Israel leaked video that brought down Austrian government, says German ex-spy chief
May 28, 2019 1 Comment
Israeli intelligence was likely behind the leaked video that brought down the far-right governing coalition in Austria on Monday, according to the former deputy director of Germany’s spy agency. The surreptitiously recorded video was leaked to two German media outlets on May 17, days before Austrian voters participated in the continent-wide elections for the European Union. In the video, two senior members of Austria’s governing far-right Freedom Party are seen conversing with an unnamed woman posing as a Russian investor. The two men in the video were Heinz-Christian Strache, the the Freedom Party’s leader and until recently Austria’s Vice Chancellor, and Johannes Gudenus, the party’s deputy leader and a member of parliament. In the video, Gudenus and Strache promise to award the woman’s firm state contracts if her uncle —a Russian oligarch— purchases an Austrian newspaper and uses it to support the Freedom Party. The video threw Austria’s political system into disarray and prompted the resignations of both Strache and Gudenus. On Monday, Austria’s Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, was removed from power during a special parliamentary session in Vienna.
But the question is who leaked the video, and why? In an article in the Cicero, a monthly political magazine based in Berlin, a former senior official in Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) argues that Israeli intelligence was probably behind the leak. The article’s author is Rudolf Adam, who served as deputy director of the BND from 2001 to 2004, before serving as president of the Federal Academy for Security Policy of the German Ministry of Defense. Adam argues that the actions of Strache and Gudenus, as shown in the leaked video, seem “half mafia-like and half-treasonable”, and that the two should face legal consequences. But he goes on to ask “a far more interesting question”, namely “who is behind this intrigue [and] what were the intentions of its initiators?”. Adam points out that nothing is known about the woman in the video; she reportedly met Gudenus several months before the video was filmed. She posed as the Latvian niece of a Russian oligarch with ties to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. In exchanges that lasted for several months, the woman told Gudenus that she planned to move with her daughter to Vienna and was interested in investment opportunities. She eventually invited him and Strache to a meeting in a villa in the Spanish resort island of Ibiza. It was there where the video was recorded. Read more of this post
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Western spies used ‘crown jewel’ of espionage tools to hack into Russia’s Google
June 28, 2019 by Joseph Fitsanakis Leave a comment
On Thursday, Reuters cited “four people with knowledge on the matter […] in Russia and elsewhere”, who said that Yandex was targeted by a sophisticated hacking operation between October and November of 2018. The news agency said that three of its sources had direct knowledge of the details of the cyber-espionage operation against Yandex. According to the unnamed sources, the hackers appeared to be primarily interested in breaching the accounts of specific employees in Yandex’s research and development unit. Their purpose was to acquire technical information about how Yandex authenticates user accounts. That information could potentially enable them to impersonate Yandex users and access private information, including email messages, geolocation information, and other sensitive private data. Reuters said that the hackers attempted to breach Yandex for purposes of espionage, not sabotage or disruption, or stealing intellectual property for commercial purposes.
Moreover, the hackers used Regin, a highly sophisticated malware that a technical expert from the Symantec Corporation described as “the crown jewel of attack frameworks used for espionage”. Regin was identified as a malware employed by intelligence services of the so-called Five Eyes intelligence alliance between spy agencies of the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the United States. It was identified as a Western cyber-espionage tool in 2014, based on revelations made by Edward Snowden, the American former employee of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency who defected to Russia. The same malware was used in 2013 to access about a dozen mainframe computers of Belgacom, Belgium’s largest telecommunications service provider, which is partly state-owned. The attack was widely attributed to a consortium of Western intelligence services led by the NSA.
According to Reuters, the hackers were able to penetrate Yandex’s networks for several weeks or longer, without being noticed by the company’s cyber-security monitors. When the penetration was detected, Yandex hired a cyber-security team from the Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky. The Kaspersky team identified Regin and, according to Reuters, concluded that the hackers behind the cyber-espionage operation were tied to Western intelligence agencies. Kaspersky, the Russian government, and intelligence agencies from the Five Eyes alliance declined requests by Reuters to comment on the story. Yandex confirmed the cyber-espionage attack in a statement to Reuters, but said that its cyber-security experts had been able to detect and “fully neutralize [it] before any damage was done”. Consequently, said Yandex, “no user data was compromised in the attack”.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 28 June 2019 | Permalink
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