China reportedly hacked UK Defense Ministry's payroll system, exposing names of current and former service members. Russia and China now have a lot the information about UK spies.
China hacked Ministry of Defence, Sky News learns
it's Britain so I imagine someone in MI6 clicked the "SECRET-TRANS-CELEBRITIES.zip" file that they received in their government email and now they'll have to find a way to blame this on Hamas antisemitism
I'm interested to hear just how 'bad' it was - I of course don't trust the exact figure they put out, but its hard to know if they'll inflate the statistics because China Bad, or if they'll deflate the statistics because MI6/Britain is James Bond good.
It's so silly. All the spy stuff. It's like - well we hacked them, then they hacked us, then we hacked them, then they hacked us, then we hacked them, for as long as computers have been a part of each nations infrastructure.
So, 'Breaking News' everyone, spies are still spying. The spying will continue until they stop spying on us.
as a bit of a tangent, this is a great read on the technique developed by Yuri Totrov for identifying spies using statistical patterns that drove CIA nuts
and here's the list of identifiers he came up with
Some of these points are embarrassingly obvious. Of course your spy's cover as a diplomat is going to suck if he didn't went to the school all diplomats go to and doesn't live up to objective requirements like that of citizenship.
I wonder how amateurish these diplomatic covers are today and if it is only the yanks who are this bad at them.
Somebody should write a comedy/parody of espionage thrillers around this. Owning your opponent so hard they think they're crawling with infiltrators is damn funny.
Half of these are so obvious I refuse to believe that's all of it or even is it and Totrov wasn't fucking with the CIA because it would do bad things to my mental health. Gotta say folks, that's bullshit, there's a more shadowy, more competent level of CIA at play that Totrov didn't know about
The Cold War over, a senior and very experienced officer was dispatched to Japan to seek out Totrov and offer him a vast sum of money for his "memoirs." Totrov’s retort was typically blunt. "Have you not read what is on my file at Langley? It says, 'Not to be Pitched.'"
Big dick move though
the fact that CIA officers replacing one another tended to take on the same post within the embassy hierarchy, drive the same make of vehicle, rent the same apartment and so on. Why? Because the personnel office in Langley shuffled and dealt overseas postings with as little effort as required.
I'm becoming the fucking joker here I've had better Opsec than that as a teenager doing dumb shit
Espionage is an open secret. No one serious considers embassies a place of diplomacy and administration unless it’s an insignificant country.
The government will not name the country involved, but Sky News understands this to be China.
The cyberattack was on a payroll ...
... All salaries will be paid this month.
The contractor system is not connected to the main MoD computer systems and has been taken down with a review launched.
A system so important that its management was contracted out.
No idea where the breach came from, or how it was done, or exactly who the contracting firm running that system is but "CHINA CHINA CHINA!"
The US department of energy has its own paramilitary force that guards nuclear sites. Despite wearing camo, having a military commander, and considered so called “elite,” they’re just contractors from a private agency - not even self employed.
The DOE protective forces are all contractors, with the management of the force varying from site to site.
Don’t you feel safe that the most militaristic, bloodthirsty nation on earth hires mall cops to guard nukes? It’s even more weird than guys who protect spy bases or Area 51 because they usually wear the company’s provided uniforms but the FPF wear camp like soldiers lol.
I still have it my head that 99% of the land based ICMB arsenal is 100% incapable of launching and I refuse to be corrected.
So, overpaying Paul Blarts to watch the fences around the silos while the military nuke techs sit in their holes playing video games and watching cartoons actually makes me feel pretty comfortable.
wear camp like soldiers lol
I'm sure this is a typo and you mean to say "camo" but soldiers on guard duty in drag queen getup makes me smile.
At this point, common Chinese counterintel win.
Captured, compromised, or neutralized https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/us/politics/cia-informants-killed-captured.html
China Used Stolen Data to Expose CIA Operatives in Africa and Europe (Foreign Policy Mag, Dec 2020)
Around 2013, U.S. intelligence began noticing an alarming pattern: Undercover CIA personnel, flying into countries in Africa and Europe for sensitive work, were being rapidly and successfully identified by Chinese intelligence, according to three former U.S. officials. The surveillance by Chinese operatives began in some cases as soon as the CIA officers had cleared passport control. Sometimes, the surveillance was so overt that U.S. intelligence officials speculated that the Chinese wanted the U.S. side to know they had identified the CIA operatives, disrupting their missions; other times, however, it was much more subtle and only detected through U.S. spy agencies’ own sophisticated technical countersurveillance capabilities.
Not only did China kill the CIA sources, but the CIA used a Chinese American CIA agent as a scapegoat. He “confessed” to doing everything but the CIA wasn’t able to find any evidence, but he was sentenced to prison anyway.
I believe he had gambling and business debt problems, and had business dealings with Chinese agents, but that’s about it lol. The real culprit is most likely a series of fake websites designed by the CIA to communicate with sources. But they refused the same templates and databases, and Iran was the first one to find out IIRC, then they passed on the info they found about Chinese and Russian moles to the respective countries.
china is reaching levels of basedness long thought impossible
I bet China must have reaaaalllly dedicated all its national resources and efforts over the last few years to achieve a hack of this magnitude.
Unrelated, remember when the UK treasury was trying to recruit a head of cyber security and only offered a salary of £50k?
"Oi, what you mean the bloke we paid 50k to put the passwords in plaintext on a public-facing server?"
There was a bit of confusion about that cuz in England they call "passwords" Wordie-Daffer-SiteSeeSee.
Hacker Man
ゴゴゴゴゴゴゴゴゴゴゴゴゴゴゴゴゴD A T A
Russia should take responsibility just for lulz
lol yeah like what's UK gonna do sanction them 😂
That sentence (title) just gets better and better
:kim-philby-shining:
Imagine keeping the names of all your spies on a payroll database exposed to the internet lol
On a file called mi6-final_FINAL_V4_DO_NOT_SHARE.db
It’s likely most of them are office workers, handlers, and “embassy staff.” So nothing too damaging. Most of their sources are likely coded, but considering the CIA’s sources were all killed in china, I can’t imagine britbongs having much more sophisticated tradecraft