US Congressional review considers impact of federal database hack
July 30, 2015 Leave a comment
A United States Congressional review into last month’s cyber theft of millions of government personnel records has concluded that its impact will go far “beyond mere theft of classified information”. Up to 21 million individual files were stolen in June, when hackers broke into the computer system of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Part of OPM’s job is to handle applications for security clearances for all agencies of the US federal government. Consequently, the breach gave the unidentified hackers access to the names and sensitive personal records of millions of Americans —including intelligence officers— who have filed applications for security clearances.
So far, however, there is no concrete proof in the public domain that the hack was perpetrated by agents of a foreign government for the purpose of espionage. Although there are strong suspicions in favor of the espionage theory, there are still some who believe that the cyber theft could have been the financially motivated work of a sophisticated criminal ring. But a new report produced by the Congressional Research Service, which is the research wing of the US Congress, seems to be favoring the view that “the OPM data were taken for espionage rather than for criminal purposes”. The report was completed on July 17 and circulated on a restricted basis. But it was acquired by the Secrecy News blog of the Federation of American Scientists, which published it on Tuesday.
The 10-page document points out that strictly financial reasons, such as identity theft or credit card fraud, cannot be ruled out as possible motivations of the massive data breach. But it points out that the stolen data have yet to appear in so-called “darknet” websites that are used by the criminal underworld to buy and sell such information. This is highly unusual, particularly when one considers the massive size of the data theft, which involves millions of Americans’ credit card and Social Security numbers. Experts doubt, therefore, that the OPM data “will ever appear for sale in the online black market”. This inevitably leads to the conclusion that the breach falls “in the category of intelligence-gathering, rather than commercial espionage”, according to the report.
The above conclusion could have far-reaching consequences, says the report. One such possible consequence is that high-resolution fingerprints that were contained in the OPM database could be used to blow the covers of American case officers posing as diplomats, and even deep-cover intelligence operatives working secretly abroad. Furthermore, the hackers that are in possession of the stolen files could use them to create high-quality forged documents, or even publish them in efforts to cause embarrassment to American intelligence agencies.
► Author: Ian Allen | Date: 30 July 2015 | Permalink: https://intelnews.org/2015/07/30/01-1746/
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intelNews.org 
Memos may relate to secret NSA deal with leading cryptography vendor
July 31, 2015 by Joseph Fitsanakis 3 Comments
My 2007 claim was based on a string of well documented allegations that surfaced in the early 1980s. While conducting research for his seminal book The Puzzle Palace, historian James Bamford came across references to Project BORIS, which involved a pact between the NSA and the Swiss company. To be precise, the deal appeared to have been struck between the Swiss inventor and Crypto AG founder Boris Hagelin and William F. Friedman, an American cryptologist who led the Armed Forces Security Agency, a forerunner of the NSA. The two men were united by a deep personal friendship, which was forged during World War II by their mutual hatred of Nazism.
Bamford’s claim was echoed in 1996 by Scott Shane and Tom Bowman, reporters for The Baltimore Sun. In a six-part investigative series about the NSA, the two journalists wrote that Friedman visited Hagelin during a trip to Switzerland in 1955 and asked for his help so that American could dominate its Cold War rivals. According to Shane and Bowman, Hagelin agreed and built a type of cryptological backdoor in Crypto AG’s devices, which allowed the NSA to read millions of messages for many decades. The company, of course, reacted furiously, saying that claims of a secret deal were “pure invention”.
On Thursday, however, BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera confirmed that a BBC investigation of 55,000 pages of documents, which were declassified by the NSA in April, claim to have found proof of the secret agreement. The declassified material, said Corera, contains two versions of the same NSA memorandum, as well as an earlier draft, which refer to a “gentleman’s agreement” between Friedman and Hagelin. Under the agreement, Crypto AG would inform the NSA about periodical changes to the technical specifications of its encoding machines. The company would also provide the American spy agency with detailed lists showing the precise models purchased by various national governments around the world. Furthermore, Crypto AG agreed not to sell the more advanced, customizable models of its equipment to countries viewed by Washington as directly adversarial. This, says the BBC, amounted to Crypto AG deceiving some of its customers, by offering them “watered-down versions” of its encoding devices.
Corera notes that there is no evidence in the memos that Crypto AG built any kind of back door in its devices for use by the NSA. Instead, by providing the American agency with detailed operational knowledge of the devices, it enabled American codebreakers to reduce the time and effort needed to break encoded messages intercepted by the NSA.
There are a couple of minor errors in Corera’s article. For instance, the “father of American code-breaking” is not Friedman, as he claims, but Herbert Yardley, who led the so-called Black Chamber (also known as the Cipher Bureau) in 1919, long before Friedman was in the picture. Additionally, he fails to mention Bowman’s contribution to Shane’s Baltimore Sun article, which was published in 1996, not 1995, as he writes. These minor errors aside, however, the BBC discovery is absolutely crucial for our understanding of cryptological history in the Cold War.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 31 July 2015 | Permalink
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Boris Hagelin, Cold War, Crypto AG, cryptology, declassification, Gordon Corera, history, News, NSA, Operation RUBICON, Project BORIS, Switzerland, United States, William Friedman