Former Sen. Stevens killed in crash near Dillingham

by Channel 2 News staff

Monday, August 9, 2010


ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Former Sen. Ted Stevens and four other people were killed in a plane crash Monday.

Five or six of the nine passengers of a DeHavilland DHC-3 Otter were killed, according to earlier reports. No confirmation has been made yet as to the identities or condition of the flight's other four passengers, though former NASA chief Sean O'Keefe survived the crash.

Weather continues to hamper recovery efforts at the site of the crash, officials said at a press conference Tuesday, where Gov. Sean Parnell offered a tribute to the 86-year-old former senator.

Parnell said that while Stevens may have been small in stature, he was "larger than life."

"He built Alaska, he stood for Alaska and he fought for Alaskans," Parnell said. "Ted was a lion who retreated from nothing."

A timeline of the flight's downfall began to emerge on Tuesday.

Officials said that good Samaritans in Dillingham set out to investigate after the flight was overdue. They discovered the crash site about 17 miles north of Dillingham in a mountainous area and alerted authorities using a satellite phone at around 7 p.m. Weather kept night rescue crews battling bad weather conditions from the scene overnight, where Samaritans had already arrived and were providing medical assistance, said Air National Guard spokesperson Maj. Guy Hayes. A military C-130 and a Pave Hawk helicopter were waiting in Dillingham for the weather to break and reached the site just after 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, transporting some survivors to Anchorage for medical treatment.

As of Tuesday, the response had been "confounded by the weather extremes that we've had to face," said Maj. Gen. Tom Katkus of the Alaska National Guard, which is coordinating the recovery response with the Coast Guard and other agencies. The National Transportation Safety Board has sent a "Go-Team" from Washington D.C. early Tuesday morning to the crash site. An NTSB official said the team is responsible for investigating the most high-profile and catastrophic crashes.

Parnell said he learned of the crash and the possibility that Stevens was on board the plane late Monday night, and was informed that the former Senator was among the dead Tuesday morning.

"As a state, as a country and as a globe we are experiencing a tragedy," Parnell said. "As citizens of Alaska we have a long road of grief to walk."

Fictitious femme fatale fooled cybersecurity
Intel, defense specialists fell for ruse in test

8:07 p.m., Sunday, July 18, 2010
By Shaun Waterman

Call her the Mata Hari of cyberspace.

http://i26.tinypic.com/15eh7j5.jpg

Robin Sage, according to her profiles on Facebook and other social-networking websites, was an attractive, flirtatious 25-year-old woman working as a "cyber threat analyst" at the U.S. Navy's Network Warfare Command. Within less than a month, she amassed nearly 300 social-network connections among security specialists, military personnel and staff at intelligence agencies and defense contractors.

A handful of pictures on her Facebook page included one of her at a party posing in thigh-high knee socks and a skull-and-crossbones bikini captioned, "doing what I do best."

"Sorry to say, I'm not a Green Beret! Just a cute girl stopping by to say hey!" she rhymingly proclaimed on her Twitter page, concluding, "My life is about info sec [information security] all the way!"

And so it apparently was. She was an avid user of LinkedIn - a social-networking site for professionals sometimes described as "Facebook for grown-ups." Her connections on it included men working for the nation's most senior military officer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and for one of the most secret government agencies of all, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which builds, launches and runs U.S. spy satellites. Others included a senior intelligence official in the U.S. Marine Corps, the chief of staff for a U.S. congressman, and several senior executives at defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. Almost all were seasoned security professionals.

But Robin Sage did not exist.

Her profile was a ruse set up by security consultant Thomas Ryan as part of an effort to expose weaknesses in the nation's defense and intelligence communities - what Mr. Ryan calls "an independent 'red team' exercise."

It is not the first time "white-hat" hackers have carried out such a social-engineering experiment, but military and intelligence security specialists told The Washington Times that the exercise reveals important vulnerabilities in the use of social networking by people in the national security field.

Ms. Sage's connections invited her to speak at a private-sector security conference in Miami, and to review an important technical paper by a NASA researcher. Several invited her to dinner. And there were many invitations to apply for jobs.

"If I can ever be of assistance with job opportunities here at Lockheed Martin, don't hesitate to contact me, as I'm at your service," one executive at the company told her.

One soldier uploaded a picture of himself taken on patrol in Afghanistan containing embedded data revealing his exact location. A contractor with the NRO who connected with her had misconfigured his profile so that it revealed the answers to the security questions on his personal e-mail account.

"This person had a critical role in the intelligence community," Mr. Ryan said. "He was connected to key people in other agencies." He said that he reached out to the individual, and the misconfiguration was repaired.

But many other connections also inadvertently exposed personal data, including their home addresses and photos of their families.

"These are all important violations of [operations security] and [personal security]," Mr. Ryan said.

He added that he was surprised about the success of the effort, especially given that Ms. Sage's profile was bristling with what should have been red flags.

"Everything in her profile screamed fake," he told The Times. She claimed to have 10 years' experience in the cybersecurity field - which would mean that she entered it at age 15 - and there is no such job as "cyber threat analyst" at the Naval Network Warfare Command. Even her name is taken from the code name of an annual U.S. special-forces military exercise, as a two-second Google search establishes.

Mr. Ryan chose the photos, which he found on an amateur pornography site, "because she looked foreign" - which he said was another potential counterintelligence red flag - as well as for her attractiveness.

Several people with whom she attempted to connect spotted the fakery, Mr. Ryan said, "I was pretty much busted on Day Two." He said some people with whom Ms. Sage tried to connect took simple precautions such as trying to call the phone number she provided, or by asking her to e-mail them from her military account. Others checked public records on her purported National Security Agency information security qualification or reviewed the college alumni network for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she claimed to have been educated.

Some even noticed that her profile on every site had been established less than a month earlier.

But Mr. Ryan added that no central place was established for people to warn others about the scam, and tweets or other commentary questioning her authenticity didn't stop others from connecting with her.

"The only agencies where I didn't get any connections were the FBI and the CIA," he said.

David Wennergren, the deputy chief information officer for the Department of Defense, said in an e-mail that the answer was to continue the Pentagon's effort to "ensure our folks are well trained on responsible use of the Internet - at work and home."

After the department discovered that it was the victim of "long-distance phone abuse ... we didn't abandon the use of telephones," he said.

"We should address the behavior, not abandon the tool."

"All access to the Internet - not just social-networking sites - involves risk; even accessing websites and the use of e-mail involves risk," Mr. Wennergren added.

But Paul Strassmann, a professor at George Mason University who was the Pentagon's director of defense information in the early 1990s, said the unrestricted use of social networking by Defense Department personnel poses unacceptable risks.

"You are opening the floodgates to a torrent of data, which your adversary can ... sift and turn into intelligence," he said.

Mr. Strassmann, who said he was recently engaged by a U.S. agency he declined to name to help develop a policy on social networking, added that it didn't matter that the security breaches in the case were unintentional. "In intelligence, many of the most important leaks are inadvertent."

Another person involved at a senior level in the U.S. military's cybersecurity efforts, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the case, called it "an object lesson in the dangers of social networking."

"People feel they are safe" on the Internet, he said, but in reality, "it is a perfect environment for preying on people's weaknesses."

Mr. Strassmann was dismissive of a Pentagon policy document on the use of social networking and other Web 2.0 capabilities by defense personnel. The document, issued in February after many delays and a lengthy process of internal consultation and review, notes that pre-existing policy "permits limited personal use of federal government resources," such as phones and Internet connections.

"When accessing Internet-based capabilities using federal government resources in an authorized personal or unofficial capacity, individuals shall employ sound operations security (OPSEC) measures ... and shall not represent the policies or official position of the Department of Defense," the policy states.

"They just haven't thought about it," said Mr. Strassmann. "They are saying, 'Be careful.' My grandmother used to say that. ... It's not really useful."

Mr. Strassmann said that after conversations with personnel in Iraq and elsewhere, he thinks that many, many military personnel are avid users of social-networking sites. Troops often had to contend with huge levels of boredom, and such sites were "highly habit-forming."

He said he was told by "someone in a position to know" that up to 20 percent of all traffic on Defense Department computer networks involves social networking on public sites, "which are unprotected, as well as potentially toxic."

In Israel, where soldiers who had served at a top-secret military base set up a Facebook page, and allowed a reporter to sign up to it, members of Sayeret 13, the elite naval commando unit that carried out the botched assault last month on the Gaza-bound aid flotilla, have been ordered to close their Facebook accounts, according to the Jerusalem Post.

China's military also has issued regulations limiting cell phone and Internet use to prevent disclosures of military data.

Absent a straightforward ban, Mr. Strassmann said, the only solution would be to try to monitor social Internet traffic on defense computer systems, using forensic software tools and highly trained intelligence officers.

"You can trust people, yes; but you must verify also," he said.

Network control centers - essentially hubs where computer traffic can be tracked and analyzed - already existed on Defense Department networks, he said, "but do not have the mission" to mine data from social-networking traffic looking for security breaches.

© Copyright 2010 The Washington Times, LLC.

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Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones

$26 Software Is Used to Breach Key Weapons in Iraq; Iranian Backing Suspected

WASHINGTON -- Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights. Still, the intercepts could give America's enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under U.S. surveillance. The drone intercepts mark the emergence of a shadow cyber war within the U.S.-led conflicts overseas. They also point to a potentially serious vulnerability in Washington's growing network of unmanned drones, which have become the American weapon of choice in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The stolen video feeds also indicate that U.S. adversaries continue to find simple ways of counteracting sophisticated American military technologies.

U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered the problem late last year when they apprehended a Shiite militant whose laptop contained files of intercepted drone video feeds. In July, the U.S. military found pirated drone video feeds on other militant laptops, leading some officials to conclude that militant groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds.

Intelligence reporter Siobhan Gorman discusses how hackers were able to gain access to U.S. military drones, and what type of information insurgents accessed.

In the summer 2009 incident, the military found "days and days and hours and hours of proof" that the feeds were being intercepted and shared with multiple extremist groups, the person said. "It is part of their kit now."

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