “Cyberwar for Sale.” Be aware that the blog url may return a 404, display questionable links like a plea for the visitor to install wonky Flash or Microsoft support from an unidentified source, or display images some may find disturbing or illegal in some jurisdictions. The write up provides information on a range of subjects which may be of interest to those looking for content about some government activities.
The original article about Hacking Team was written by Mattathias Schwartz. The appeared in “mainstream media.” Examples include the Intercept. The recycling in AllyCanbeg blog flowed in our newsfeed on March 1, 2020.
DarkCyber worked through the Ally Canbeg version possibly modified by Ally Brake. One never knows when the factoids or alleged factoids will be useful. Another point of this write up is that looking for certain information can present challenges: Spam, scams, etc.
This is the Ally Canbeg blog on Blogspot. The story requires an explicit url. Be careful clicking within the story. Ally is wily in DarkCyber’s opinion. The site requires that the visitor’s ad blocker be disabled. The reason is that money is needed to create the content.
The DarkCyber team has extracted statements and information from the Ally Canbeg blog post. The goal is to make the assertions somewhat easier to follow. The factoids may be true or false, but taken as a whole, DarkCyber finds the write up interesting.
Despite the dicey nature of the blog, DarkCyber spotted a number of statements, possibly accurate, about the activities of Hacking Team, FinFisher, Trovicor, and NICE. Each of these firms is allegedly providing tools to compromise targets’ electronic communications and devices. Keep in mind that the AllyCanbeg blog is characterizing these companies. DarkCyber is summarizing information from the blog.
Let’s run through some of the statements in the blog post which DarkCyber found suggestive. DarkCyber has created some categories and group information in these. The source document is a bit scattered, and it is likely that the Ally Canbeg entity assembled the allegedly accurate information from a number of different sources. DarkCyber concludes that the write up itself is a polemic against Hacking Team, against “authorities” who use tools to act in a manner offensive to Ally Canbeg-type individuals, and the general state of surveillance systems and methods.
The Hacking Team Company
- Compared with conventional arms, surveillance software is subject to few trade controls. An effort by the US to regulate these types of software and systems under the Wassenaar Arrangement failed. Information about this agreement is available at this link.
- Hacking Team (founded in 2003) is based in Milan, Italy and has fewer than 50 employees. The founder is David Vincenzetti. Eric Rabe is identified as the company’s spokesperson in the US. Philippe Vinci is a company vice president. Alessandro Scarafile is an engineer with the company.
- The Hacking Team opened in 2015 a US subsidiary in Reston, Virginia. The idea was to sell the solution to the US military, the Department of Justice, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Metro police departments were identified as prospects; for example, San Bernadino, CA, Washington, DC, New York, NY, Fort Lauderdale, FL, and Orlando, FL.
Government Failings
- The US government changed the rules of criminal procedure. The idea was to make it easier for federal agents to hack into multiple computers with a single warrant.
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation says about the Hacking Team technology: “This is much more intrusive than the interception of a phone call. They [presumably the authorities who purchased the Hacking Team solution] are not only listening; they are taking over your laptop.”
Business Practices
- Hacking Team customers sign contracts agreeing to comply with local laws. Ally Canberg writes, “Leaked documents suggest that employees have sometimes turned a blind eye.”
- Hacking Team marketed by sending emails to US military and intelligence community members. Government employees were on the list too.
The Hacking Team RCS Solution
- The company’s espionage tool is call RCS, shorthand for Remote Control System. The cost of the software is allegedly “as little as $200,000 a year.”
- RCS obtains information at the source before it can be encrypted. The unencrypted data is transferred to the designated capture point.
- The functions of RCS, once installed using techniques difficult for the target to identify, perform surveillance of text messages, emails, phone and Skype calls, location data.
- The methods for installing RCS include getting physical access to the device and then placing necessary software on the device. RCS can be installed over a WiFi network. An email containing malware in an attachment lures the target to open the attached file. Network injection may also be an option. Information about network injection can be found at this link. Social engineering can also be used.
- The Hacking Team was itself hacked in 2015. More than 400 gigabytes of information was made public. The RCS source code is allegedly “now public.”
- RCS captures images from built in cameras, sound from built in microphones, screenshots, detailed records of applications opened, information about bitcoins transferred, a continuous log of location with latitude and longitude data, address books, calendars, hone calls, Skype calls and passwords, and browser histories.
- Keyloggers record every key pressed.
- Data from a target’s device can be displayed on a time line.
- Data from a compromised device is routed through a series of dedicated servers scattered around the world.
Licensees
- The US FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration have allegedly licensed the software. According to Ally Canbeg, the FBI’s licensing fees have been more than $700,000 paid since 2011.
- Hacking Team’s software has been licensed to Ecuador, Honduras, Ethiopia, Bahrain, Mexico (the company’s biggest export market), Morocco, Egypt, Singapore (the company’s first non-European customer),and Saudi Arabia, among others.
- Hacking Team has “a three year relationship” with Russia’s FSB, the equivalent of a national police force. Allegedly the Russian deal as intermediated by Kvant, a Russian entity.
Competitors
- SS8, a company “backed by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers and the Harris Corporation” compete with the Hacking Team for customers.
Why Specialized Software Is a Big Seller
- Why vendors of specialized software have gained traction. The write up states: “Geopolitical winds have been blowing in favor of the Hacking Tem and other self described allies of law and order…As George Tenet famously said about pre-September 11 intelligence, blinking red: The imploding Middle East, a restive nuclear armed Russia, battalions of ISIS-trained jihadis roaming around Europe with their encrypted thumb drives and Dark Web expertise. Against this backdrop of ever-increasing danger, concerns about human rights are naive at best.” Hacking Team emails “exploit this sense of danger and alarm.” The theme of the sales and marketing, according to Ally Canbeg is “privacy is secrecy and secrecy is terrorism.”
DarkCyber Observations
- Ally Canbeg or Ally Brake present the information in a way likely to lead to unexpected behaviors on the site visitors computer. The blog runs on Blogspot, and DarkCyber thinks that Google, the owner of Blogspot, is not doing a very good job of monitoring code in the blogs on its service.
- Hacking Team is an example of a company behaving in a manner inappropriate to individuals with certain sensibilities.
- The information appears to be recycled from Mattathias Schwartz.
- Mentioning one competitor leaves the impression that a very small number of firms offer similar technology. Numerous firms offer similar capabilities.
Net Net
Wow. Dicey blog. Recycled information. Intent? Questionable.
Stephen E Arnold, March 9, 2020
DCGS: Palantir and BAE Seem to Be Winners
March 9, 2020
DarkCyber noted “BAE, Palantir Earn Spots on $823M Army Contract.” The Distributed Common Ground System Army has an interesting history. To make a long story short, DCGS chugs along. BAE System will compete for task orders with Palantir.
The write up reports:
That system provides the Army with intelligence from multiple sources over networks of varying security levels and includes “laptops and desktops, fixed, portable and vehicle-mounted servers, and ground stations to receive, share and store collected intelligence” and software programs to analyze and share that information.
According to the US Army:
DCGS-A connects Soldiers to the Intelligence Community, other Services, multiple joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms and sensors and Army Mission Command systems. It gives commanders the ability to view ISR information in one place. It also integrates that information into tools that can support intelligence development.
The key point is that DCGS A becomes a “model” approach for other military branches as well as for some of the US government’s enforcement entities.
Stephen E Arnold, March 9, 2020
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