Paradigm Intel: Future of Terrorist sites: www WAR

Paradigm Intel: Future of Terrorist sites:

The most powerful and savvy media nation in the world is loosing the "info war"
to a man hiding in a cave in the Mountains, without access to a computer.

Currently the energy is towards shutting down the Terrorist web sites.
So far there hasn't really been a question of free speech and a good definition of a terroris web site.
Like porno I know it when I see it.

Every time we shut down a web site they loose some information, some data bases and some members.

They can email contact info and the sites new URL when they start a new site, but some mail will be lost to spam and some won't bother to sign back up again.

So as we take down the web sites we whittle away at their membership and fragment their groups.
Into more and smaller and smaller groups.

We get smaller concentrations of crazy.
Fewer crazys, and easier targets, harder to hide in a smaller group, and fewer resources to smaller groups.

Eventually they will migrate to servers in "enemy" countries.
At that point we need cyber forces with cyber arms.
The ability to "crash" a server, a web site, a web page even a post...
take it down and keep it down, with rootkit bots, dos bots etc.
And order physical,kinetic Ops against three dimensional addresses.
Web masters home in a theater of operations.


So we may have a paradigm to handle the Insurgents web sites.

But that misses the crux of the problem.
Recruiting is fruitless if they get no volunteers.
There is an on going battle on the Internet for minds and hearts
of the most influential and intelligent and wealthy Muslims. The ones with computers and Internet. One of their Victims.

USA has to develop a "Info WAR" capability.

When the cyber forces are recognized as valuable as troops in the field
then we can fight the battle for the hearts and minds of the Ummah the
demographic where the jihadists are recruited from.

The Islamofacisists have some of the most powerful motivators in human nature
at work for them; sex, the 72 virgins; testosterone, war, guns, explosives; religion, Bastardized Islamism:
hero's, Bin Laden: foreign adventure, a chance to break away from the parents, and obtain high family esteem.

A formidable repertory indeed. It works.

And USA is AWOL from the Info war for the most part.

The terrorist propaganda is bought and used by Western Press services and it does influence the American people.

What does a Info war trooper do?
He runs ops, simple ones, and confronts lies, and propaganda anywhere he finds it on the web.
He utilizes 2,000 well organised bots (combination spiders and search engine) looking for key words and phrases and reporting back results 24/7, this establishes a knowledge base to draw from and develop replies.
The aim is not to convert the hard core jihadist but to influence the "lurker" there are estimates that for every post there are 50 readers that never post (lurkers).
The lurkers are where the future recruits come from.
And the ones that USA wants to influence.

Each trooper should have one terrorist forum and one terrorist web site he monitors, tracks, responds to and reports on.
This is modeled on one of our associates, who is pro-Islam and vehemently anti-al Qaeda and anti-taliban, Bill at Infovlad
And ranked by their ability to respond to lies and propaganda, with cogent, logical replies, or even spin.
And the ability to call on help for replies or action situations, or bring down a server or web site.

Right now USA could use about 5,000 of these troops, using fast computers, and heavy ram and good security.
They have the potential to stop or cut down on recruitment, suicide bombers, even prevent operations.
Or track and engage the Internet enemy kinetically thru proxys.
Kill or arrest terrorist web masters when tracked to an IP, and physical address.

This kind of operation has the potential to severely reduce terrorist suicide bombers, volunteers.

Develop counter terrorist web sites, an "anti-al qaeda" web site, " anti-Taliban", Afghan and Pakti sites with USA videos, stories, and analysis and countering lies, false videos and terrorist spin posts. And info on USA support to these regions on a daily basis.

The score now is Terrorist about 4,000 web sites and forums vs USA zero, almost none. ( Except for the Civilian Irregular Forces. and they receive no funding, how about anonymous donations, put it in your budget. )

The capability is available we seem to be lacking in the will to engage.

Gerald
Anthropologist

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Follow up:
Current State and Future of Cyber Warfare:

Al-Qaeda has established the first effective cyber warfare division.
By a man hiding in a cave.
Their influence on the American elections and the Moslem ummah cannot be denied.

Their cyber division includes Command and Control, training, recruitment and a media psyops division second to none.

Their media arm is able to maintain moral in public view of heavy losses.

They have identified their demographic and pander to it very effectively.

They have mobile web sites on maybe 20 servers, use public servers to distribute their elaborate weekly terrorist magazines ( est. 12 ) and videos ( About 12 active outlets ).
On the Internet a hand full of key people and expenses taken out of pocket are winning the Info war against the worlds most savvy media nation. Cheap sucessful asymmetric warfare.

They have several fake news sites to distribute their propaganda.
And an all volunteer distribution network.

They have the ability to comment on real time events with in an hours time.

Their distribution network is public and its publications are in several languages.

The distribution network is hardened by redundancy, some files may be loaded to 40 or 50 public sites and files. The location and urls of these files are then distributed. The files are in multiple formats also.

Their hacking abilities are limited to a few sites with software downloadable for DOS attacks. ( Which we took down and burned the head hacker.)

While N. Korea and China have dedicated hacking forces functioning full time.

One of the counter tactics for their media operations would be saturation, flooding the 'market' with competing media targeted to the same demographic.

Since the Islamo fascist's cyber warfare tactics are intuitive they are predictable.

The USA Army's efforts have been limited to a few successful psyops programs and mostly academic analysis. And the Air force have some future plans based primarily in the future and security based.

Israeli efforts have been more extensive private initiatives based on OSINT distribution, analysis and some web defacement.

Our own efforts have been limited by funds and primarily BETA model operations. While our operations have been successful and had significant impact they have been low volume. Bill at Infovlad

The strongest weapon in the cyber army arsenal seems to be the
TRUTH, and huge distribution. These tools seem to have the most impact on public opinion.

The Israeli Lebanon war is a good example. While Lebanon suffered 3,500,000,000 USD in damages and Israel suffered $10,000 worth of pot holes to fill in, and Lebanon suffered 4,500 deaths and Israeli suffered around 400 deaths, Lebanon was viewed as the winner in the war from media efforts from the Islamo fascist's media arm.

In the future I envision the USA will have several battalions of cyber troops, each trooper with their own computer. Just posting to forums, news groups and news media sites presenting the truth and monitoring the internet for breaking news, spin and OSINT, WORLD WIDE and responding to same in real time. Posting in eight hour shifts around the clock on current events and most languages countering the Islamo fascist's lies, spin and propaganda. And a psycops core producing analysis, video, magazines and text for the posters.

Another division of hackers tracking their media computers and leaders, disrupting their command and control and influencing moral through PC crippling viruses.

There is a universal psychology operating on the Internet that tends to believe anything posted often and broadly enough is believed as the "TRUTH" ie if it isn't the truth it would be confronted. Kind of like if it is in the Newspaper it must be true or they would be sued.

I have seen this in operation on the internet related to a product where there was certain scientific proof the product was safe but was ruled against by the USA government based on the false info posted all over the internet, the false info was perceived as the truth without confirmation, over scientific proofs in their own studies.

This psychology is being used to great effect by the Islamo fascists on the Internet. Lies posted over a wide range of sites often enough, un-confronted are perceived as the truth by the public, Moslem and American.

And selective edited videos can be spun as the whole truth even though they are propaganda. As evidenced by the TV company that ran the story of the insurgent sniper videos as NEWS rather than as propaganda.

After all seeing, is believing. Even if the video is one sided and selectively edited to present a slanted view or just the partial story favorable to the insurgents. And this can and does influence the American public and our elections and the Moslem ummah.

Cyber warfare in the future will center on media wars and demographic battles. Which we are not even fighting now, we are loosing by default.
Both the Moslem ummah and the USA public are loosing and being influenced by un-confronted lies and propaganda on the Internet. Much of the public believe the terrorists speak for Islam, which will eventually have deafening and devastating blow back for the ummah.

While we could win the war and all the battles in reality, we could loose in the arena of public opinion and not be viewed as the victors encouraging future wars and insurgencies and a take over of Islam, and unfairly influencing American elections through successful propaganda all by default. The USA government and the ummah have a responsibility to answer these lies and propaganda to insure their own respective survivals.

Gerald
Anthropologist

UPDATE:12.13.07
.....effectively mining the Internet and other open sources for information. Such an
effort, it is suggested, also will enable the Community to achieve a better tactical
understanding of how jihadists use the Internet’s web-television capabilities, chat
rooms, and “news” sites, to train forces and raise money. Ultimately, these observers
suggest, the United States must develop the capability to understand and influence
foreign populations — “not in their council of states but in their villages and slums”
— if it is to effectively counter the threat posed by jihadists. In such circumstances,
it is argued, the information that should matter most to policymakers can be derived
from open sources.2
The debate over the relative value of open source information, compared to that
of classified data, is occurring at a time when the global information environment is
viewed by some as having reached a “post-modern” stage.3 In such an environment,
secret information may be less important than the combination of open source information, information sharing, computer networking, and an ability to sift and analyze a dizzying volume of open source information. Indeed, one former senior intelligence officer suggested that whereas the 20th century was the century of secrets, the 21st century may well prove to be the century of global information. If the Intelligence Community as a whole accepts and understands this change, according to some observers, it may gain an edge in confronting current threats, particularly those posed by terrorism.
SOURCE: CRS
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UPDATE ii; SAME DATE:

Success On The Playing Field

( Missing the paradigm, parens by Gerald)

This new Command's ability to wage cyberwarfare will be judged based on its success in three areas:
( while this development is crucial it is but a small part of cyberwarfare, the leading Paradigm of actual Internet WAR will be MAD, "Mutually Assured Destruction", many nation states and criminal gangs are on the verge of being able to bring down the www, which is a disadvantage to most everyone including the criminal element. The clearer best use of cyber forces will be in the "Information WAR" arena. Confronting the lies and propaganda spread by the Terrorist. All way down to the village level. The key new weapons will be easy convenient OSINT COLLECTIONS, and response to propaganda. )

• ( this will be a small reserve component ): Real-world experience and rapid (open source) innovation. Most, if not all, of this experience and innovation in cyberwarfare is gained through criminal activity. Innovation is a product of rapid cycles of competition with software vendors and computer security companies.
• Massive self-replication. Think in term of small teams (the smarter, the better) designing software that seizes control of tens of millions of computer systems through various forms of infection.
• Deniability. Nearly all of the successful operations conducted in offensive cyberwarfare will require deniability. Post-attack forensics must not point back to a government since these wars/battles will be fought in peacetime.

What This Means

Given these requirements, this new Command will likely fail (and badly). To provide contrast, the Russian Business Network (the RBN is a computer criminal syndicate responsible for an estimated 60% of online criminal activity), gets top marks in all of these areas. Here's a round up of what this means:

• Nation-states that protect or maintain close ties to computer criminal networks will gain advantages in emerging cyberwarfare capability. Early example: Russia's use of the RBN against Estonia and China's use of vigilante hackers for control of domestic dissent and computer espionage.
• US institutional cyberwarfare will create public embarrassments as it attempts to operate in this environment. This will generate friction with allied nation-states and run afoul of domestic privacy advocates. As a result, ROEs will tighten mightily (debilitating).( RBN has a very sucessful history of Deniability, no one knows who they are.)
  
• The Command will become almost exclusively defensive over time. It won't be able to innovate at rates even remotely comparable to the competition. As a result, its activity will likely devolve to the "active" defense of government systems (most corporations will stay with private security companies for support). Additionally, its scale will be only a small fraction of the competition's hundreds of thousands of contributors and its tens of millions of infected computers (it will be out-mobilized). ( disagree completely, a billion sleeper bots in reserve for MAD, is all that is required, the Internet infra structure its self will learn to deal with DDOS on massive scales for reasons of self preservation. Every Industrial nation in the world will join against any massive DDos on the WWW. This function will in time be nullified and obsolete. )
  

NOTE: Cyberwarfare, although nascent today, will become a major form of warfare in the next decade as computing power increases by 100 fold and computer automation creeps into every nook and cranny of the global economy. NOTE2: Much of this analysis/synthesis will also apply to the emergence of open source biowarfare in the next decade.

Posted by John Robb on Wednesday, 12 December 2007 at 07:58 AM | Permalink

( Gerald )
There are two considerations we are reviewing, one is the criminal element alone or coupled with a state actor, AND, the Deniability factor.
If the attacks are traced back to a state, then the practicability of the situation is it will be considered prima facia evidence of a state attack, and the state will be held responsible. As there doesn't seem any other way to successfully deal with the stealth factor.

Again this problem stems from the World Governments inability to deal effectively with Global Internet Crime, the current paradigm is to almost ignore it and prosecute cases of convenience.

Now this criminal element has become Global and can threaten the Internet, and there is no Paradigm for dealing with them.

Awhile back we ran into 400 American Express CC for sale, with some free cards and info , we quickly notified owners and American Express, their security offices in Chicage and NY, neither were interested. Do they make a profit from stolen cards?

The Estonia cyber attack suggest a workable paradigm,
If an attack comes from a state it is considered an attack by that government, and that governments reasponsiblity to stop it,
and is subject to counter attacks.

The basis for this threat stems from the number of unprotected computers connected to the Internet, which makes them subject to conversion to Zombies. In the future all IPS will be required to verify computer security before they let a computer connect to the Internet.
I estimate this will reduce the number of bot nets by at least 70%.
And remove most of the threat to the WWW.
Currently if there is a massive attack the only choice is to shut off that country, WWW node, off from the Internet.

A possible solution is a WWW police force with Internet Courts and powers of warrant and police powers to go after targeted computers and ISPs and players.




Gerald


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