Category Archives: National Security

Britain, European Union, National Security, Russia

Putin blasted by MI5 for ‘fog of lies’ over Salisbury

BRITAIN’S INTELLIGENCE SERVICE

Head of MI5: Andrew Parker

Intro: Andrew Parker speaks out for the first time since the Salisbury nerve agent attack

THE head of MI5, Britain’s intelligence service, has launched an excoriating attack on Russia, accusing Vladimir Putin’s regime of flagrant breaches of international law.

Andrew Parker used his first public speech outside of the UK by taking aim at the Russian president and his “aggressive and pernicious” agenda.

He told European security chiefs the Salisbury poisonings were a deliberate and malign act that could turn Russia into a “more isolated pariah”. He also launched a strident attack on the “fog of lies, half-truths and obfuscation” that pours out of Mr Putin’s propaganda machine.

Mr Parker’s speech in Berlin was the first time he has spoken publicly since the attempted assassination in Salisbury of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, in March.

The attack, with the Novichok toxin, marked the first use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War.

The MI5 director-general said that with an unrelenting international terrorist threat and rising state aggression, the UK and Europe need to work together more than ever.

His words are likely to have been interpreted as a warning to Brussels to agree a post-Brexit deal on security cooperation. That has been in growing doubt amid a row over whether Britain will still be allowed to participate in the EU’s multi-billion-pound Galileo global navigation satellite project. But Mr Parker reserved his toughest language for Russia, saying that Mr Putin’s government is pursuing an agenda through aggressive actions by its intelligence services.

He accused the Kremlin of flagrant breaches of international rules, warning that the Salisbury attack was a “deliberate and targeted malign activity”.

Britain’s security agencies are still trying to identify those individuals behind the attack. It is understood there are several persons of interest who are back in Moscow and may have been in the UK at the time of the poisoning.

Mr Parker, who has been head of the security service since 2013, also condemned the unprecedented level of Russian disinformation following the attack, saying it highlights the need “to shine a light through the fog of lies, half-truths and obfuscation that pours out of their propaganda machine”.

In the wake of the attack, Theresa May said “Kremlin-inspired” accounts were posting lies as “part of a wider effort to undermine the international system”.

Mr Parker did, however, praise the international response to the incident in his speech which was hosted by Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence service.

He noted that 28 European countries agreed to support the UK in expelling scores of Russian diplomats.

In 2017, Mrs May’s national security adviser, Mark Sedwill, said the threat from Moscow was worse than ever imagined. He warned that it was intensifying and diversifying.

 

MR Parker also told EU security leaders in Berlin that Internet giants have an “ethical responsibility” to prevent hostile states spreading a “torrent of lies” online. He said that “bare-faced lying” had become the “default mode” of the Russian state.

He added that there was a “great deal more” that could be done with internet providers to stop the exploitation of the web.

MI5’s director-general said Europe faced sustained hostile activity from states including Russia who he described as the “chief protagonist”.

In his speech, he said: “Age-old attempts at covert influence and propaganda have been supercharged in online disinformation, which can be churned out on a massive scale and at little cost. The aim is to sow doubt by flat denials of the truth, to dilute truth with falsehood, divert attention to fake stories, and do all they can to divide alliances.

“Bare-faced lying seems to be the default mode, coupled with ridicule of critics.”

The Russian state’s now well-practiced doctrine of blending media manipulation, social media disinformation and distortion with new and old forms of espionage, high levels of cyber-attacks, military force and criminal thuggery is what is meant these days by the term “hybrid threats”. Russia’s state media and representatives instigated at least 30 different so-called explanations of the Salisbury poisonings in their efforts to “mislead the world and their own people,” Mr Parker said.

One recent media survey found that two-thirds of social media output at the peak of the Salisbury attack came from Russian government-controlled accounts.

Last October, MI5’s chief said he wanted internet companies to do more to stop extremists using the “safe spaces” on the web to learn illicit techniques such as bomb-making.

This week’s keynote speech was the first time he has called on web giants to do far more. “We are committed to working with them as they look to fulfil their ethical responsibility to prevent terrorist, hostile state and criminal exploitation of internet carried services: shining a light on terrorists; taking down bomb-making instructions; warning the authorities about attempts to acquire explosives precursors.

“This matters and there is much more to do,” the director-general of MI5 said.

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Britain, Economic, Government, National Security, Russia, Society, United States

Russia’s ‘tremendous weapon’

CYBER WARFARE

SECURITY CHIEFS have warned that tens of thousands of British families’ computers have been targeted by Russia – potentially paving the way for a devastating cyber-attack.

. You might also like to read The terrifying era of internet warfare

They fear the Kremlin is trying to identify vulnerabilities allowing it to “lay a foundation for offensive future operations” that could cripple Britain.

The concern is that Russia could take control of these devices then use them to overload vital infrastructure systems such as banks, water supplies, energy networks, emergency services and even the Armed Forces.

A so-called “man-in-the-middle” attack could be carried out anonymously because the Government would not know who had hacked into these systems in UK homes.

Security chiefs said they feared Moscow-backed hackers were trying to create a “tremendous weapon” to unleash in “times of tension”. Britain’s eavesdropping agency GCHQ, the White House and the FBI have launched an unprecedented joint alert about “malicious cyber activity” carried out across the globe by the Kremlin.

They warned that Moscow was mounting a campaign to exploit vulnerable devices and threaten “our respective safety, security, and economic well-being”. It followed a recent warning that Vladimir Putin was ready to retaliate for the Western air strikes on Syria, where Bashar al-Assad’s regime is backed by Russia.

Britain has been tracking the online activity for more than a year, a spokesperson for the National Cyber-Security Centre (NCSC) said.

Kremlin-sponsored actors were said to be using “compromised routers” to conduct “spoofing” – when the attacker hides their identity – to “support espionage… and potentially lay a foundation for future offensive operations”.

In an unusual transatlantic briefing the NCSC said there are millions of machines being globally targeted, with the intent of trying to seize control over connectivity.

“In the case of targeting providers of internet services, it’s about gaining access to their customers to try to gain control over the devices.

“The purpose of these attacks could be espionage, it could be the theft of intellectual property, it could be positioning or use in times of tension. All of the attacks have directly affected the UK.”

The FBI says that US government experts had found themselves “unwittingly on the frontline of the battle” against Moscow’s cyber-attacks. The Bureau said that, if Russia were able to hack into a wireless router then “own it”, hackers could monitor all the traffic going through it. “It is a tremendous weapon”.

A White House cyber security co-ordinator warned the Kremlin that the US and Britain would respond to any attack. The UK has previously carried out a huge cyber offensive against Islamic State, and the US attacked the Iranian nuclear programme by launching the Stuxnet cyber- attack in 2010 which wholly deactivated the programme’s centrifuges.

The US and UK insist they are pushing back hard and say that cyber activity must be stopped and opposed at every turn. They are confident, however, that Russia has already carried out a co-ordinated campaign to gain access to enterprise, small office routers and residential routers – the kind of things that everyone has in their homes.

The NCSC, FBI and US department of homeland security warned that Russian state-sponsored actors were trying to spy on individuals, industries and the Government.

A joint UK-US statement said “multiple sources” – including private and public sector cyber security research organisations and allies – had reported such activity to governments. The communique said: “Russia is our most capable hostile adversary in cyberspace so dealing with their attacks is a major priority.”

A UK Government spokesperson said: “This is yet another example of Russia’s disregard for international norms and global order – this time through a campaign of cyber espionage and aggression, which attempts to disrupt governments and destabilise business. The attribution of this malicious activity sends a clear message to Russia – we know what you are doing, and you will not succeed.”

 

THE warning from intelligence agencies that Russia is launching a cyber offensive against our Government, infrastructure, companies and even families, with the intention of spreading chaos and panic, is hugely significant.

It is a chilling reminder for everyone – if one were needed – that for Vladimir Putin, bombs, missiles and poison gas aren’t the only weapons of war.

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Britain, Defence, Government, National Security, Terrorism

Security Review: Terror threat to UK to get worse

BRITAIN

A SECURITY review warns that Britain could face a greater threat from Islamist terrorism over the next two years.

Intelligence experts fear battle-hardened jihadis in Syria are dispersing to set up cells elsewhere from which to plot attacks on the West.

There are also concerns that die-hard fanatics could try to come back to Britain to carry out massacres.

These factors, on top of concerns that youngsters at home are being easily radicalised on the internet, point to a heightened terror threat.

The assessment comes after MI5 chief Andrew Parker recently warned that the terror threat was already the worst he had ever seen in his 34-year career.

A security shake-up detailed in the National Security Capability Review, states: ‘We expect the threat from Islamist terrorism to remain at its current heightened level for at least two years and it might increase further.’

The review comes in the wake of five terror attacks on British soil last year and this month’s nerve-agent attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury.

In other details from the review, it can be disclosed that:

. The UK will introduce a ‘fusion doctrine’ to use military, financial, cultural and diplomatic clout to quash threats;

. ‘Unprecedented’ levels of intelligence were shared with allies after Salisbury to make the case for action against Russia;

. Russia, Iran and North Korea are identified as the key state-based threats;

. So-called ‘soft power’ such as the BBC’s World Service and social media will be used to tackle misinformation.

The review outlines the threats facing the UK and how the Government plans to deal with them.

In it, Theresa May states: ‘Every part of our Government and every one of our agencies has its part to play. As long as we defend our interests and stand up for our values, there will continue to be those who seek to undermine or attack us. But these people should be in no doubt that we will use every capability at our disposal to defeat them.

‘Over the past year we have witnessed appalling terrorist attacks in London and Manchester. But also a brazen and reckless act of aggression on the streets of Salisbury: Attempted murder using an illegal chemical weapon, amounting to an unlawful use of force against the UK.’

She said national security depended on not only the police, security services and the Armed Forces, but ‘on our ability to mobilise… the full range of our capabilities in concert’.

The nerve-agent attack in Salisbury shows just how important it was to counter propaganda from Russia. The Kremlin had put out more than 20 stories to confuse the picture.

On top of this, up to 2,800 Russian bots – computer programmes that generate posts on social media – are thought to have tried to sow confusion after the poison attack by spreading deliberately fake information. Officials have feared for months that IS jihadists defeated in Iraq and Syria could morph into a new terror group.

But the danger from Islamist extremists moving into other regions seems likely to increase the threat to British citizens. There are, for example, cells in Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, as well as those remnants that remain in Syria and Iraq. There is no doubt that they will seek to project out.

The biggest shift in the terrorist threat comes from those who have been radicalised in their own communities and through their interactions in cyber space.

. Russia can take fight to space

Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Hillier, Head of the RAF, warns that Russia could defy international rules by attacking in space.

THE UK must be ready to confront Russia in space as technology opens a new frontier, the head of the RAF has said.

In the wake of the Salisbury nerve-agent attack, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Hillier warned that Moscow could defy rules to attack in space.

He said enemy states were developing space weapons capable of destroying satellites and jamming GPS signals.

The Chief of the Air Staff said the RAF needed to be able to combat such threats. At the Royal Aeronautical Society in London, he said: “We have potential adversaries like Russia who are disregarding the rules-based international system and exploiting environments in whatever way they feel they can to their advantage. I don’t foresee a war in space, but I can see us being contested for use of space and for people trying to deny some of our specific capabilities.

“We already see that to a significant degree and we need to be prepared to deal with that threat.”

His warning of intensifying threats from Russia comes ahead of the publication of a defence review in the summer.

Weapons could affect the ability of aircraft to operate, cripple satnavs and shut down maps on mobile phones.

Consumers could also be stopped from using cashpoints and online banking because such activities rely on satellites and time signals.

Sir Stephen said: “We could look at it and say, ‘Yes that is the theory, but they wouldn’t do it, would they?’ Well they would never launch a nerve-agent on a city in the United Kingdom, would they? But they did. So, we need to be ready for those situations.” Pentagon experts believe Russia and China are developing lasers and missiles that could take out satellites in low-earth orbit, according to reports.

Sir Stephen also hit out at Russia for its use of a military grade nerve agent, as well as the “criminal activities of the Russian state in cyberspace”.

He said: “The post-war consensus that has provided the basis for the rules-based international order is being challenged and undermined.

“We must respond, collectively with our NATO and other partners, to counter hostile acts by Russia against our countries, our interests and our values.”

It comes as Western capitals brace for Kremlin reprisals after the list of British allies kicking out Russian spies over the Salisbury attack grew to 27.

Ireland, Belgium, Macedonia and Moldova have joined the list while NATO said it would cut the Russian delegation at its headquarters by ten.

Moscow has threatened a “tough response” to the expulsions.

. See also Britain’s Military and the 2015 Defence Review…

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