Updated at 10:22 a.m. ET

Russian hackers working for the Kremlin are believed to be behind an attack into U.S. government computer systems at the departments of Treasury and Commerce that may have lasted months before it was detected, according to U.S. officials and media reports.

The hackers reportedly broke into the email systems at those two government departments, but the full extent of the breach was not immediately clear as U.S. officials scrambled to make an assessment. There are concerns that hackers may have penetrated other government departments and perhaps many private companies as well.

The Commerce Department, the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security all acknowledged the intrusion in brief statements but provided no details.

“We can confirm there has been a breach in one of our bureaus,” the Commerce Department said.

“We have been working closely with our agency partners regarding recently discovered activity on government networks,” said NSC spokesman John Ullyot.

The U.S. government did not name Russia or any other actor as being responsible.

Reuters first reported the story on Sunday, and subsequent reports identified Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, as the most likely culprit.

Russia’s SVR, the rough equivalent to the CIA in the U.S., was blamed for major hacks in 2014-15 that involved unclassified email systems at the White House, State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Russia on Monday denied any involvement in the latest reported breach.

Emergency directive

Meanwhile, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is part of Homeland Security, issued an emergency directive calling on all federal civilian agencies to review their computer networks for signs of the compromise. The statement also said agencies should disconnect from SolarWinds Orion products immediately.

SolarWinds has government contracts, including with the military and intelligence services, and also works with many large private companies. The attackers are believed to have used a “supply chain attack” method that embeds malicious code into legitimate software updates.

“The compromise of SolarWinds’ Orion Network Management Products poses unacceptable risks to the security of federal networks,” CISA’s acting Director Brandon Wales said in a statement. “Tonight’s directive is intended to mitigate potential compromises within federal civilian networks, and we urge all our partners — in the public and private sectors — to assess their exposure to this compromise.”

SolarWinds, based in Austin, Texas, put out its own statement saying it was aware that its systems were experiencing a “highly sophisticated, manual supply chain attack” on specific versions of its Orion platform software released between March and June of this year.

“We have been advised this attack was likely conducted by an outside nation-state and intended to be a narrow, extremely targeted, and manually executed attack, as opposed to a broad, system-wide attack,” the company said.

Kevin Thompson, SolarWinds’ president and CEO, said the company was working with the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community and other law enforcement agencies to investigate.

Tech companies respond

Two other tech companies, Microsoft and FireEye, also weighed in.

Microsoft said in a blog post late Sunday, “We believe this is nation-state activity at significant scale, aimed at both the government and private sector.”

The Commerce Department and the Treasury Department use the Microsoft Office 365 platform, Reuters and The New York Times reported Sunday.

FireEye reported last week that hackers, also believed to be Russians, stole the company’s key tools used to test vulnerabilities in the computer networks of its customers, which include government agencies.

FireEye said in a blog post late Sunday night that it had identified “a global campaign that introduces a compromise into the networks of public and private organizations through the software supply chain.”

Speaking in Moscow last Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed allegations that Russia was involved in the FireEye hack.

“I want to remind you that it was President (Vladimir) Putin who proposed that the American side agree and conclude agreements (with Russia) on cybersecurity,” Peskov said, adding that Washington had ignored the offer.

“If there have been attacks for many months, and the Americans could not do anything about it, it is probably not worth immediately, groundlessly blaming the Russians. We didn’t have anything to do with it,” he said.

NPR’s national security correspondent Greg Myre contributed to this report.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/14/946163194/russia-suspected-in-months-long-cyber-attack-on-federal-agencies

The post Russia Suspected In Major Cyberattack On U.S. Treasury, Commerce Departments first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Officials confirmed that Trump and national security adviser Robert O’Brien have cut 70 positions inherited from former President Barack Obama, who had fattened the staff to 200.

Many were loaners from other agencies and have been sent back. Others left government work.

The NSC, which is the president’s personal staff, was rocked when a “whistleblower” leveled charges that led to Trump’s impeachment.

Last week, one key official who testified against Trump at a House hearing on the Ukraine affair that led to impeachment was sent packing. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was returned to the Pentagon. His twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, was also given the boot. Trump had expressed displeasure that Alexander Vindman had testified against him when the Ukraine specialist said he did not like the phone conversation between the president and a newly elected president of Ukraine.

Since entering the White House, Trump has relied on staff smaller than previous administrations and has noted how prior presidents had a much smaller NSC team.

O’Brien recently said that former President George W. Bush handled the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with 100 NSC aides, a model he is instituting.

“This month, we will complete the right-sizing goal Ambassador O’Brien outlined in October, and in fact, may exceed that target by drawing down even more positions,” John Ullyot, the NSC’s senior director for strategic communications, told Secrets.

Source: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/bigger-than-vindman-trump-scrubs-70-obama-holdovers-from-nsc

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The post Breaking News – North Korea ‘working on new missiles’ first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

WASHINGTON (CNN) – New indicators, including satellite images, show that North Korea could be in the midst of building new missiles, the Washington Post reported Monday, citing officials familiar with the intelligence.

According to The Post, the officials said the new information reveals that work is potentially taking place on one or two liquid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles in Sanumdong, a suburb of Pyongyang.

Liquid-fueled rockets are harder to store and move than solid-fuel rockets because the fuel is more volatile, according to experts. The volatility of liquid fuel can cause missiles to fail in launch and the fuel has to be stored separate from the missiles, causing a decrease in military readiness. Liquid fueling can also take a fairly long time to complete, giving US spy satellites a period of time to see launch preparations underway. Solid-fueled missiles can be very quickly launched giving the US very limited warning

The National Security Council declined to comment when reached by CNN.

News that the North Koreans are potentially developing new weapons would be a heavy blow to President Donald Trump’s efforts at diplomacy with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

Pyongyang has appeared open to discussions surrounding its status as a nuclear state following meetings with both South Korea and the United States. Trump traveled to Singapore in June for a summit with Kim and, following the meeting, Trump announced that North Korea no longer posed a nuclear threat — despite a lack of evidence proving that the North Koreans would cease to continue its nuclear program.

“Just landed – a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” Trump tweeted at the time. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”

Last Tuesday, Trump said new images signaled that North Korea was beginning to dismantle “a key missile site.”

“New images just today show that North Korea has begun the process of dismantling a key missile site, and we appreciate that,” Trump said, an apparent reference to images of the Sohae Satellite Launching Station published Monday by the prominent monitoring group 38 North.

The images were taken between July 20 and July 22, and show North Korea has indeed started to dismantle key facilities at the satellite launch station, a move analysts said represents “an important first step towards fulfilling a commitment” made by Kim during his summit with Trump.

However, CNN also reported last week that, according to an official with close knowledge of North Korea’s position on the matter, continued negotiations between the United States and North Korea hinge on Washington’s willingness to make a “bold move” and agree to a peace treaty with Pyongyang.

The source previously told CNN that if a peace treaty to replace the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War did not ensure the survival of the current North Korean regime, it could be the end of denuclearization talks.

The intelligence community has publicly stated that it has seen signs of continued activity, including at fuel plants.

Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relation Committee last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged that North Korean factories “continue to produce fissile material” used in making nuclear weapons.

Pompeo also told the committee that moving toward concrete denuclearization is “a process,” adding that it “will definitely take time.”

The commander of US Forces Korea, General Vincent Brooks, said at the recent Aspen Security Forum that North Korea’s “production capability is still intact.

“So we haven’t seen a complete shutdown of production yet. We have not seen the removal of fuel rods. These types of things tell us that there are steps that still must be taken on the road to denuclearization,” Brooks said.

Brooks also recently confirmed that North Korea’s nuclear production capability was still intact.

Source: http://www.kkoh.com/news/wapo-new-indicators-show-north-korea-potentially-working-on-missiles/

The post WaPo: New indicators show North Korea potentially working on missiles first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Miscalculations and flawed assumptions could trigger an all-out war, analysts told The Straits Times.

Talk of a “bloody nose” strike on North Korea has been going on for weeks – though the Trump administration says the military option is only one of its many options for dealing with North Korea.

But discussions over the risky move have intensified after Dr Victor Cha, a Georgetown University professor and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was abruptly dropped this week as White House’s pick for US Ambassador to Seoul.

Reports said he had counselled against a military strike, and also against tearing up the US’ free trade agreement with South Korea. The Donald Trump administration wants to rectify the US’ trade deficits.

The Washington Post also cited a person familiar with the nomination process saying a red flag was raised during Dr Cha’s background check that led officials to determine he could not serve in the ambassador’s post. No specifics were offered.

Whatever the case, Dr Cha in a commentary in The Washington Post on Thursday (Feb 1) – seemingly a few hours after his nomination had been dropped – cautioned against a “bloody nose” military strike on North Korea. And Dr Cha is by no means a moderate on North Korea.

That alone has raised eyebrows in policy and security circles in Washington and abroad. It suggests that hawks rule the roost in the Trump administration.

“The administration’s interest in striking the North appears to be all too real,” Dr Mira Rapp-Hooper, a senior fellow in the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School and an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, wrote in The Atlantic on Wednesday.

But such a strike on North Korea would trigger “cataclysm”, she warned.

That the US has the resources and ability to mount a targeted strike in short order is beyond doubt.

It has plentiful military assets including three aircraft carriers in the Asia-Pacific region. But a strike would trigger an unpredictable chain of events.

“The US can control what it does, but not what the North sees and believes,” warned Dr Robert Jervis, professor of International Affairs at Columbia University, in a piece published on the website 38 North.

“A military strike will want to convey both resolve and restraint, but it is the adversary’s perceptions that will determine whether this happens,” he wrote.

“This is a situation of intense bargaining which, while being coercive, is not in our unilateral control. We can try to manipulate North Korea’s incentives, but it is how Pyongyang sees the situation, estimates our intentions and future behaviour, and decides how to behave that will shape the outcome.”

Dr Jervis estimated that the Department of Defence officials he had spoken with put the probability of a military strike higher than he had assumed.

But he was “not sure how carefully people had thought things through”, he told The Straits Times.

One of the biggest dilemmas the US faces in striking, say, a North Korean missile facility, would be whether to evacuate American families from Seoul and other places in South Korea within range of retaliation from North Korea.

Starting such an evacuation would send a powerful signal to the North that the US was preparing to strike. But it would also lose the element of surprise.

On any given day, there are 230,000 Americans in South Korea and 90,000 or so in Japan, Dr Cha wrote in the Washington Post commentary.

Projections of all-out war put the potential death toll in the hundreds of thousands in just a few days.

A “bloody nose” suggests a limited but precise strike.

But “one of the crucial dilemmas is, if you hope to keep the war limited you’ve got to be pretty limited going in” ,Dr Jervis said. “If you think you can’t for any number of reasons, then you have to go really big.”

President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser General H.R. McMaster has emerged as one of the administration’s most hawkish voices on North Korea.

Matt Pottinger, President Trump’s top adviser for Asia on the National Security Council, is widely seen as backing Gen McMaster.

The former general in 1997 published an acclaimed autopsy of the Vietnam war titled Dereliction Of Duty, but his field experience has been in the Middle East and he has little experience in north-east Asia.

He has since last summer been building a case for the use of preventive force against North Korea, Dr Rapp-Hooper wrote.

Administration hawks believe Kim Jong Un cannot be deterred.

They see North Korea’s participation in the Winter Olympics as a move to drive a wedge between the US and South Korea. They see Mr Kim’s long-term plan as waging conventional war – under the threat of his own nuclear umbrella – to drive US forces off the Korean peninsula, and they fear he will proliferate nuclear weapons technology.

“Nuclear deterrence and US military superiority, in other words, would not be enough to halt Kim’s mission of peninsular conquest,” Dr Rapp-Hooper wrote in The Atlantic.

Dr Cynthia Watson, professor of Strategy at The National War College, told The Straits Times in an e-mail interview: “The Administration believes it must convince Pyongyang that it will act if North Korea does not move to reduce its nuclear threat.

“I believe President Trump and his team genuinely believe they must alter the current trajectory the DPRK nuclear programme is on,” she wrote. She stressed that she was expressing her personal opinion.

But she added: “I don’t think the military is anxious to launch a strike as they do know well the implications. These are sane, rational professionals who are weighing the relative dangers differently than many people discussing the Korea problem.”

As the US had discovered in Vietnam, the “willingness to suffer is a source of power”, Dr Jervis warned in his piece published on 38 North.

“The likelihood of the success of our use of force therefore depends on North Korea’s will. Second, the North’s willingness to bear pain rather than give in is related to what is being demanded of it. The more a state values what it is being asked to give up, the greater its resistance is likely to be.”

Source: http://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/bloody-nose-strike-on-north-korea-will-trigger-all-out-war-warn-analysts

The post ‘Bloody nose’ strike on North Korea will trigger all-out war, warn analysts first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.