This is very intriguing, because we just don’t know who is operating as Anonymous. It could be a legitimate group of do-gooders that want to attack the cartels, or it could be a competing cartel that wants to target the Zetas, and use the Anonymous handle to do this.
But as STRATFOR pointed out, the cartels have their own computer experts, and they will certainly hunt down any threats and make an example of them. They have already hunted down and killed reporters and bloggers, and this new threat from Anonymous will be dealt with in the same brutal and bloody way.
The other thing to remember is that the cartels have a ton of money to hire cyber lance teams. Or basically a team that can hunt people online, and kill or capture them with their armed component. I would not underestimate their ability to assemble such a team, and I am sure they already have such folks working as we speak. This will certainly be a true test of Anonymous’ OPSEC/PERSEC abilities.
This also brings up another concept that I have gone over in the past, and that is fifth generation warfare. A third possibility here, is that either an enemy of the Zetas or of Anonymous, or even of both, has put this whole thing together in order to create a ‘war’ between the two. That third party can constantly and anonymously feed both parties to make that war very bloody and costly, and that third party would benefit–and yet stay completely out of the mess. The question is, who is the third party? (Although I tend to agree with Lind that it is still too early to really define what fifth generation warfare is) But this theory would fit into some of the definitions that are floating around out there. Who knows?
Either way, we will see how this works out. I do know that with this kind of cyber warfare, there will be no limitations or niceties. Both sides will be trying to do massive harm, both online, and in reality. Although I would put my money on the Zetas for putting the lance in ‘cyber lance’. I hope Anonymous is ready to play, because this is when the game get’s very serious. -Matt
Edit: 11-08-2011, So Jester (a certain hacker that is well known for taking on Wikileaks and other folks in prime hacker fashion) has just posted a very interesting deal about this story. He just identified an individual named Barrett Brown who was behind all of this, and that the kidnapping was fabricated–all because he wanted to generate some buzz about Anonymous. The reason? To sell a book. lol Yep. Here is the quote from Jester:
Message to all. The truth of the matter is this, with Brown, it’s not about fighting Mexican injustice, it’s not about a ‘kidnapped’ Anon, it’s not even about him having a problem with the prices he has to pay to get high, it’s not about anything except him generating interest in his upcoming book.
Excellent news, and this is great to see a resource like this. With so much focus on the other problems of the world, these animals continue to rove the jungles of Africa and terrorize and kill. There must be a more coordinated and serious effort to kill or capture Joseph Kony and his LRA.
The other thing with this is that if you look at the concentration of incidents (heat map), you can get a basic idea where the LRA operational area is. This is where a drone or satellite should be pointed, and a task force could be on call, just waiting to pounce on these guys as soon as movement or activity gets seen or reported.
Or how about we take every village that has ever been attacked by these scum in these areas, and do a massive lion hunt type operation? If you can flush the LRA out of their hiding spots, and set up ambushes or blocking forces to kill them, then that might be a good use of the thousands of people who would love to see their destruction. There is strength in numbers, and something like this would empower the people.
The other thing I like about this service is that data like this will help those who want to defend against the LRA. If you can see the main group moving closer to a village, then that village could be warned and the children and women could be hidden. Every little tip and report, is a vital piece to this game. The design of the website and service also reminds me a lot of Ushahidi. Check it out. -Matt
LRA Crisis Tracker
The LRA Crisis Tracker is a real-time mapping platform and data collection system created to bring an unprecedented level of transparency to the atrocities of the Lord’s Resistance Army.
Using information sourced from Invisible Children’s Early Warning Radio Network, UN agencies, and local NGOs, this tool allows for better response from governments, policy-makers, and humanitarian organizations.
This joint project, developed by Invisible Children and Resolve, marks the first time data surrounding the crisis has been comprehensively aggregated and made publicly available.
This is cool. The rebels in Libya are using a Aeryon Scout UAV in their war. There is some great footage that they were able to capture with this UAV and definitely check it out. On a side note, it sounds like the PSC called the Zariba Security Corporation delivered the UAV to the rebels. Chalk up another instance of PSC’s on the ground in Libya.
Also, check this quote out from Aeryon’s website. Now that is a user friendly, simple to use UAV!
In cooperation with the Zariba Security Corporation and the Libyan Transitional National Council, Libyan tropps were trained in-country on the use of the Aeryon Scout UAV. Docking in the besieged city of Misrata, after an 18-hour boat ride from Malta, a representative from Zariba Security delivered and conducted Scout UAV training. With enemy artillery landing nearby and rockets still falling on the city, training began at the Misrata Airport. “After only one demonstration flight, the TNC soldiers operated the following flight,” said Charles Barlow of Zariba. “I was amazed how easy it was to train people with no previous UAV or aircraft experience, especially given the language barrier. Soldiers need tough, intuitive equipment – and the Scout delivered brilliantly.”
Which brings up a great idea with weapons development. I mentioned the Fisher Price AK 47 in the past, and I really like the concept of simple to use, but extremely durable battlefield tools. I would imagine that this UAV can also be viewed using iPhones or similar smart phones? If so, then rebels could show one another very easily what they are seeing with a quick playback or if they were all networked, so that everyone can know the placements of enemies. Very interesting, and I am sure this will add another chapter to Guerrilla Warfare manuals everywhere. -Matt
Edit: 08/23/2011- It was brought to my attention that the Libyan rebels had paid for this UAV, and it was not donated like I originally posted. A source for this would be Wired’s Danger Room and they were able to talk with the players involved. Supposedly the drones are worth about $100,000 to $150,000. The Globe and Mail reported as well. I have no idea how much Zariba’s services cost, or if that was included in the price. Maybe the rebels will pay for NATO and all of the bombs they dropped as well? lol
In the program’s first three weeks, the model has proven to be 71 percent accurate in predicting the place and day where crimes have occurred, said Deputy Chief Steve Clark. In other words, 71 percent of the time the model told an officer to be at a location, a crime was in progress or was reported. At least one person has been arrested because of a patrol check initiated by the system, he said. Police recently gave eight years of crime reports for residential burglaries, vehicle burglaries and vehicle thefts to an applied mathematics professor at Santa Clara University. The system essentially maps the time, location and recurrence of past crimes to help police predict crime and tailor their patrols.-Santa Cruz police have success with predictive policing
For this building snowmobiles post, I wanted to draw upon a new crime fighting technology and explore the idea of it’s possible uses. The idea here is to use predictive analysis, much like what retailers use for product research or what researchers use for earthquake prediction, and use it to predict where crime is most likely to happen to get resources to efficiently cover those areas via patrols.
So the question I ask is if this actually works for crime, then why not apply it to warfighting? And especially COIN and today’s conflicts, where the war is long and there is time to collect statistics of attacks and instances that would be needed to build such a model? Or how about for anti-piracy or for the drug war down in Mexico? The key is if you have statics over the course of several years, then a model could be made. And if war planners are wanting to use their resources more efficiently because they have less forces to use, or the host nation is limited in resources, then predictive warfighting might help with the more efficient use of manpower on the battlefield.
If anything, much like with policing, it will be the guy on the ground who patrols their areas daily that will have the intuition of where to go and how best to cover their AO’s. But what about units that cycle in and out of the battlefields? Where is their intuition coming from if they have never been to that AO? So predictive analysis might help in the transition periods and help build that intuition of the new forces. This predictive analysis will also make it easier to make judgements about setting up patrols. You could combine human intuition/experience/orientation with this predictive analysis, and make a better plan of operations.
Predictive policing also helps the COIN forces by efficiently guiding the local police forces to areas they need to be. With places like Afghanistan, you might have officers who do not want to go in certain areas or dwell more in certain areas than they should, or are not trained enough to recognize patterns, or they come from other parts of the country. They too could benefit from this predictive analysis to further reinforce their intuition. But it could also help determine if that police force is working efficiently.
The fear though is depending upon this predictive analysis entirely. To me it is an interesting tool that needs to be tested more to see where it can be most effective, or where it could fit in to the overall strategy for crime fighting or warfighting. Interesting stuff and definitely check out all of the articles and information posted below if you would like to read more about it.
On a final note, Santa Cruz and other police departments throughout the nation looked at this new system as a way to more efficiently use their police forces to deal with crime. But they were also looking at it because of economic reasons because there is less money available to fund police departments these days. So more and more departments will be looking at cost cutting measures, while still being able to ‘protect and serve’ their communities. So what say you? -Matt
#60: Fighting Crime With Mathematics
12.16.2010
By Daniel Lametti
One major problem in crime-fighting is that a police crackdown in one neighborhood may simply push criminal behavior into a nearby area. In March two mathematicians, working with an anthropologist and a criminologist, announced a way to quantify this reaction (pdf).
“Crimes tend to cluster together in space and time, forming hot spots,” says UCLA mathematician Martin Short, the study’s lead author. Drawing on real-world data, his team developed a model showing that hot spots come in two varieties. One type forms when an area experiences a large-scale crime increase, such as when a park is overrun by drug dealers. Another develops when a small number of criminals—say, a pair of burglars—go on a localized crime spree.
The model suggests that a focused police response can relatively easily extinguish larger hot spots because the criminals there scatter randomly, making it unlikely that they will resume coordinated unlawful activity nearby. But for smaller crime waves, crooks just migrate together into an adjacent neighborhood, where they are likely to start another spree. By analyzing police reports as they come in, Short hopes to determine which type of hot spot is forming so police can handle it more effectively.
Link to Discover article here.
—————————————————————- UC MaSC Project
Funded by the Human Social Dynamics Program at NSF, the UC MaSC Project centers on theoretical, methodological and empirical work to develop analytical and computational models of crime pattern formation. Crime mapping forms a key feature of current approaches to understanding offender behavior and is a tool used increasingly by police departments and policy makers for strategic crime prevention. However, despite the availability of sophisticated digital mapping and analysis tools there is a substantial gap in our understanding of how low-level behaviors of offenders lead to aggregate crime patterns such as crime hot spots. Thus, for example, we are unable to specify exactly why directed police action at crime hot spots sometimes leads to displacement of crime in space but, surprisingly, often can also lead to hot spot dissipation and a real reduction in crime incidences.
This is a quick one, and falls under the Opensource Military Hardware concept. Imagine this–building a weaponized drone using open source maker’s sites like DIY Drones and Dronepedia and utilizing a 3D printer to make hundreds if not thousands of them? That is where all of this stuff is going, and the possibilities are endless.
The other reason why I wanted to bring this up is that this kind of thing is definitely competition for the defense industries that specialize in UAV sales. Why buy an expensive drone from a company when you can just print out a bunch of them? And because anyone can access the information on how to build these things, then now you have the ability to continuously improve your drone program based on the input of the crowds.
My last point to bring up with this is that as this technology becomes cheaper and more available, then the odds of these things being used by criminals or terrorists increase. The other day, a DIY crew made a drone that could hack into computers via Wifi, and it is only a matter of time until we see the bad guys use this stuff to do all sorts of interesting things. Or even today’s terrorists/enemies, and all of the possible deadly uses of drones. Cartels or pirates could also get into the game of making and using drones. Especially for pirates, because drones could help them to find vessels to take down. Perhaps having shotguns for site security will be a required weapon in the near future? Or some kind of grenade launcher outfitted with special rounds to counter drone attacks?
Now what I would be interested to see is a drone that could be launched by an RPG launcher, and either used for surveillance or as a flying missile. A drone that you could quickly get into the air and use it as a ‘bird of prey’ for a fire fight. Or something that you could launch and have it fly farther than any of your unit’s weapon’s effective ranges, and have the ability to locate and destroy an enemy across the canyon or up in the hills. Something like that could end one of these DShK cross canyon ambushes, and especially if you did not have CAS on deck to deal with the attackers. While everyone is returning fire, this drone could be launched and flown above enemy positions so precise targeting data could be collected, or targets of opportunity could be taken out by the drone itself. -Matt
Lately, there has been an increased intensity of hacking attacks on government and business. Of course, government is doing all it can to keep up and stop these hackers. And like the piracy problem on the high seas, hackers in the commons called cyber space are operating with virtual impunity.
To me, there are several areas of weakness that today’s hackers are exploiting. One is the shear enormity of the internet and cyber space, and all the potential targets that a hacker can attack. Like with the pirates of Somalia, hackers have plenty of ocean and are constantly searching for new hunting grounds and weaknesses to exploit.
Their rewards can be immense. Hack into a bank, steal information from a technology firm, or hack a government website and exploit that information. Or they do it because of the ‘lulz’ or the hell of it, just to prove they are the best. Or worse, they attack individuals. (companies or the government has done nothing to protect the little guys– like this blog, from attacks) And these hackers can do it all from a terminal at some random location in the world.
The other thing at play here is scale. Once folks see for themselves how successful one group or individual is, then others will copy them. They will borrow brilliance and follow a model of operation that works, all to achieve a goal. And like today’s example of piracy, hacking spreads because it is inspired by the success of others and by the rewards of the risk taking.
It also spreads when money or organizational influence comes into play. China or a cartel from Mexico can easily do things to add fire to the world of hacking and cyber warfare. All nations add to scale of such things. Just wait until ‘plomo o plata‘ comes to the world of hacking, and then that is when cyber lances will really become essential.
Which brings me to the point of this post. Because this problem is only growing, there must be measures that equal the size and scale of this global deluge. Legal tools like the LoM must be considered to even the scale between black hat and the company use of white hat hackers. Of course it would be nice if government and it’s law enforcement apparatus could be large enough enough to apply the rule of law to all corners of the cyber universe. But like with today’s modern day scourge of piracy, government cannot be everywhere and at all times.
So here is where I like to take the next step forward. Companies need the legal authority to effectively combat black hat hackers. That legal authority can and should come in the form of a Letter of Marque and Reprisal. Or maybe a government can come up with a different title for this license. But either way, by giving companies the legal authority to do what they need to do to combat the problem, they in essence help to put ‘the armed guards on boats’. (another analogy with today’s piracy problem)
Here is some more food for thought. If the targets of hackers are companies, then is the government the best tool to use to protect all of these companies out there? Who would have more interest and incentive to protect a company’s infrastructure–a government or the the company itself? Of course a company would love for someone to do it for free, but the problem here is that there is too much at stake to put the security of a company simply in the hands of a burdensome, bureaucratic and highly inefficient government organizations. Government does not have the resources to watch over every company, and it does not have the personal motivation to defend a company’s assets to the fullest degree.
Yet again, the piracy analogy works for this example. All of the navies in the world have not stopped piracy, and if anything, the problem has grown. Likewise, the US government was not able to protect Sony, Google or Lockheed Martin from vicious hacking attacks, even though the government has cyber warfare units and tons of agencies tasked with monitoring cyber related activities.
So what is the solution? I say government should listen to what the companies have to say about how best to help them. The government would also have to re-evaluate what ‘help’ really means, in the context of this problem. If a company says it is legally constrained when trying to defend against black hat hackers, then what is the logical solution? Do you put the government’s police forces in charge of a company’s security anti-hacking units, or do we license a company to combat this problem? To me, issuing a license to companies so they can actually compete with these black hat hackers, is the equivalent of putting ‘armed guards on boats’ to defend against Somali Pirates. It makes sense, and it answers the problem of scale.
It also sounds like this is the natural progression anyways? The new DIB Cyber Pilot program sounds like another step towards empowering companies. With companies like Lockheed Martin, it behooves the government to help them because this company is very much a part of our national security. So will licensing companies be the next ‘natural progression’ as an answer to this world wide scourge? I know myself, and the Morgan Doctrine blog will be following this stuff, and we will see….-Matt
To supplement my cyber lance post, this news, along with the attacks on L3 and Lockheed Martin or the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, all point to how important and dangerous this stuff really is. I will let the article speak for itself.
Also check out the Morgan Doctrine’s opinion about this story. The MD is a blog that promotes the concept of cyber privateers and tracks the world of cyber warfare and crime. -Matt
Cyber Combat: Act of War
MAY 31, 2011
Pentagon Sets Stage for U.S. to Respond to Computer Sabotage With Military Force
By SIOBHAN GORMAN And JULIAN E. BARNES
WASHINGTON—The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.
WSJ’s Siobhan Gorman has the exclusive story of the Pentagon classifying cyber attacks by foreign nations acts of war. – News Hub
The Pentagon’s first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country’s military.
In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the consequences of attacking the U.S. in this way. “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” said a military official.
I want to thank Matt from Facebook for bringing up this quote from Starship Troopers. I found the movie clip of the quote and it clearly shows the weakness of cyber warfare. It shows why you must have a direct action/physical security component mixed with your cyber warfare/information operations unit.
The simple reason why is that all it takes for your enemies to ruin your ‘hacking’ ventures, is for them to kill your hacker and physically destroy his equipment. To ‘throw a knife into the hand of the guy that pushes the buttons’, to paraphrase the quote up top.
Or worse, that hacker could be tortured and key information could be extracted in order to conduct a larger attack. The value of what that hacker knows (a nation or company’s secrets), or what they know how to do (hacking a nation or company), makes them a high value target.
In other words, today’s freelance hacker or even government/military hacker, is a highly valuable asset to a nation or a company. That highly valuable asset must be defended, and have a highly evolved physical and cyber offensive capability in order to compete and survive in today’s world.
So in order to deal with this new reality I have developed and defined a new term that I wanted to share with the readership. Enter the ‘cyber lance’.
Basically, a cyber lance is a combined arms team within a privateer company or military unit. Or it could be an outsourced team. The lance part comes from the french term Lances fournies, or ‘lances fournished’. Here is the definition from wikipedia.
The Lances fournies (French: “lances furnished”) was a medieval army squad that would have surrounded a knight in battle, consisting of a four to ten man team built of squires, men-at-arms (usually mounted swordsmen), archers, attendants (pages) and the knight himself. These units formed companies under a captain either as mercenary bands or in the retinue of wealthy nobles and royalty. A Lance was usually led and raised by a knight in the service of his liege, yet it is not uncommon in certain periods to have a less privileged man, such as a sergeants-at-arms, lead a lance. More powerful knights, also known as a knight bannerets, could field multiple lances.
And of course the cyber is used to refer to anything to do with the internet or computing. I particularly like this etymology of cyber from wikipedia:
By the 1970s, the Control Data Corporation (CDC) sold the “Cyber” range of supercomputers, establishing the word cyber- as synonymous with computing. Robert Trappl credits William Gibson and his novel Neuromancer with triggering a “cyber- prefix flood” in the 1980s.
What’s cool about a cyber lance, is that a company can actually define it’s size to a client. They can say ‘we have 20 cyber lances’ or ‘cyber lancers’ (whatever sounds better to the user)
The other reason why I like the cyber lance concept, is that it mixes physical security with cyber security. It also mixes physical offense, with the cyber offense. You must have one with the other as the world of cyber warfare continues to evolve. The cyber lance defines that combined arms group of hackers and shooters. The way I envision it, it could be as simple as a protective detail assigned to a hacker, or as involved as a special forces type team that does both the protection of a hacker, and conducts offensive operations based upon the information gained by that hacker. It is a fusion of the cyber and the physical, and all the potential actions that can come out of that combination.
I also like the etymology of lance corporal. If you have ever served in the Marines, you more than likely were a ‘Lance Corporal”. Although the lance part refers to lancepesade.
From the Italian lanzia spezzata, which literally means “broken lance” or “broken spear”, but which was used to denote a seasoned soldier (the broken spear being a metaphor for combat experience, where such an occurrence was likely).
Or if you have ever heard of the term ‘free-lance photographer’ or ‘free-lancer‘ (etymology- medieval mercenary warrior) , then now you know the origins of the term. I think it works pretty nicely for cyber lance. So to me, cyber lance makes perfect sense in the context of what I am talking about here.
The cyber lance is also flexible in it’s usage. They could be all military units, or a private cyber lance contracted out to the government or companies. A cyber privateer or cyber pirate company would have several groups of cyber lances as an organizational idea. Each cyber lance is just a unit or term to describe this hardened ‘hacker team with teeth’. It also goes back to the idea of combined arms, or mutually supporting groups within a unit. This concept is very much a part of the building snowmobiles mindset.
Combined arms is an approach to warfare which seeks to integrate different branches of a military to achieve mutually complementary effects (for example, using infantry and armor in an urban environment, where one supports the other, or both support each other). Combined arms doctrine contrasts with segregated arms where each military unit is composed of only one type of soldier or weapon system. Segregated arms is the traditional method of unit/force organisation, employed to provide maximum unit cohesion and concentration of force in a given weapon or unit type.
A cyber lance also promotes the idea of ‘team’, as opposed to an individual. I believe cells or teams are far more capable for the attack and defense, as opposed to just an individual. The security of a nation or company, or the prosecution of that nation or company’s best interest would best be placed into the hands of a team, as opposed to just one individual. Primarily because teams would actually have the ‘teeth’ necessary to capture or kill ‘individuals’, or defend against an attacking force. A cyber lance could also be attacked by a cyber lance, or a group of cyber lances that would make up a cyber privateer company.
Another key component of the cyber lance is it’s ability to work within the borders of another country or navigate the complexities of the commons called cyber space. A small team can be surgical and have a light foot print. It also falls in line with the concepts of netwar, and offense industry which was a past building snowmobiles post.
Finally, as hackers become more valuable and more capable, it will be of national interest to protect these assets. The cyber lance could very well be the next chapter or paragraph in the world of combined arms and cyber warfare. It will also take the combination of the hacker’s mind and the tactical and strategic thinking of a special operations team to think of all the ways a cyber lance could be used for the defense or offense. The end result could lead to the destruction of a nation’s key national security assets, or the preservation of a nation’s vital national security assets. That is what makes a cyber lance a very important and lethal building snowmobiles concept. -Matt
Hat tip to Nathan Hodge for this one. The weight of this system is an outstanding two pounds! It is also a lot less obtrusive than the system being used in that Switchblade video below. I am telling you, the day when Drone Archers become a reality in infantry units and special forces units is coming.
The next step is to take micro drones like the Switchblade and make them launchable from Gustavs, SMAWs or similar hand held rocket launchers. If you watch that Switchblade video, these things are tube launched from a basic mortar type launcher, which I assume are disposable. Perhaps they should make the Switchblade launchable from an actual mortar tube? Or the other concept would be to make a micro drone that could be launched from an RPG. Or make it like a LAW or AT -4?
The reason why I say make them launchable like this, is so that you can get these drones on top of the enemy as soon as possible. The enemy will have a running start if they see a force hand launch this drone. But if a team could shoot that UAV immediately above the battle space, then getting eyes on for the kill or for tracking purposes becomes more efficient and increases success. It can end the fight a lot quicker, if this was possible. I imagine the electronics would have to be pretty sturdy to withstand this kind of launch, but after all, they have done it with systems like the Javelin.
What is interesting too, is that drone archers would be more successful while the fight is in progress. Accurate fires in the direction of the enemy would help to keep them in place and behind cover, while at the same time the drone archer can get a UAV above that enemy element and go for a kill or for over watch purposes to help develop the situation and contribute to a team’s OODA. Interesting stuff. -Matt
Photo from Wired's Danger Room and the company website for MVR IV
Multi-Band Video Receiver (MVR IV)
Overview
The MVR-IV is a hand-held unit that receives real-time, full-motion video. Designed to work over the L, S and C bands, it provides situational awareness to ground troops from aircraft, UAV, or ground based video sources. The unit is compatible with standard-issue eyepiece and can be interfaced to a portable computer for video capture, manipulation (John Madden), retransmitting and storage. It is modular in design, is upgradeable for unit specific requirements (to include digital encoding), and works with all legacy video transmission systems. Digital link encryption for all bands is available.
