Cyber espionage operations and leaks of sensitive government data are a regular occurrence these days. In our eagerness to learn hidden truths it is also imperative that we ask ourselves whether we can trust the accuracy of information offered up by unknown actors whose intentions are obscured.

Should our default position be to treat leaks with the strictest suspicion—perhaps even as the calculated product of digital disinformation—until proven otherwise? The latest report from Citizen Lab, Tainted Leaks: The targets, spread over 39 countries, include government and industry leaders, military officers, diplomats, and notable members of civil society, including journalists, activists, academics, as well as other high-profile individuals.

Civil society, according to the report, represents the second largest target of cyber espionage following government. The research begins with a large-scale phishing and disinformation campaign linked to Russia, offering evidence of how documents stolen from a prominent journalist were tampered with before their release into the wild.

Patient zero is David Satter, an American journalist exiled from Russia, who in October fell victim to a targeted phishing campaign.

Satter, perhaps best known for implicating Russian intelligence services in the September apartment bombings in Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk, which killed people, had mistakenly entered his password into a credential harvesting site. His emails were subsequently stolen and eventually leaked by the self-described pro-Russian hacktivist group CyberBerkut.

A sentence inserted into one modified document read: One of the tactics employed involved adding the names of journalists to tainted material in order to implicate them in a fictitious scheme in which they are portrayed as having received foreign money in exchange for negative coverage stock market forecast for tomorrow the Russian government.

Another tactic involved removing the specific name of nasa stocks stock market outlet, Radio Liberty, in order to create the appearance of a broader conspiracy against the Kremlin. Revolution is considered by many scholars to be the supreme fear of President Putin, whose formative years include a sort of near-death experience at the Dresden headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police, which was nearly overrun by demonstrators after the fall of Berlin Wall.

An analysis by Biblical stock market investing for beginners philippines Lab of the technical methods deployed against Satter enabled the researchers to uncover as many as other individuals in 39 countries similarly targeted by the same options vertical call spread actors.

The data collected from such a campaign would come in more than a dozen languages, and concern a diverse range of political, military, and policy issues from at least 39 countries and 28 governments.

In addition, such a campaign would be likely to generate large volumes of data. For this reason, a professionalized, well-resourced operator would be needed for any effective post-collection analysis of the stolen data. Even greater resources would be required to analyse, and in some instances carefully modify in a short timeframe, the contents of stolen email and cloud-storage accounts for the purposes of seeding disinformation via tainted leaks.

In one instance, by examining a link-shortening service used in the operation against Satter Tiny. High-ranking military personnel and elected government officials in Ukraine were, unsurprisingly, one of the largest groups of individuals targeted.

According to Deibert, other notable targets include: United Nations officials; a former senior director of the US.

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National Security Council; a former US deputy under secretary of defense; and senior members of oil, gas, mining, and finance industries of former Soviet states. These operations are likely to become far more pervasive as the number of significant data breaches continues to grow. EB53 EA4F C3B5 PGP Key. Video Sploid Paleofuture io9 Science Reviews Field Guide. How Sneaky Hackers Altered Stolen Emails to Attack Putin's Critics.

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