Frankly, it's not 'Russian' intelligence officers I'm actually concerned about.| Submit your comments on this article |
| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Putin must wonder what else America knows about Russia |
| 2018-07-17 |
| An interesting perspective. [In Military] When Russian President Vladimir Putin sits down at the table in Helsinki on Monday, he will surely have in the back of his mind some intelligence worries that have nothing to do with the U.S. president seated across from him. Putin’s elite spy world has been penetrated by U.S. intelligence. That’s the implication of the extraordinarily detailed 29-page indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence (GRU) officers handed up by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators on Friday. The 11-count charge includes names, dates, unit assignments, the GRU’s use of "X-agent" malware, its bitcoin covert funding schemes and a wealth of other tradecraft. Putin must be asking himself: How did the Americans find out all these facts? What other operations have been compromised? And how much else do they know? "The Russians have surely begun a ’damage assessment’ to figure out how we were able to collect this information and how much damage was done to their cyber capacity as a result," says Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA general counsel, in an email. "They are probably also doing a CI (counter-intelligence) assessment to determine whether we have any human sources or whether the Russians made mistakes that we were able to exploit." Must the GRU assume that officers named in Friday’s indictment are now "blown" for further secret operations? Should Russian spymasters expect that operations they touched are now compromised? What about other Russian operations that used bitcoin, or X-agent, or another hacking tool called X-Tunnel? Has the United States tracked such operations and identified the targets? Finally, how are U.S. intelligence services playing back the information they’ve learned ‐ to recruit, exploit or compromise Russian officers? |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #6 All the more reason to offer Julian Assange a deal, if ya ask me. |
| Posted by: Raj 2018-07-17 05:52 |
| #5 Frankly, it's not 'Russian' intelligence officers I'm actually concerned about. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2018-07-17 05:52 |
| #3 Are Democratic computers more secure now than they were before their vulnerabilities were publically revealed? What about government computers previously compromised? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2018-07-17 05:36 |
| #2 What he knows is that US intelligence/counter intelligence services are in revolt against the elected president - that gives Russia certain opportunities, which might be weighted against the risks. Had Vlad not been hacking our election and political process, none of this turmoil would be taking place, NONE OF IT! The 'Reset' was working I tell you. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2018-07-17 04:20 |
| #1 What he knows is that US intelligence/counter intelligence services are in revolt against the elected president - that gives Russia certain opportunities, which might be weighted against the risks. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2018-07-17 04:08 |