Latest Petya Cyber-Attack Due To NSA’s Neglectful Loss of Hacking Tools

What you are watching or reading on the mainstream media about the latest global outbreak of a new virus called Petya is total nonsense. Britain’s Secretary for Defence, Michael Fallon made the most absurd and quite bizarre speech as to the government response to the cyber-attack problem which is echoed by the Telegraph in a just as ludicrous article using the headline:

Britain prepared to use air strikes or send in troops as retaliation against future cyber attack

The Telegraph proceeds as follows: “Sir Michael Fallon warned potential attackers that a strike on UK systems “could invite a response from any domain – air, land, sea or cyberspace”. 

For both Fallon and the Telegraph an outstanding point is quite clear – they either understand little about this cyber-attack whatsoever – or, more likely, they are propagating FAKE news.

Why? Perhaps because the High Court has just granted Liberty permission to challenge part of the Government’s extreme mass surveillance regime with a judicial review of the Investigatory Powers Act and this is just part of the response.

The article then goes off on a tangent to excuse the British government for decimating the size of its army.

Fallon was speaking at a conference in London just as the head of the Chief of the General Staff said “the British Army was now at its smallest since the time of Oliver Cromwell.”

The truth is though, that Fallon and the media are simply using this event to ratchet up the argument for the further destruction of our civil liberties whilst defending the ever increasing undisclosed budget for its illegal 360 degree full spectrum state surveillance and cyber-warfare strategies that have gone so badly wrong for the rest of us in society.

 

It is now increasingly clear that this most recent global outbreak of software that targeted Microsoft Windows PC’s was more about spreading havoc and disorder that about filling the bank accounts of clever criminals.

The Malware, this time called NotPetya because it masquerades as the previously known Petya ransomware, trashed systems large and small across the world taking down corporate networks via worms which chewed up all important filesystems.

From The Register comes an interesting article that explains in detail that this latest attack was not as first appears: “Although it demands about $300 in Bitcoin to unscramble the hostage data, the mechanisms put in place to collect this money from victims in exchange for decryption keys quickly disintegrated. Despite the slick programming behind the fast-spreading malware, little effort or thought was put into pocketing the loot, it appears.

 

“The superficial resemblance to Petya is only skin deep,” noted computer security veteran The Grugq. “Although there is significant code sharing, the real Petya was a criminal enterprise for making money. This latest malware is definitely not designed to make money. This is designed to spread fast and cause damage, with a plausibly deniable cover of ransomware.”

 

To put it plainly, this code was built to destroy, not extort.

But more importantly, the only reason why we have this problem in the first place is because of a very careless National Security Agency in America who lost their own hacking tools and failed to warn anyone, which Wikileaks did for them, but by then, it was too late.

 

“It (NotPetya) also uses a modified version of the NSA’s stolen and leaked EternalBlue SMB exploit, previously used by WannaCry, plus the agency’s stolen and leaked EternalRomance SMB exploit, to infect other systems by injecting malicious code into them.”

 

These cyber-weapons attack vulnerabilities were patched by Microsoft earlier this year, so the credential theft is usually more successful, at least at places that are on top of their Windows updates.

To put that plainly as well, the NSA caused this mayhem because they failed to fully secure their own destructive hacking and malware systems that got stolen and shared around the world by criminals in dark rooms and kids in their bedrooms.

Today, more than ever, we have a lot to fear from our own government that we do from others.

 

 

 

 

---