China in Angola: A quest for oil and legitimacy

“Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world,” Napoleon Bonaparte had allegedly said. It has been quite a while since Austerlitz and Waterloo, but the former French emperor and military genius seems to have hit the nail right on the head. Long forgotten are Mao’s economic and social experiments, namely, the […]

How the NSA caught the next Edward Snowden with the help of the Russians

In 2016, U.S. law enforcement arrested Harold T. Martin III, a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, for stealing a massive amount of classified data that would put Edward Snowden to shame. Now, it’s being revealed the intelligence that led to the bust came from the unlikeliest of sources: a Russian cybersecurity company. Kaspersky Lab, based […]

Another Russian spy op busted: Agents impersonating State Department employees to hack software

Hackers affiliated with the Russian government have struck once more. This time around, however, their operation went beyond normal hacking and into the realm of espionage. According to Reuters, two cybersecurity companies, CrowdStrike and FireEye Inc, have uncovered a covert operation: Russian hackers have been masquerading as State Department employees in order to gain access to […]

Cryptocurrency owners beware: Cryptocrime is real and hard to prosecute

As the popularity of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin grows, so do the number of users who are falling victim to cyber crimes and losing their investments. According to a report from Reuters, these crimes are not only hard to prove, but its oftentimes not clear which agency has the jurisdiction to investigate in […]

Decoding what happened to the USS John McCain in the age of information warfare

On August 21st, 2017, in the early morning hours of local Japanese Standard Time, the Arleigh-Burke class destroyer USS John McCain collided with the Alnic MC, a huge 30,000 ton tanker, off the coast of Singapore.  This latest mishap was an embarrassing continuation of a series of at-sea collisions between commercial shipping vessels and U.S. […]

Cyber security in the digital age: The threats are real, keep yourself safe

With every leap in civilization there comes along with it a new brand of criminal.  People adopt new technology to improve their lives, but with new tech comes new vulnerabilities, and it’s up to the individual to keep themselves protected.  If you invent guns, you are eventually going to need to invent body armor too. […]

Personal details of nearly 200 million US citizens exposed

Sensitive personal details relating to almost 200 million US citizens have been accidentally exposed by a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee. The 1.1 terabytes of data includes birthdates, home addresses, telephone numbers and political views of nearly 62% of the entire US population. The data was available on a publicly accessible Amazon […]

The Russians are using ‘a new style of attack’ against France’s frontrunner candidate

A hacking group linked by cybersecurity experts to Russia’s military intelligence apparatus has begun taking aim at France’s centrist presidential candidate, Emmanuel Macron, the cybersecurity firm Trend Micro said in a report published on Tuesday. On March 15, the group — known as Fancy Bear, Pawn Storm, Sednit, APT28, Sofacy, or STRONTIUM — began registering […]

Ideology can kill a country’s intelligence apparatus

“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”—Friedrich Nietzsche My entry into the world of intelligence-gathering began in 1996 when I joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).  Before my retirement in 2014, most of my career was spent overseas as an operations officer in countries comprising the former Soviet Union. Serving abroad in the CIA […]

Proxies and guerillas: Delaying armageddon

Guerrilla warfare is nothing new. Neither is proxy war. China’s history of using indirect methods to erode and undermine their enemies without battle goes back to the earliest treatises on warfare written by the general T’ai Kung. (Sun Tzu’s admonition that supreme excellence is found in victory without fighting has nothing to do with pacifism […]

Microsoft President called for a digital ‘Geneva Convention’ for cyber warfare

Microsoft President Brad Smith gave a speech on Tuesday, in which he called on world leaders to form an international body that can establish the rules of digital warfare, akin to the rules put in place on traditional warfare by the Geneva Convention. In the speech, Smith said that recent hacking of elections in nation-states […]