Related: New York Times Makes Me WannaCry
Computer systems from Ukraine to the United States were struck on Tuesday in an international cyberattack that was like a recent assault that crippled tens of thousands of machines worldwide.
In Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, ATMs stopped working. About 80 miles away, workers were forced to manually monitor radiation at the old Chernobyl nuclear plant when their computers failed. And tech managers at companies around the world, from the Danish shipping conglomerate Maersk to US drug giant Merck, were scrambling to respond.
Related:
"The positive result was a welcome surprise because three previous experimental drugs of the same type had failed....."
$ome good news amongst the bad.
It was unclear who was behind this cyberattack, and the extent of its effect was still hard to gauge Tuesday.
It started as an attack on Ukrainian government and business computer systems — an assault that appeared to have been intended to hit the day before a holiday marking the adoption in 1996 of Ukraine’s first constitution after breaking away from the Soviet Union. It spread from there, causing collateral damage around the world.
I'm sure that was to establish Russian fingerprints.
This outbreak is the latest and perhaps the most sophisticated in a series of attacks that make use of dozens of hacking tools that were stolen from the National Security Agency and leaked online in April by a group called the Shadow Brokers.
See: Shadow Broker Bull$h**
Like the WannaCry attacks in May, the latest global hacking took control of computers and demanded digital ransom from their owners to regain access. This attack used the same NSA hacking tool, Eternal Blue, that was used in the WannaCry incident, and two other methods to promote its spread, according to researchers at the computer security company Symantec.
So where do they want the money sent this time after the earlier flop?
The NSA has not acknowledged its tools were used in WannaCry or other attacks. But computer security specialists are demanding that the agency help the rest of the world defend against the weapons it created.
Well, if they are still using them.... see the beauty here?
“The NSA needs to take a leadership role in working closely with security and operating system platform vendors such as Apple and Microsoft to address the plague that they’ve unleashed,” said Golan Ben-Oni, the global chief information officer at IDT, a Newark, N.J.-based conglomerate hit by a separate attack in April that used NSA hacking tools. Ben-Oni warned federal officials that more serious attacks were probably on the horizon.
The vulnerability in Windows software used by Eternal Blue was patched by Microsoft in March, but as the WannaCry attacks demonstrated, hundreds of thousands of organizations around the world failed to properly install the fix.
“Just because you roll out a patch doesn’t mean it’ll be put in place quickly,” said Carl Herberger, vice president of security at Radware. “The more bureaucratic an organization is, the higher chance it won’t have updated its software.”
Government at the top of the list, too. Same government collecting all the data.
Because the ransomware used at least two other ways to spread on Tuesday, even those who used the Microsoft patch could be vulnerable, according to researchers at F-Secure, the Finnish cybersecurity firm.
CIA always insists on a trapdoor. How do you think all this trouble started?
A Microsoft spokesman said the company’s latest anti-virus software should protect against the attack.
The Ukrainian government said several of its ministries, local banks, and metro systems had been affected. A number of other European companies, including Rosneft, the Russian energy giant; Saint-Gobain, the French construction materials company; and WPP, the British advertising agency, also said they had been targeted.
Ukrainian officials pointed a finger at Russia on Tuesday, though Russian companies were also affected. Home Credit bank, one of Russia’s top 50 lenders, was paralyzed, with all of its offices closed, according to the RBC news website. The attack also affected Evraz, a steel manufacturing and mining company that employs about 80,000 people, the RBC website reported.
In the United States, DLA Piper, the multinational law firm, also reported being hit. Hospitals in Pennsylvania were being forced to cancel surgeries after the attack hit computers at Heritage Valley Health Systems, a health care provider, and its hospitals in Beaver and Sewickley, Pa., and satellite locations across the state.
A spokesman for the NSA referred questions about the attack to the Department of Homeland Security.
“The Department of Homeland Security is monitoring reports of cyberattacks affecting multiple global entities and is coordinating with our international and domestic cyberpartners,” Scott McConnell, spokesman for DHS, said in a statement.
Computer specialists said the ransomware was very similar to a virus that first emerged last year called Petya. Petya means “Little Peter,” in Russian, leading some to speculate the name referred to Sergei Prokofiev’s 1936 symphony “Peter and the Wolf,” about a boy who captures a wolf.
Yeah, must be the Russians then.
Reports that the computer virus was a variant of Petya suggest the attackers will be hard to trace. Petya was for sale on the so-called dark web, where its creators made the ransomware available as “ransomware as a service” — a play on Silicon Valley terminology for delivering software over the internet, according to the security firm Avast Threat Labs.
Don't intelligence agencies operate in the dark shadows with their covert operations?
Who benefits here?
That means anyone could launch the ransomware with the click of a button, encrypt someone’s systems, and demand a ransom to unlock it. If the victim pays, the authors of the Petya ransomware, who call themselves Janus Cybercrime Solutions, get a cut of the payment.
That distribution method means that pinning down the people responsible for Tuesday’s attack could be difficult.
This so stinks of the endless psyop sh** we have been getting, and my eyes are starting to water.
The attack is “an improved and more lethal version of WannaCry,” according to Matthieu Suiche, a security researcher who helped contain the spread of the WannaCry ransomware when he created a kill switch that stopped the attacks.
In just the last seven days, Suiche noted that WannaCry had tried to hit an additional 80,000 organizations, but was prevented from executing attack code because of the kill switch. Petya does not have a kill switch.
Petya also encrypts and locks entire hard drives, while the earlier ransomware attacks locked only individual files, said Chris Hinkley, a researcher at Armor, the security firm.
The hackers behind Petya demanded $300 worth of the cybercurrency bitcoin to unlock victims’ machines. By Tuesday afternoon, online records showed that 30 victims had paid the ransom, though it was not clear whether they regained access to their files. Other victims may be out of luck, after Posteo, the German email service provider, shut down the hackers’ email account.
In Ukraine, people turned up at post offices, ATMs, and airports to find blank computer screens, or signs about closures. At Kiev’s central post office, a few bewildered customers milled about, holding parcels and letters, looking at a sign that said, “closed for technical reasons.”
The hackers compromised Ukrainian accounting software mandated to be used in various industries in the country, including government agencies and banks, according to researchers at Cisco Talos, the security division of the computer networking company. That allowed them to unleash their ransomware when the software, which is also used in other countries, was updated.
The ransomware spread for five days across Ukraine, and around the world, before activating Tuesday evening.
“If I had to guess, I would think this was done to send a political message,” said Craig Williams, the senior technical researcher at Talos.
Hmmmm.
One Kiev resident, Tetiana Vasylieva, was forced to borrow money from a relative after failing to withdraw money at four automated teller machines. At one ATM in Kiev belonging to the Ukrainian branch of the Austrian bank Raiffeisen, a message on the screen said the machine was not functioning.
Americans will be ripping each others throats out.
Ukraine’s Infrastructure Ministry, the postal service, the national railway company, and one of the country’s largest communications companies, Ukrtelecom, had been affected, Volodymyr Omelyan, the country’s infrastructure minister, said in a Facebook post.
Officials for the metro system in Kiev said card payments could not be accepted. The national power grid company Kievenergo had to switch off all of its computers, but the situation was under control, according to the Interfax-Ukraine news agency. Metro Group, a German company that runs wholesale food stores, said its operations in Ukraine had been affected.
At the Chernobyl plant, the computers affected by the attack collected data on radiation levels and were not connected to industrial systems at the site, where, though all reactors have been decommissioned, huge volumes of radioactive waste remain. Operators said radiation monitoring was being done manually.
That's actually now a paradise.
Cybersecurity researchers questioned whether collecting ransom was the true objective of the attack.
“It’s entirely possible that this attack could have been a smoke screen,” said Justin Harvey, the chief security officer for the Fidelis cybersecurity company. “If you are an evil doer and you wanted to cause mayhem, why wouldn’t you try to first mask it as something else?”
First of all, when did he start quoting George W. Bush?
Anyway, the ending is such an in-your-face laugher.
Yeah, wouldn't you try to run a false flag to cast blame on some innocent target, which will then be used to prosecute aggression against them?
--more--"
Related: Nuclear Attack Will Come From the Shadows
We will all be crying ourselves to sleep then.
This next item not only carries forward the false flag theme, it will also have you in tears:
"US officials have seen chemical weapons activity in Syria, Pentagon says" by Helene Cooper and Ben Hubbard New York Times June 27, 2017
You would have thought they had learned after the halfhearted non-apology for the Iraq lies, but nope.
WASHINGTON — An official with US Central Command, which oversees combat operations in the Middle East, said Monday night that he had “no idea” to what the White House statement was referring.
No kidding. They see no activity, huh?
A White House official said Tuesday that relevant agencies, including the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, had been involved in issuing the statement.
Like we are going to believe them.
Aren't they the same agencies that said Russia interfered with our election and collaborated with Trump?
It remained unclear whether the statement was based on raw intelligence that President Trump had chosen to declassify. Neither White House nor Pentagon officials said an attack, or retaliation, was imminent in Syria.
I see that phrase and I think big, swirling, steamer of a pile.
“The Department of Defense remains focused on operations to defeat ISIS,” Major Adrian Rankine-Galloway, a Defense Department spokesman, said in a statement, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “Nevertheless, the continued brutality of the Assad regime and his use of chemical weapons presents a clear threat to regional stability and security, as well as the national security interests of the United States and our allies.”
Didn't we already go through all this about 14 years ago?
In Damascus, Ali Haidar, the Syrian minister for national reconciliation, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying Tuesday that the government did not have chemical weapons and that it would not use any.
Officials in Russia, which has provided military and political support to President Bashar Assad during the Syrian conflict, also rejected the accusations.
“I am not aware of any information about a threat that chemical weapons could be used,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said Tuesday. “Certainly, we consider such threats to the legitimate leadership of the Syrian Arab Republic unacceptable.”
A senior Russian lawmaker accused the United States of using the declaration about chemical weapons to plan an attack on Syria.
“Preparations for a new cynical and unprecedented provocation are underway,” Frants Klintsevich, member of the Russian Parliament, told state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.
The whole world sees it.
As if to punctuate his contempt for the Trump administration’s warning, Assad visited a Russian air base near Latakia in the western part of the country Tuesday, accompanied by General Valery V. Gerasimov, the Russian military’s chief of staff. Syrian news media, which reported the visit, also distributed a video clip of Assad climbing into the cockpit of a Russian Sukhoi Su-35 parked at the base, where Russia has conducted many of its bombing operations to support the government’s side in the war.
--more--"
I tried to click on whatreallyhappened last night and couldn't get through at all; I thought they might have a word or two to say about all this.
Related:
"Wednesday, June 28, 2017
The Materially Insane on the Runaway Train to Krazy Town.
(I hate to go pedestrian in Visible Origami but certain events are taking place as certain trends are appearing and they signify dark portents for coming times. As was recently stated whatever happens in the world is of the world. Otherwise there is the ineffable and you MUST cast all your cares and concerns into his hands because the world is in Krazy Phase, being driven by the force of runaway Materialism. Step aside and let it go by. Do not jump onboard. That train is headed for Krazy Town.)
It is official. It is now official,
Donald Trump is owned by the combination cabal of Organized Satanists
and Israeli Dual Nationals. It could
be no more clear than this. Here is a more
clear picture of what is taking place. Meanwhile there are forces
that have been at work for some time and the truth
of this has been known to some for awhile.
The agents of the dark side and those
who serve the light have many things in common, aside from the
principal items such as intentions and objective. Both sides are
dedicated and determined and have great faith in the force they
serve. Both employ forms of prayer and ritual. I could go on but it's
not germane to today's point.
Crazy is crazy and there are no
barriers of social station, level of intelligence, economic
standing... that can protect you from crazy; frankly... quite
frankly, crazy
can get in anywhere. Someone explain to me what difference it
makes what the sexual designation of single use bathrooms is?
Materialism is legitimately insanity
and the further in you go, the crazier you become. Since the entire
planet is being swept up in it, crazy is the new normal. It is one of
the most unfortunate things that people do not pay attention to what
is going on around them in the larger and wider sense. Consonant with
this, people believe that social and cultural changes come about all
on their own and are the result of some sort of evolutionary drive.
They do not see that most of the social and cultural changes, these
days, are being engineered by malificants working in concert to
destroy all harmony and symmetry and to usher in Hell on Earth.
We are being attacked at every level
with the intention of making us sick at every level. Our sexual
nature is being shaped with the objective of destroying the family
unit. Our eating habits are being programmed so that our physical
health will be ruined. Our moral sense is being warped by increments
so that we will lose our common and native affection for one another.
Our history is being manipulated in order to activate antipathy
between the races and the sexes; events are set in motion to amplify
hatred and suspicion over every difference that exists between us.
The primary offspring of Materialism is
selfishness. Selfishness makes us uncaring of others. The population
in the poorest locations is experiencing the highest birthrates. Half
the world lives on around $2.50 a day. Almost 400 million people
live on less that $1.90 a day. 8 men possess as much wealth as half
of the world's people. These disparities are amazing but there is
nothing accidental about any of it. Life is a dream and all the
world's inhabitants live at some level of awareness in the dream.
Very, very few are awake. Very many are deep into it and it is for
this reason that an apocalypse comes around at regular intervals. It
is for this reason that the Avatar appears at regular intervals. It
is a natural cultural progression that the religious systems that
endured for such a length of time would begin to disintegrate. They
are not the only long standing pillars of the social infrastructure
that are crumbling.
In times of apocalypse the truth is
revealed and this changes the collective perceptions of the residents
and that changes the world. At this point in time, falsehoods are
riding roughshod over the collective mind and bizarre expositions of
both temporary and chronic madness are everywhere to be seen. All
through the changes people come and go across the dreamscape. They
see and do not see. They hear and do not hear. The composition of
individual Karma is expressed in the density of the dream as it
manifests in each life. Only through a great and persistent intensity
of effort or the visitation of Grace can one awaken. One's capacity
for the intensity of effort is also reliant upon Karma. In most cases
there is no industry whatsoever in respect of awakening. All of the
intention is upon material aspirations for material gain and this is
a prison house of perpetual suffering. One suffers with the absence
of the objects of desire and then one suffers in the possession of
the objects of desire. One suffers from the loss of the objects of
desire but more especially from the disappointment in the objects of
desire.
(I normally wouldn't interrupt a fellow blogger; however, there is that word again)
(I normally wouldn't interrupt a fellow blogger; however, there is that word again)
There is something missing. There is an
emptiness that cannot be filled by any material gain no matter what
it might be. The mind has convinced itself that what desire has
provoked will prove to be the solution to the emptiness but it never
is. Only in recognition of the indwelling self is peace possible.
Still there is no peace until that blessed reunion takes place but
there is a certainty and determination now. There is a faith that is
like that peace which passes all understanding and it drives you like
nothing that has ever come before. It gives a meaning to existence
that was not present in other times when the monkey mind scrambled in
every direction finding only temporary distractions.
A reader asked me the other day where
she might go that was safe. Where could one go and be able to live on
minimal resources. This person wanted to know where and in what state
such a place could be found and I had no answer for that because
every place involves a different combination of possibilities for
each person. No one place is the same for everyone. This world is
filled with people who have answers. Solutions fall so easily from
their lips. Never before have we had so many experts on so many
subjects and never before have so many of them been so consistently
wrong. Now we have life coaches and people who converse with spirit
guides and channel just about everyone who has ever been here and
plenty of beings who live in other dimensions and in other solar
systems.
Some years ago I was in New York and I
came across one of those spiritual newspapers that are like the sex
ad newspapers that can have well over a hundred pages. I was stunned
the first time I saw one of those but... I digress. I came upon this
spiritual newspaper that also had at least a hundred pages and dozens
of those were filled with classified ads. I guess I had some time on
my hands so I spent a good portion of time reading this newspaper and
I came across no less than a dozen, maybe two dozen people who were
channeling Jesus Christ; half a dozen channeled Moses. I can't
remember how many were offering the Comte de St. Germain. How is it
possible that so many people could be conduits for the same spiritual
personality at the same time?
There are thousands and thousands of
these people who bring us information and advice about how to live
our lives and how to get what we want and how many of them are
legitimate? I suspect there are very, very few. Meanwhile... the
source of all things is resident within us. The answer to everything
that could ever concern us is resident within the ineffable who is
resident within us. We seem unable to ask with the necessary
sincerity and faith. We seem incapable of believing in the one who is
more real than any other thing and who is the source and origin of
every good thing. This is due to the Karma that has chained us to the
wheel of desire for all the temporary things we have been deceived
into believing are the thing we want and life proves to us over and
over through life after life that none of it is true or real.
Only the ineffable can resolve every
concern. Only the ineffable can lift us out of the dream and into the
real. Only the ineffable can conquer death and every sorrow and loss.
Until one finds the clarity of vision to know this they will wander
in dreams and the dreams will be populated with suffering and there
will be no answers because there is only one answer and only one
place where it can be found.
My life is not free from suffering. My
life is not a constant flow of ease and serenity but I know where the
answer is. I know that God is real and so I know that it is simply a
matter of time and the circumstances that are necessary for me to
come to the place where what is meant to happen can happen.
Everything else is of no importance. Everything else is just images
seen from a car window. Everyone passing by is me at some point along
the way; me when I knew a great deal less and me when I knew a great
deal more. Now there is only one thing I am certain of and so... it
is just a matter of time. Is time even real? Are the necessary
circumstances real? I know that God is real and so it is a certainty
that the moment will come that the ineffable will appear in such a
way that... and it is at this point where words fail me once more and
I can only hope that the time will come when more can be said.
--MORE--"
With h/t.
--MORE--"
With h/t.
*************************
"Anxiety about the building materials appeared to be spreading to other countries. Arconic, the US company that sold the combustible material, said Monday that it would no longer sell the paneling for use in high-rises....."
Which begs the question why incidents like this haven't been happening all over the world. Or have they?
British prosecutors charge 6 people in deadly 1989 stadium disaster
That would be the disaster at Hillsborough, after which the police lied.
How much does the royal family cost each Brit?
Too much.
Trump says he feels like he knows all of the Irish people in America
He's got a couple of friends.
"A Dutch court ruled on Tuesday that the government was partly liable for the deaths of about 350 Muslim men in 1995 in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, the site of Europe’s worst mass murder since World War II. In all, the massacre claimed the lives of at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. They were systematically separated from women and girls, hauled away, bound, shot, and buried in mass graves. Among the few survivors were some who pretended to be dead. International courts have declared the killings a genocide....."
A lot of them were Al-CIA-Duh, Bill Clinton brought them into Bosnia, but the jew$paper doesn't tell you that.
That doesn't excuse what happened; it just notes that there were other forces at work.
German Chancellor Merkel’s pivot boosts hopes for gay marriage in Germany
Surprisingly enough, a lot of Nazis were gay.
Google fined record $2.7 billion in EU antitrust ruling
Looks like a money grab.
Europe’s stimulus could be scaled back gradually, ECB chief says
I guess the fires in Portugal are out, amongst other things.
*********************
"In its annual assessment of global efforts to end forms of modern slavery, a strongly worded State Department report released Tuesday in a formal announcement attended by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, the fierce criticism of China promises to accelerate a rapid worsening of relations with the Asian nation that had briefly benefited from good feelings generated by an April summit between President Trump and President Xi Jinping at Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago....."
Which means the Chinese now see Trump as two-faced.
This after they approved her licensing deals, too!
US Navy holds memorial service for 7 sailors killed in crash
A crash that they initially lied about, like they lied about the position of the Vinson a while back.
The question needs to be asked: when is the US Navy not lying?
I suppose that encompasses my Philippines coverage for the day. Nothing in my paper about Iraq, Afghanistan, Qatar, Pakistan, and a whole lot of other places.
Time to ferry this post to a close.
"Complaints from Massachusetts customers have resulted in an online cremation service based in Colorado having its registration suspended. The Colorado Office of Funeral Home and Crematory Registration found that the company, Heritage Cremation Provider, failed to notify customers that it was subcontracting cremations. It was using its website to advertise its services in at least 11 states — including Massachusetts — where it was not registered to do business, according to a press release. An employee at Heritage Cremation Provider declined to answer questions from the Globe....."
Dead men tell no tales.
Also see: Tuesday's Eids
Quite a change in fare today, 'eh?
