Information Operations

Newsletter

Compiled by: Mr. Jeff Harley

US Army Space and Missile Defense Command

Army Forces Strategic Command

G39, Information Operations Division

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ARSTRAT IO Newsletter on OSS.net

ARSTRAT IO Newsletter at Joint Training Integration Group for Information Operations (JTIG-IO) - Information Operations (IO) Training Portal

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Vol. 11, no. 07 (23 May – 13 June 2011)

1.  Chinese Responses to the International Strategy for Cyberspace

2.  Russia, Belarus to Conduct Joint Electronic Warfare

3.  The Syrian War Is Raging on Facebook

4.  Information Operations

5.  Searching For Ways to Trace Cyber Attackers

6.  White House Rejects Terrorism-Related Cyberwar Provisions In House Bill

7.  Cyber Combat: Act of War

8.  EW 2011: Call Goes Out For Unified EW Command

9.  EW 2011: UAVs to Enter the EW Business

10.  Stuxnet Attack Forced Britain to Rethink the Cyber War

11.  List of Cyber-Weapons Developed By Pentagon to Streamline Computer Warfare

12.  China Bans Its Troops from Making Friends Online

13.  The Pentagon Is Confused About How to Fight a Cyber War

14.  Mideast Uses Western Tools to Battle the Skype Rebellion

15.  British Intelligence Used Cupcake Recipes to Ruin Al-Qaida Website

16.  Russia Ratifies Electronic Warfare Agreement with Belarus

17.  NATO Plans Force To Respond To Cyber Attacks

18.  Al Qaeda's New Video: A Message of Defeat

19.  China and the US: Sizing up for cyber war?

Chinese Responses to the International Strategy for Cyberspace

By Adam Segal, Council of Foreign Relations (blog), May 23, 2011

A week after the United States released its International Strategy for Cyberspace, it is possible to gauge some Chinese responses. Not surprisingly, there was a relatively high degree of skepticism about U.S. intentions. Chinese concerns revolved around three issues:

The strategy is really about military capabilities and deterrence. Perhaps following the lead of some U.S. news reports, Chinese press reports focused on the statement that Washington reserved the right “to use all necessary means—diplomatic, informational, military, and economic—as appropriate and consistent with applicable international law,” to defend itself and its allies. This must be frustrating to the State Department since it was trying to de-emphasize cyberspace as a warfighting “domain” and stress its importance as a public forum, market, and source of innovation. They wanted less talk about Cyber Command and more about international engagement. Certainly it couldn’t have been an accident that Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn spoke after Homeland Security Advisor John Brennan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.

Despite the calls for cooperation, the U.S. is trying to maintain its technological lead. In the view of some Chinese analysts, the call for interoperability and global standards mask an effort to lock others into technologies owned by U.S. companies. Global Times quoted one analyst as saying: “The U.S. masters a number of core technologies for cyberspace usage, and it aims to continuously consolidate its advantages.” Similarly, in the area of Internet governance, no matter how often U.S. government officials refer to international cooperation, they still want the United States “to maintain its lead role. At a press conference on the same day, Hillary Clinton made this point very clear.”

The push for Internet freedom will lead to more conflict. While U.S. calls for the free flow of information and criticism of censorship usually create most of the fireworks in discussions with Beijing, most of the Chinese reports seem fairly uninterested that the strategy is grounded in the “principles of fundamental freedoms, privacy, and the free flow of information.” Maybe they’ve heard it all before and are tired of making all the counter arguments; maybe they wanted to focus on what seemed new in the strategy. Still, almost all the responses still managed to slip in the idea that the Internet freedom agenda would be used to pressure other countries and cause more conflict.

Of course, it is difficult to draw a straight line from Chinese press reports to official positions. Maybe Chinese policymakers have been more flexible and expansive in the S&ED or at the ongoing track II dialogue on cyber issues. But it suggests that Chris Painter, the State Department’s Cyber Coordinator, has his work cut out for him.

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Russia, Belarus to Conduct Joint Electronic Warfare

From Military & Aerospace Electronics Russia & CIS General Newswire, May 22, 2011

The State Duma has ratified a Russian-Belarusian agreement on cooperation in electronic warfare (EW).

The agreement was signed in Moscow on December 10, 2009. The document establishes a legal framework for the Russian-Belarusian cooperation in electronic warfare for the purpose of providing military security in the region.

The two countries plan to cooperate in creating, and ensuring the functioning of, a unified electronic warfare system of the regional grouping of Russian and Belarusian troops.

The agreement involves cooperation in training military command bodies, military units and EW subdivisions of both countries' armed forces for joint operations as part of the regional grouping of troops.

Another area of cooperation will be the coordinated use of the radio spectrum by EW for defense purposes and providing electromagnetic compatibility of military EW systems.

The agreement also involves joint EW research, creating a new and upgrading of the existing special EW equipment for the regional grouping of troops

The two countries will hold consultations and exchange information on EW organization to support the operations of the regional grouping of troops.

The parties are planning to use the unified EW system. To maintain the necessary level of combat readiness they will hold joint operational and tactical training of military command bodies, military units and EW subdivisions.

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The Syrian War Is Raging on Facebook

Posted by Eliza Strickland, IEEE Spectrum, Wed, May 18, 2011

The Syrian government has brutally cracked down on protesters demanding regime change and social freedoms over the past two weeks: Government forces have detained 10 000 protesters in mass arrests, activists say, while Syrian tanks have shelled residential neighborhoods in contested cities. And in this day and age, every war comes with a cyberwar.

In Syria, the crackdown on the streets has been mirrored by tumult on Facebook. Pages supporting the protesters have been hacked, and a shadowy group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army has used Facebook to coordinate its attacks.

Helmi Noman, a researcher with the OpenNet Initiative, has been monitoring the Syrian Electronic Army. He told IEEE Spectrum that he first noticed the group on Facebook a few weeks ago (its profile image is pictured), and he has been watching since then as the group stages attacks and opens new channels of communication. The group recently started a website, a Twitter feed, and a YouTube channel.

Noman says the Syrian Electronic Army claims to be a volunteer, civilian effort. "The group says on its Web site that it is not an 'official entity' but rather a group of young people who love Syria and want to serve the country by 'attacking back those who have attacked Syria,'" says Noman.

Hacking the Revolution

On Facebook, the group has played a cat-and-mouse game with site administrators. According to Noman, the group has created 11 pages thus far, opening a new page each time Facebook shuts one down. (As of this writing, version 11 is up and running.) Noman says the earliest versions of the group's page directed followers to file-sharing websites where they could download DDOS and hacking software applications, and encouraged them to hack oppositional Facebook pages and websites.

Presumably, Facebook has been shutting down the Syrian Electronic Army's pages because the group violates terms of service--it used the pages to engage in unlawful and malicious behavior, namely hacking. We asked Facebook to comment on this situation, but got no reply to our inquiries.

One Facebook page that was hacked in the last few weeks, Noman says, is titled Syrian Revolution 2011 (its profile pic is at right). It's not clear whether the Syrian Electronic Army had a role in that hack, but the attack did get a lot of attention. In a blog post for OpenNet Initiative, Noman writes about an editorial in a Syrian government newspaper that complained about Facebook's disparate treatment of the Electronic Army's page and the dissident page:

The editorial also accused [Facebook] of having double standards because it allegedly shut down pages belonging to the Syrian Electronic Army without any justification or prior notice. The paper added that Facebook has restored a page for the “so called Syrian revolution after it was hacked and deleted by a Syrian University engineering student.”

Speaking to Oprah Fans

The Syrian Electronic Army also encourages its followers to spread the governmental love via Facebook. As Noman told IEEE Spectrum: "The group calls its members to collectively write pro-Syrian regime comments on popular Facebook pages such as that of Oprah Winfrey 'as a way to reach out to, and influence the American public opinion.'"

Yep, you read that right. Even the Syrian Electronic Army wants to get on Oprah. Judging from the current state of Oprah's page, that mission may have come to a close, but here's a screenshot of a typical comment on her wall from a few weeks back:

Last week the army appears to have moved on to the European Parliament's Facebook page. The page's administrators declared that they had been hit by a massive spam attack, which further annoyed the army's followers:

Messing With Random British Towns

As if all that activity wasn't enough, the Syrian Electronic Army has reportedly moved its mischief beyond Facebook and into the wider Web.

The YouTube video, which Noman says was made by the Syrian Electronic Army, documents the hacking and defacement of several British towns' websites. How and why the hackers targeted the Royal Leamington Spa Town Council and the Bournemouth & Poole Borough Council may remain one of the mysteries of our age.

As of this writing, the Royal Leamington Spa's page is back up. Weirdly, the Bournemouth & Poole page now appears to have been taken over by Spanish-language hackers.

Monitoring Facebook

The Syrian Electronic Army may not be the only pro-government faction meddling with Facebook's operations in Syria. In early May, mysterious forces staged a man-in-the-middle attack, where Facebook users who attempted to log in to their accounts were redirected to a fake Facebook login page. This allowed the attackers to harvest logins and passwords, giving them the ability to monitor and control those accounts. The attack targeted Facebook's encrypted HTTPS version, and made use of forged security certificates.

The Facebook users who first publicized this attack believed that it was carried out by the Syrian Telecom Ministry, but there has been no confirmation of that. Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted in a blog post that the attack was easy to spot, and seemed like an amateur attempt.

The attack is not extremely sophisticated: the certificate is invalid in user's browsers, and raises a security warning. Unfortunately, because users see these warnings for many operational reasons that are not actual man-in-the-middle attacks, they have often learned to click through them reflexively. In this instance, doing so would allow the attackers access to and control of their Facebook account.

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Information Operations

From EUFOR Forum Latest Edition

As Civil-Military Co-operation (CIMIC) is often seen as the Santa Claus of the Armed Forces i.e. the bringer of presents, we as members of Information Operations (IO) sometimes have the feeling that colleagues from EUFOR see us as the fun time event organisation branch. For that reason and because there is much more behind the IO work, I would like to take this opportunity to inform you a bit more about our work.

Yes, we do organise an annual soccer and art competition for children from all over BiH, in fact they are the biggest national school’s competitions in BiH! Yes, we do hand out promotional items. But no, we do not do that just for fun, there is a much wider perspective behind our activities.

IO has the general role of influencing the perceptions, attitudes and the behavior of our target audience. This must be carried out in line with EU political and military objectives. There are a number of more specialist fields that are controlled by IO branch and these include Psyops, CIMIC, Computer Networks, key Leader engagement and, especially for the soldiers on the ground, PPP (Presence, Posture and Profile). So, what does it actually mean? I will try to explain that in the perspective of the mission we are in, EUFOR.

EUFOR is in BiH to contribute to a safe and secure environment for people to live in. In a solely strategic way armed forces can do that by deploying a strong military force, however, it is always difficult to maintain a large military force indefinitely within areas of conflict. It is though, possible to try and tackle the problem where it started, in the minds of the people. If you can get people to believe in a better future for their country, reconciliation and the importance of peacefully living together and see positive results then, potentially, you have a stronger weapon than military force itself!

One of IO’s main tasks is to show the citizens of BiH that they too can become part of the EU, and that multi ethnicity is necessary to reach this goal. Since young people are the future of any country, IO, along with the EU organizations in BiH, see them as a major target audience. The youth are the future politicians, the future teachers, the future members of the armed forces and if they can work together for a safe and secure BiH then in due course when the political and security situation is appropriate there will no longer be a need for EUFOR’s presence in BiH.

To reach the youth of BiH with this message we need to use all possible ways of communicating with them directly and indirectly. Our TEME magazine, our FACEBOOK profile and YOU TUBE are direct ways of communicating with the youth. The events we organise, like the EUFOR Cup (soccer competition) and the EUFOR School’s Competition, are indirect ways of communication. With these events we attract the attention of the youth and we get children from different backgrounds to come together in fun and competition. Through our FACEBOOK profiles we can see that even after the competitions the children often stay in contact with each other. In order to promote EUFOR and our events we produce promotional items, posters, calendars, leaflets etc. EUFORs major success is its ability to attract major support from the international community and organisations – the English Premier League being one such supporter. This success is down to a lot of individual work by COM EUFOR and the IO team.