ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Pierluigi Paganini Security experts speculate that the Chinese government is using mobile spyware, MITM attacks and Internet monitoring to control Hong Kong protesters. In the last days I published the news regarding a spyware used to spy on activists in Hong Kong , a Fake Occupy Central app is targeting the smartphones of the activists belonging to the Occupy Central pro-democracy movement. The malicious app has circulated online claiming to be an instrument to coordinate the members of the Occupy Central pro-democracy movement. The spyware is disguised as an Android App , dubbed Code4HK, designed by a group of coders trying to improve government transparency in Hong Kong. “No one from the Code4hk community has done any application on OC at the moment nor sent the message out.” Code4HK in an official statement . It’s a shared opinion that the Chinese government might be using smartphone apps to spy on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, the suspect is confirmed by the analysis ma...

by Pierluigi Paganini Two researchers Brandon Wilson and Adam Caudill released their attack code to reprogram USB sticks and use them as an undetectable hacking instrument. Recently, two independent researchers, Brandon Wilson and Adam Caudill, have released the code which can reprogram, benign USB devices turning them in malicious components. The experts published the code on the Github raising the question related to the real level of security of USB devices, the BadUSB research was approached in detail during the Black Hat conference when security experts demonstrated the risks related to an undetectable menace carried via USB. Security experts explained that USB devices can be used to compromise personal computers in a potential new type of attacks that could not be detected with all actual security protections. Karsten Nohl, chief scientist with Berlin’s SR Labs, discovered that bad actors could exploit this new class of attacks loading malicious software low-cost computer chi...

"What the world believes and what actually happened are quiet different" The current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, has long been portrayed as the man who brought an end to the killing and rescued his country from oblivion. Now there are increasing questions about the role of Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front forces in the dark days of 1994 and in the 20 years since. The film investigates evidence of Kagame's role in the shooting down of the presidential plane that sparked the killings in 1994 and questions his claims to have ended the genocide. It also examines claims of war crimes committed by Kagame's forces and their allies in the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo and allegations of human rights abuses in today's Rwanda. Former close associates from within Kagame's inner circle and government speak out from hiding abroad. They present a very different portrait of a man who is often hailed as presiding over a model African state. Rwanda's...

Pakistani Taliban says it will provide fighters "and every possible support" to help ISIL defeat its enemies. By Al Jazeera and agencies The Pakistani Taliban has declared it is backing the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and ordered fighters across the region to help the group in its campaign to set up an Islamic caliphate. In a message on Saturday marking the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, the Pakistani Taliban said it fully supported ISIL's goals to set up a "caliphate" in the Middle East. "Oh our brothers, we are proud of you in your victories. We are with you in your happiness and your sorrow," said the statement by Shahidullah Shahid, a Taliban spokesman, on Saturday. "In these troubled days, we call for your patience and stability, especially now that all your enemies are united against you. Please put all your rivalries behind you. "All Muslims in the world have great expectations of you... we are with you, we will provide you...

Reuters / Ints Kalnins The EU’s chief criminal intelligence agency warms that the threat of “online murder” is set to rise, with cyber criminals increasingly targeting victims with internet technology. The European Police Office (Europol) said governments are ill-equipped to counter the menace of “injury and possible deaths” spurred by hacking attacks on critical safety equipment, the UK Independent reported Sunday. Security experts called for a paradigm shift in forensic science which would react to the ‘Internet of Everything’ (IoE) – the dawning era of technological interconnectedness where increasingly more human activity is mediated through computer networks. “The IoE represents a whole new attack vector that we believe criminals will already be looking for ways to exploit," according to the Europol threat assessment . “The IoE is inevitable. We must expect a rapidly growing number of devices to be rendered ‘smart’ and thence to become interconnected. Unfortunately, we fee...

By Eric Margolis Hong Kong is at a gentle boil. As of this writing, tens of thousands of students have been politely demonstrating, calling for the Beijing-appointed chief executive, C.Y. Leung, to resign and be replaced through free elections. Politics don’t often divert Hong Kong’s manic obsession with business and finance, but the upsurge of youthful discontent has presented China with one of its biggest popular challenges since the 1989 Tiananmen uprising – which China insists never happened. So far, China’s Communist Party and its tough new boss, Xi Jinping, have stood back and taken no serious action to curb the peaceful demonstrations. Now, however, protest leaders are threatening to seize government buildings unless Beijing drops plans to select Hong Kong’s new government in 2017. This is a direct challenge to Beijing’s national authority. Considering that Beijing is ruthlessly crushing protests by Uighur Muslims in its strategic westernmost province of Xinjiang, Hong Kong’s de...

One might think that by now even Americans would have caught on to the constant stream of false alarms that Washington sounds in order to deceive the people into supporting its hidden agendas. The public fell for the lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan are terrorists allied with al Qaeda. Americans fought a war for 13 years that enriched Dick Cheney's firm, Halliburton, and other private interests only to end in another Washington failure. The public fell for the lie that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" that were a threat to America and that if the US did not invade Iraq Americans risked a "mushroom cloud going up over an American city." With the rise of ISIS, this long war apparently is far from over. Billions of dollars more in profits will pour into the coffers of the US military security complex as Washington fights those who are redrawing the false Middle East boundaries created by the British and French after WW I when the British ...

By Fred Reed  I read that Apple and Google have begun encrypting the data of customers so that nobody, including Apple and Google, have plaintext access to it. This of course means “so that the government will not have access to it.” The FBI is terribly upset about this, the first serious resistance against onrushing Orwellianism. God bless Apple and Google. But will they be able to stand up to the feds? Here is a curious situation indeed. The government has become our enemy, out of control, and we have to depend on computer companies for any safety we may have. NSA spies on us illegally and in detail, recording telephone conversations, reading email, recording our financial transactions, on and on. TSA makes air travel a nightmare, forcing us to hop about barefoot and confiscating toothpaste. The police kick in our doors at night on no-knock raids and shoot our dogs. In bus stations we are subject to search without probable cause. The feds track us through our cell phones. Laws m...