Imagine keeping the names of all your spies on a payroll database exposed to the internet lol
I don't think many UK spies would be on the MoD payroll.
Fortunately SIS, the Security Service and GCHQ all have their own little buildings so it probably wouldn't be difficult to tell who's coming and going, etc
It’s likely most of them are office workers, handlers, and “embassy staff.” So nothing too damaging. Most of their sources are likely coded, but considering the CIA’s sources were all killed in china, I can’t imagine britbongs having much more sophisticated tradecraft
it's Britain so I imagine someone in MI6 clicked the "SECRET-TRANS-CELEBRITIES.zip" file that they received in their government email and now they'll have to find a way to blame this on Hamas antisemitism
I'm interested to hear just how 'bad' it was - I of course don't trust the exact figure they put out, but its hard to know if they'll inflate the statistics because China Bad, or if they'll deflate the statistics because MI6/Britain is James Bond good.
It's so silly. All the spy stuff. It's like - well we hacked them, then they hacked us, then we hacked them, then they hacked us, then we hacked them, for as long as computers have been a part of each nations infrastructure.
So, 'Breaking News' everyone, spies are still spying. The spying will continue until they stop spying on us.
as a bit of a tangent, this is a great read on the technique developed by Yuri Totrov for identifying spies using statistical patterns that drove CIA nuts
https://www.salon.com/2015/09/26/how_to_explain_the_kgbs_amazing_success_identifying_cia_agents_in_the_field/
and here's the list of identifiers he came up with
Show
https://books.google.ca/books?id=-SmgCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA256&lpg=PA256&dq=%22Agency+personnel+were+frequently+alumni+of+Harvard,+Yale+or+Columbia%22&ots=56nvHTN27B&sig=ACfU3U0w4HRdq8GPeCcz8cz5q-s1QDAonQ&hl=en&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22Agency%20personnel%20were%20frequently%20alumni%20of%20Harvard%2C%20Yale%20or%20Columbia%22&f=false
Some of these points are embarrassingly obvious. Of course your spy's cover as a diplomat is going to suck if he didn't went to the school all diplomats go to and doesn't live up to objective requirements like that of citizenship.
I wonder how amateurish these diplomatic covers are today and if it is only the yanks who are this bad at them.
the soviets: we noticed that CIA agents often hang out with CIA agents
the us: fuck. how could they do this to us. how did they know. we're so fucked
Somebody should write a comedy/parody of espionage thrillers around this. Owning your opponent so hard they think they're crawling with infiltrators is damn funny.
Well there was also that too lol. The main CIA guy in charge of rooting out KGB moles was, you guessed it, a KGB mole himself.
I remember reading that a lot of the CIA/FBI guys were cocky and refused to believe they could be infiltrated which led to delays in investigations for moles lol. That or they suspected minority agents instead of white ones.
Half of these are so obvious I refuse to believe that's all of it or even is it and Totrov wasn't fucking with the CIA because it would do bad things to my mental health. Gotta say folks, that's bullshit, there's a more shadowy, more competent level of CIA at play that Totrov didn't know about
The Cold War over, a senior and very experienced officer was dispatched to Japan to seek out Totrov and offer him a vast sum of money for his "memoirs." Totrov’s retort was typically blunt. "Have you not read what is on my file at Langley? It says, 'Not to be Pitched.'"
Big dick move though
the fact that CIA officers replacing one another tended to take on the same post within the embassy hierarchy, drive the same make of vehicle, rent the same apartment and so on. Why? Because the personnel office in Langley shuffled and dealt overseas postings with as little effort as required.
I'm becoming the fucking joker here I've had better Opsec than that as a teenager doing dumb shit
The incompetence is absolutely stunning. CIA managed to build up so much mystique around itself, but when you read up on how they actually operate you quickly realize that this org is full of utter clowns.
I see your point but I still refuse to believe "Our last guy got found out, here's his spy job, his spy communications line, his spy car with which you go to the same spy house he did. You also lack 9/10 requirements for having this job on paper. Watch out for moles, the only reason we can imagine that the last guy got found out." is real and no argument can convince me of this for reasons stated above. I'm going full conspiracy theorist here, the truth is too horrifying to me and I instead opt to construct some shadowy cabal that pulls the strings and put this on as a front. I mean what, we couldn't forge some papers here?
I'd retire clothes for like 3 months when I was a drunk teenager stealing road signs for funsies just in case a witness description of "Black hoodie, jeans, average height man (probably)" got out and somebody else saw it and connected it to me revealing I was drunk of my ass near location X at the time. If I believe this, this would've put me in like top 1% of removed, apparently. I refuse to believe entire governemnts get toppled and the course of history changed by a bunch of dudes who couldn't get on the level of OPSEC of an alcoholic teenager, sorry. I now consider the CIA a front organisation putting out chaff to distract from the actual agency, the Even-More-Central-Intelligence-Agency (EMCIA), which is so good at their job none of us know about it
I very much agree that what's being described are just comical levels of incompetence. Small children could run a more competent spy organization than this.
Resident spies tend to be easier to identify. You start off by assuming everyone wearing a suit and lanyard at an embassy is intelligence and you’d be correct 70% of the time. The guys who are gun running, meeting monarchs to traffic children, meeting friends of warlords and drug lords - they tend to be less identifiable.
You give them too much credit. I mean the KGB’s intelligence was the most sophisticated in the world and the USSR got toppled. No amount of intelligence is going to save you from incompetence and malice in more powerful positions. Not to mention, the CIA was communicating with sources through fake websites with passwords hidden in the page elements lol
Espionage is an open secret. No one serious considers embassies a place of diplomacy and administration unless it’s an insignificant country.
The government will not name the country involved, but Sky News understands this to be China.
The cyberattack was on a payroll ...
... All salaries will be paid this month.
The contractor system is not connected to the main MoD computer systems and has been taken down with a review launched.
A system so important that its management was contracted out.
No idea where the breach came from, or how it was done, or exactly who the contracting firm running that system is but "CHINA CHINA CHINA!"
The US department of energy has its own paramilitary force that guards nuclear sites. Despite wearing camo, having a military commander, and considered so called “elite,” they’re just contractors from a private agency - not even self employed.
The DOE protective forces are all contractors, with the management of the force varying from site to site.
Don’t you feel safe that the most militaristic, bloodthirsty nation on earth hires mall cops to guard nukes? It’s even more weird than guys who protect spy bases or Area 51 because they usually wear the company’s provided uniforms but the FPF wear camp like soldiers lol.
I still have it my head that 99% of the land based ICMB arsenal is 100% incapable of launching and I refuse to be corrected.
So, overpaying Paul Blarts to watch the fences around the silos while the military nuke techs sit in their holes playing video games and watching cartoons actually makes me feel pretty comfortable.
wear camp like soldiers lol
I'm sure this is a typo and you mean to say "camo" but soldiers on guard duty in drag queen getup makes me smile.
Too lazy to look up the details atm, but didn't they identify and kick out a lot of CIA spies from their country in the last 20 years?
Captured, compromised, or neutralized https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/us/politics/cia-informants-killed-captured.html
Love to see it. Unfortunately I can't even read that article due to NYT nonsense.
So I signed up with an old email just to listen to this article. I hate everyone who works for NYT
https://archive.is/UyjBh
I may not have caught you in time this time around, but for future reference, always try an archive site first. Even if someone else didn't already archive the article, you can do so yourself and it bypasses the paywall/sign-in wall. There's also the added benefit of not giving that liberal cesspit state department propaganda outlet your traffic.
China Used Stolen Data to Expose CIA Operatives in Africa and Europe (Foreign Policy Mag, Dec 2020)
Around 2013, U.S. intelligence began noticing an alarming pattern: Undercover CIA personnel, flying into countries in Africa and Europe for sensitive work, were being rapidly and successfully identified by Chinese intelligence, according to three former U.S. officials. The surveillance by Chinese operatives began in some cases as soon as the CIA officers had cleared passport control. Sometimes, the surveillance was so overt that U.S. intelligence officials speculated that the Chinese wanted the U.S. side to know they had identified the CIA operatives, disrupting their missions; other times, however, it was much more subtle and only detected through U.S. spy agencies’ own sophisticated technical countersurveillance capabilities.
other times, however, it was much more subtle and only detected through U.S. spy agencies’ own sophisticated technical countersurveillance capabilities.
The sophisticated technical counter surveillance capabilities? A website designed by a sophomore high schooler instead of a freshman high schooler
Not only did China kill the CIA sources, but the CIA used a Chinese American CIA agent as a scapegoat. He “confessed” to doing everything but the CIA wasn’t able to find any evidence, but he was sentenced to prison anyway.
I believe he had gambling and business debt problems, and had business dealings with Chinese agents, but that’s about it lol. The real culprit is most likely a series of fake websites designed by the CIA to communicate with sources. But they refused the same templates and databases, and Iran was the first one to find out IIRC, then they passed on the info they found about Chinese and Russian moles to the respective countries.
I bet China must have reaaaalllly dedicated all its national resources and efforts over the last few years to achieve a hack of this magnitude.
Unrelated, remember when the UK treasury was trying to recruit a head of cyber security and only offered a salary of £50k?
"Oi, what you mean the bloke we paid 50k to put the passwords in plaintext on a public-facing server?"
There was a bit of confusion about that cuz in England they call "passwords" Wordie-Daffer-SiteSeeSee.
That sentence (title) just gets better and better
