McAfee

COLONIAL PIPELINE HACK? Another Carter Ruse to Spike Oil?

Posted on by Helena

Colonial Pipeline shut down a portion of its lines supplying jet fuel, diesel fuel, heating fuel and gas to the east coast amid a data ransomeware hack demanding money.   While only one of their pipelines is devoted to gas, filling stations report being empty already.   The company is owned by the Koch Industry, South Korea government thru a nationalized pension fund, a Crown Corporation, Industry Funds Management – US, and Shell, a Norwegian company.   That being said, a pipeline that is essential for the oil and gas provisions of the east coast is predominantly owned by the UK, South Korea and Koch Brothers. It has had 272 infractions since 2000.  

Currently, the entire website for Colonial is down – although they assure everyone it is unrelated to the malware hack!   Coincidences.

Industry Funds Management:   would also seem to have had their website taken down.

Although the hack occurred nearly a week ago, there appears to be no progress, no discussions with the CISA or FBI to ask for help to remedy the situation despite the fact that a state of emergency has been declared for all states involved.   Gas lines and gas prices have already begun their climb while Biden is asking for oil shipments from Europe to supplement.   Odd given the number of fracking operations he shut down right here.

Colonial owns 15 tank farms which are required to hold a 45 day surplus of fuel.   For some unknown reason, those storage facilities remain untapped.   It takes 14-24 days for a single batch or oil to move through the pipelines to their destination.   Meaning the pipelines – are now full and idle.

Why Biden would request delivery of oil from Europe instead of Canada or Mexico our closest neighbors is puzzling.   Typically delivery from Europe would be quite expensive and take upwards of a ten days to a month for diversion at a premium price.   If fracking had not been shut down there would be no problem.  

Lines reminiscent of the Carter administration will likely develop quickly.   President Carter declared an oil shortage which quickly led to fear and long lines as people stored oil.   Yet a Washington Post expose in 1979 revealed that the crisis was actually a – fraud.   The purpose of the Carter Big Lie was to artificially rake prices higher given a glut had accumulated. As a result, the price of crude rose 50% within less than a year and had more than doubled by 1980.

Raising oil prices has been on the forefront of the Biden Administration!

Charles Koch one of the Colonial owners, the remaining Koch industry behemoth, is currently worth in the neighborhood of $65-$70 billion.   While declaring himself Libertarian, he has aligned with such liberal notables as: Brennan’s Center For American Progress, the ACLU, MacArthur Foundation, and even – Soros Open Society.   He has aligned with Michael Bloomberg on numerous ventures as well.  All of which make his ‘choices’ somewhat suspect.

Is it possible that the Colonial Pipeline ‘Hack’ is actually fake?   Why wouldn’t Colonial’s Executive Team have immediately requested CISA and FBI assistance?   Simply deferring to the fact that they are a private company should be of no consequence given the disruption is a massive public emergency.   But then if the hack was a fake, they would not need any help – would they?

And like President Carter, the purpose is to exponentially raise the price of gasoline across the country as other companies divert to cover the east coast shortages.   Such a diversion would trickle throughout creating shortages elsewhere and a possible doubling of the price of gas at the pump.

The White House has declared that the ransomware attack came from a newly created hacking group, DarkSide.   Apparently this group made themselves known just a year ago, although no actual hack has been declared to be of their volition until – today!   The only historical mention of this group was by Forbes.

Brett Callow, a cybersecurity analyst stated, “Remediation and recovery is not necessarily a quick and easy process, and while essential functionality can be restored more quickly, it can take organizations weeks or even months to fully return to normal operations.”   Colonial has said they should be restored by the end of this week.

However, it is not clear what data was attacked and why it would require shutting down the pipelines at all! In addition, it would appear that some news outlets claim Colonial shut down ALL pipelines, others state that only 2 were shutdown.   Different stories fuel the notion that everything is not straight in Colonialville.   Adding to the curious notion that a group which has not had any presence before is responsible – a lack of information from Colonial’s CEO – and the obscure reason they would not request assistance.

According to a Forbes article, DarkSide announced themselves via the Dark Web.   Their ransomware hacking states that if their financial blackmail is not fulfilled, they will make their data public.   Typically that would involve something confidential such a product in development and secret from competitors, or persons involved in the Dark Web, or legal documents, or persons identities.

It is unknown what data they hold in ransom.

However, it is highly likely that DarkSide would be based in Ukraine as opposed to Russia given previous analytics performed by McAfee on cyber criminals including GandCrab, Sodinokibi, and REvil.

Crowdstrike: Cyber Security In a Hillary World

Posted on by Helena

President Trump is bringing up an assertion that the previous government of Ukraine in conjunction with a US company, Crowdstrike, had a hand in the Trump Dossier and election meddling in 2016.   Of course the old schoolers are furious that he would even suggest such a bald faced lie given everyone knows the meddling came from Russia – proof positive per Crowdstrike’s in-depth security analysis.   Unfortunately, the Crowdstrike narrative was punched with Swiss cheese holes 2 years ago and while the stream has attempted to bury the story – it still lives!   Damn that Google for not eliminating every piece of evidence!

Any longer, when President Trump makes a comment or statement, no matter how mundane or abrupt, if the media goes berserk it is likely because the comment has backbone.

Crowdstrike was founded in 2011 by: George Kurtz formerly with McAfee, Dmitri Alperovitch also with McAfee whose family had fled the Soviet Union, and Greg Marston whose bio would seem to have been scrubbed.  Interesting…

Shawn Henry, a former Assistant Deputy at the FBI during the Clinton administration, is the current president of Crowdstrike while simultaneously serving and advising NBC, MSNBC and CNBC, while simultaneously serving as faculty at National Association of Corporate Directors. Busy!

Crowdstrike was responsible for the 2016 story that Russia hacked the DNC in order to get dirt on Hillary and favor Trump.  They affirmed this because simultaneously they claimed Russia had immobilized 80% of Ukraine’s missiles and only one country fit the cue – Russia.   This was their analysis.   Their assessment was backed by James Comey.   Since then, the methodology of Crowdstrike’s determination came into question and was found to be highly defective according to The International Institute for Strategic Studies, but even more interestingly, by John McAfee.

McAfee’s point is simply this:   “If you have the wherewithal to pull off a hack of that nature, you’ve got the wherewithal to hide who you are. Otherwise, you shouldn’t be hacking. You know this.

So when someone says, “Oh, the Russians did it,” well, that’s because someone in the incompetent government cybersecurity collective said, “We traced it back, and it sure looks like the Russians because they used a hammertoss, which the Russians always use.

If I’m the Chinese, and I want to make it look like the Russians, I’ll learn how to use hammertoss.”

The point McAfee is making is that simply asserting that a type of code has been used by a hacker in the past and every security expert knows this, it stands to reason that the hack would be hacked.

McAfee further stated, “Hackers have become much more advanced than those trying to protect against them. We’re like puppets on their strings. You know how easy it is to spoof an IP address? Thousands of programs will do it. You can do it multiple times, and it can’t be traced back to you. You can make it point to anyone you want. The fact that it points to anybody at all tells me that’s not the person who did it.”

Other cyber security firms have concurred with McAfee which makes Crowdstrike’s narrative either profoundly incompetent, or it alludes to their bedfellow relationship with Clinton.

Crowdstrike was a nothing company until Google invested $100 million in 2015.   Later additional investments from investment funds including Warberg Pincus helped lift Crowdstrike’s prominence. Warberg’s president is Timothy Geithner who was president of the NY Federal Reserve under Clinton and Secretary of Treasury under Obama. Geithner also serves on the boards of Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Bilderberg Group, and the Center For Global Development.   Geithner’s father and grandfather were principles in the Ford Foundation – a serious manipulator within the mechanisms aligned with Soros Open Society – among others.

When Geithner left his position as Treasury Secretary, he proposed Hillary Clinton as his successor.

Alperovitch is senior fellow at The Atlantic Council.   The initial purpose of the Atlantic Council was to make sure Europe and the US were aligned.   Council members are a who’s who of the liberal Swamp:   Chuck Hagel, James Jones, Susan Rice, Richard Holbrooke, etc… etc… etc… Even the New York Times called out the Atlantic Council for receiving funding from 25 foreign governments. It’s board has consisted of rather interesting fellows from the ranks of Clinton, Bush and Obama.

So why would they be backing a relatively obscure cyber security company, Crowdstrike, when there are literally hundreds of more mature companies to choose from?

Because, they can control the strings.

As McAfee had noted, the intel within the government during the Hillary/Obama reign was operating under the auspices of a bunch of old men with antiquated ideas who had no idea what the cyber world was capable of doing.   McAfee’s recommendation was to offer double salary to the best of the best, overlooking the died purple hair, ring in the nose, gumshoe wearing tye dyed tea shirt manifesto, who regularly smoked weed.   In his esteemed analysis – when you are looking for real cyber security, who the ‘heck’ cares what they look like, if they are the best in the field! Because that is why the US government remains in a pigeonhole of inability to compete – we are so indoctrinated into manners, suits, and Harvard, that we lose what counts – competence.

Instead, in the past, the US government has been more concerned with creating backup companies whose data can conform to a predetermined end point to support an agenda – rather than an analysis of competent, intelligent, fact finding security.

President Trump’s statement with regard to Crowdstrike, is likely the tip of their iceberg about to melt as all things always point back to – Hillary.