From Bleeping Computer: Another Data Hack. . .and So Much More (including CIA Torture)

There are three-stories-in-one-report (1) the main headline, (2) the hacker identifies himself, and (3) the back-story ...Let's dissect all the pieces and put them in context

Here's the main headline:

T-Mobile CEO: Hacker brute-forced his way through our network

By Sergiu Gatlan

August 27, 2021 12:51 PM

Reference Link: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/t-mobile-ceo-hacker-brute-forced-his-way-through-our-network/

Insert

"Today, T-Mobile's CEO Mike Sievert said that the hacker behind the carrier's latest massive data breach brute forced his way through T-Mobile's network after gaining access to testing environments.

The attacker could not exfiltrate customer financial information, credit card information, debit or other payment information during the incident.

However, T-Mobile says that he stole records belonging to 54.6 million current, former, or prospective customers, containing Social Security numbers, phone numbers, names, addresses, dates of birth, T-Mobile prepaid PINs, and driver license/ID information.

"No ongoing risk to customer data"

"While we are actively coordinating with law enforcement on a criminal investigation, we are unable to disclose too many details," Sievert said in a  statement published earlier today.

"What we can share is that, in simplest terms, the bad actor leveraged their knowledge of technical systems, along with specialized tools and capabilities, to gain access to our testing environments and then used brute force attacks and other methods to make their way into other IT servers that included customer data."

Sievert added that, following an investigation supported by Mandiant security experts, the company closed the access points used by the hacker to breach T-Mobile's network.

"We are confident that there is no ongoing risk to customer data from this breach," the US mobile carrier's CEO added.

"There is much work to do, and this will take time, and we remain committed to doing our best to ensure those who had information exposed feel informed, supported, and protected by T-Mobile."

BACKGROUND This is the sixth major data breach T-Mobile publicly acknowledged in the past four years:

• In 2018, info belonging to millions of T-Mobile customers was accessed by hackers.
• In 2019, T-Mobile exposed prepaid customers' data.
• In March 2020, hackers gained access to T-Mobile employees' email accounts.
• In December 2020, hackers accessed exposed customer proprietary network information (phone numbers, call records).
• In February 2021, threat actors targeted up to 400 customers in SIM swap attacks after gaining access to an internal T-Mobile application.

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The hacker's identity:

Hacker makes fun of T-Mobile's 'awful' security

John Erin Binns, a 21-year-old American now living in Turkey, claims to be the one behind this massive breach according to a Wall Street Journal report from Thursday.

After hacking into their Washington state data center, he purportedly gained access to credentials for more than 100 servers on T-Mobile's network.

According to Binns' claims, the initial attack vector used to breach the T-Mobile network was an Internet-exposed and unprotected router.

"Their security is awful," the alleged attacker said. "I was panicking because I had access to something big."

In his Telegram chat with the WSJ, Binns avoided confirming if he was paid to hack into T-Mobile's systems or if he sold any of the stolen data to others.

As BleepingComputer reported almost two weeks ago, a threat actor was selling what he claimed to be a database containing the personal info of roughly 100 million T-Mobile customers on a hacking forum.

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Here's the back-story:

He also said the attack's goal was to "retaliate against the US for the kidnapping and torture of John Erin Binns (CIA Raven-1) in Germany by CIA and Turkish intelligence agents in 2019."

Binns sued the FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice in 2020 for being tortured and harassed. He is trying to force the USA to release documents exposing these activities under the Freedom of Information Act.

When asked to confirm Binns' claims, a T-Mobile spokesperson told BleepingComputer that the company has "nothing to say" outside of what was already publicly shared. . .

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How to protect your data and your T-Mobile account

Any threat actors who got their hands on the information of T-Mobile customers stolen in this incident can use it in highly dangerous SIM swapping attacks that could allow them to take over victims' online accounts and steal their identity.

All potentially affected customers should be on the lookout for suspicious emails or text messages pretending to come from T-Mobile and not click on any embedded links if they spot one to prevent having their credentials stolen.

T-Mobile encourages customers to take the following actions as soon as possible to protect their accounts:

• Set up Scam Shield: Tap into our network’s advanced scam-blocking protection and turn on anti-scam features such as Scam Block and Caller ID.

• Enable Account Takeover Protection: Use our free Account Takeover Protection service to help protect against an unauthorized user fraudulently porting out and stealing your phone number (postpaid only).

• Check additional resources for more ways to protect yourself.

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Update: Added T-Mobile's statement on Binns' claims that he was the one behind the attack.

Related Articles:

T-Mobile says hackers stole records belonging to 48.6 million individuals

T-Mobile confirms servers were hacked, investigates data breach

T-Mobile data breach just got worse — now at 54 million customers

US Census Bureau hacked in January 2020 using Citrix exploit

We Know Now (It was Hush-Hush Before): COVID Surge Causes Problems with Liquid Oxygen for SpaceX and Water Utilities

Add water problems to the growing list of consequences of a pandemic

It's true what we don't know, we don't know. . .

 

This startling report appeared in The Verge yesterday afternoon

COVID surge causes liquid oxygen problems for SpaceX, water utilities

As pandemic surges, hospitals are in dire need of oxygen

By Mary Beth Griggs Aug 27, 2021, 2:22pm EDT

The Verge

 Demand for oxygen to treat COVID-19 patients is spiking during the latest pandemic surge, leaving liquid oxygen in short supply for other uses, including water purification and rocket launches. As supplies get redirected to hospitals, other industries are scrambling to figure out alternatives. . .

Now, hospitals are so flooded with COVID-19 patients that the increasing demand is causing problems outside the medical industry.

> Rocket companies like SpaceX often use liquid oxygen as a propellant. During a launch, it reacts with fuel (think: rocket-grade kerosene), sending a spacecraft soaring. If the shortage continues, it could possibly delay launches — but that hasn’t happened yet. “This is a risk, but not yet a limiting factor,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on Twitter.

> The shortage is also putting indirect pressure on other parts of the space industry. A gas supplier for the United Launch Alliance is now focused on addressing the dire oxygen situation in Florida, a move that could change plans for a satellite launch next month, SpaceNews reported.

 

> Meanwhile, in Florida, some residents have been seeing — and in some cases, smelling — evidence of the liquid oxygen shortfall in their water supplies. Water utilities use liquid oxygen to create ozone. When ozone is used to treat water, it can destroy harmful bacteria and viruses, and break down compounds that can make water taste or smell funky. Chlorine and other chemicals can serve the same function, but oxygen has fewer byproducts.

> In Orlando, shortages have led the local utility to ask residents to stop watering their lawns and conserve water in an effort to extend the supply of liquid oxygen. . .

> Over in Tampa Bay, the water utility started using bleach instead of oxygen to treat its water.

THE WATER UTILITY STARTED USING BLEACH INSTEAD OF OXYGEN TO TREAT IT WATER

The utility usually uses oxygen to remove hydrogen sulfide, a gas that smells like rotten eggs, from its water. In switching to bleach, the utility warned that “consumers who are sensitive to taste and odor changes in drinking water might notice a slight change during this period” even though the quality and safety will remain unchanged. . .

> Florida has the highest COVID-19 hospitalization rate in the country, according to CNN. In Tampa in particular, an emergency room was so crowded with COVID patients that there was a 12-hour wait.

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Another News Flash

Photograph: Getty Images

Why Florida’s Covid Surge Is Screwing With the Water Supply (Hint: Oxygen)

More people in the hospital means more people need oxygen. But treatment plants also need the gas to purify water.

Wired

 

"On Wednesday, the Tampa Bay water utility announced a rather bizarre side effect of Florida’s out-of-control Covid surge: It wasn’t getting enough deliveries of liquid oxygen to treat its water. More than 17,000 Covid patients—who require supplemental oxygen to stay alive—are now hospitalized across the state, and there isn’t enough oxygen to go around. 

Even with vaccines widely available, the pandemic is worse than it’s ever been in Florida. The state is averaging over 20,000 cases and over 200 deaths a day, putting an incredible strain on its hospital system. Just over half of Florida’s total population is fully vaccinated.

“What we know is that the lack of liquid oxygen is due to a driver shortage and the need for available supplies to be diverted to local hospitals due to the Covid-19 pandemic,” says Brandon Moore, spokesperson for Tampa Bay Water. (Requests for comment sent to Matheson Tri-Gas, their oxygen supplier, were not immediately returned.) This comes a week after Orlando’s mayor asked residents to limit water use for the same reason.

But why do you need even more oxygen in your H₂O? Tampa Bay Water trucks in liquid oxygen, which it converts to gas, and then adds a spark of electricity to convert it to ozone. This is used in two separate facilities for two separate purposes, says Moore: At a surface-water treatment plant, the ozone kills nasties like bacteria and viruses, and at a different plant it breaks down hydrogen sulfide, a naturally occurring gas that smells like rotten eggs. 

The utility needs a whole lot of liquid oxygen—seven to nine tanker truckloads of it a week, between the two facilities—both to disinfect water and ensure that it doesn’t come out of taps smelling like holy hell. “Liquid oxygen converted to ozone is one of the most powerful—if not the most powerful—disinfectant in the water industry,” says Moore.

Tampa Bay Water’s liquid oxygen supply has been reduced by about half, Moore says. So they’re diverting the oxygen they’ve got to the treatment plant to sufficiently disinfect the water, since they can’t alter that process. They can, however, substitute sodium hypochlorite, also known as bleach, for ozone at the plant that gets rid of the hydrogen sulfide. But given the crunch, the utility is asking customers to cut back on water use, like watering lawns and washing cars. “In this scenario, the less water needed for demand means less water to treat,” says Moore. But, he adds, “it's very important that residents know that the quality of the drinking water remains safe.” 

At the same time, it’s very important that Covid patients get the supplemental oxygen they need. Covid-19 brutalizes the lungs, interfering with the transfer of oxygen from the air into the bloodstream, which is needed to keep the heart, brain, and other vital organs working properly. The target oxygen saturation for the blood is above 92 percent—get below 90 percent and you start feeling shortness of breath. (At the hospital, they measure this by slipping a device called a pulse oximeter over a patient’s finger, which fires beams of light to noninvasively measure the oxygen in their blood.) Once saturation drops below 90 percent, doctors should put a Covid-19 patient on supplemental oxygen, advises the Centers for Disease Control."

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RELATED CONTENT ARIZONA

13 Hours ago

Tracking Coronavirus in Arizona:

Latest Map and Case Count

nytimes.com 

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PUBLIC HEARING: City of Mesa Planning & Zoning Board Meeting - 8/25/2021

The screen-grab you see is Rod Jarvis making the presentation for Item 3-a, details are inserted below for your reference and information below.

Interesting to note that two members of the city's Planning & Zoning Board are not present: Chair Jessica Sarkissian and the newest appointed member Peterson. District 2 re-appointed member of the PZ Board Shelly Allen broadcasts via Zoom from what looks like her home kitchen in a face close-up. Presiding over this public hearing - with four members present in The Upper Chambers is Deanna Saucedo-Villanueva. For good reasons there are a number of persons present who mostly express opposition to an industrial development in close proximity to more than 1500 homes and residences. Most opposition arises from property owners in Lehi Crossing. This public hearing is about an hour long.

INSERT FOR ITEM 3-a that is also a companion case for Item 5-a

File #:

PZ 21098

Type:

PZ Zoning - Action

Status:

Agenda Ready

In control:

Planning and Zoning Board - Public Hearing

On agenda:

8/25/2021

Title:

ZON20-00800 District 1. Within the 3300 through 3500 blocks of East Thomas Road (north side) and within the 3600 block of North Val Vista Drive (west side). On the northwest corner of Thomas Road and Val Vista Drive (13.1± acres). Site Plan Review. This request will allow for an industrial development. Jeff McCall, McCall and Associates, Inc., applicant; Thomas Val Vista, LLC, owner.  (Companion case to Preliminary Plat, “202 and Val Vista”, associated with item *5-a). Planner: Evan Balmer Staff Recommendation:  Approval with conditions

Attachments:

1. Vicinity Map, 2. Staff Report, 3. Site Plan, 4. Grading and Drainage, 5. Landscape Plan, 6. Elevations, 7. Narrative, 8. Citizen Participation Plan, 9. Citizen Participation Report, 10. Presentation

 

 

Drone Report #2: Police Reporting Tactics After The Damage is Done When They Could No Longer Deny It

Here's one incident of an air-collision - in off-limit airport space in Toronto - that is part of a bigger story:

> This may sound like an open and transparent response by the York police about its irresponsible drone piloting, but this admission about the incident at the Toronto airport was prompted by the Canadian government's report on the incident, which was released eight days after the accident.

> If this had been a "civilian" drone, the public would have been informed immediately and regularly updated with progress on catching the perp. But this was a cop flight, so the cops acknowledged the flight when they could no longer deny it, and only because they were now the subject of an investigation by another government body.

> The report also points out NavCanada, which oversees the country's civil air navigation system, was not made aware of the drone flight nor the York Police's interest in sending a drone up into the airport's airspace to engage in an investigation.

> It is indeed illegal to fly a drone within three nautical miles of an airport. This ban on operation can only be temporarily lifted with the explicit permission of NavCanada. Obviously this didn't happen. . .

> Supposedly, everyone is just waiting for the TSB to conclude its investigation. And then there will be more waiting while the York Police engages in its own investigation. Possibly in the next few weeks or months, the news will have cycled often enough someone can fire off a press release late in the afternoon just ahead of the next convenient bank holiday.

Canadian Cops Blow Off Drone Operation Laws, Crash Their Drone Into A Landing Airplane

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the laws-must-be-for-other-people-eh dept

Fri, Aug 27th 2021 7:39pm — Tim Cushing

 

SPOILER ALERT:

Maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised.

Maybe someone will get rung up for being completely irresponsible on top of actually violating federal laws.

But I doubt it.

When a citizen does it, nothing can get the police to shut up about it.

But when the police do it, no member of the public can get them can get them to start talking, much less treat their own internal law-breaking as seriously as they treat law-breaking by outsiders.

Filed Under: airplanes, canada, drones, police, surveillance, york regional police

 

RT Report: "Killing For The Sake of Killing" in Afghanistan

‘Killing for the sake of killing’: Disillusioned US drone pilots leak footage of air strikes against unarmed Afghans, media says    

RT International | 02:26 GMT, Aug 28, 2021

25 Aug, 2021 13:54 / Updated 2 days ago

 

American drone pilots have leaked video of “punitive” and “nihilistic” strikes in Afghanistan in 2019 that led to the killing of civilians, including at least one child, as the US looked for an exit strategy in the two-decade war.

The footage, published on Tuesday as part of an investigation by military news outlet Connecting Vets, reportedly reveals how successive US administrations and defense strategists relaxed the rules of engagement in Afghanistan – as part of a policy to pressure the Taliban to the negotiating table.

However, drone operators interviewed by the outlet claimed the loosened rules around air strikes served “no point” and did not “make a difference” – with one pilot stating that it was “killing for the sake of killing.” The strikes also reportedly killed far more civilians than the Pentagon has admitted.

An unidentified pilot, who worked with the Marines as part of ‘Task Force South West’ in the country’s Helmand province in 2019, said he had been traumatized by one mistaken killing and shared a journal account of the incident with the site.

My productivity today was derailed. We killed two innocent men and a charger [military slang for a child]. They were on a motorcycle and by dumb luck drove into the same intersection as our target as the hellfire [missile] struck.

The operator said the target was an Afghan man on a bike who had been using a two-way radio – which were commonly used in Helmand after cellular towers were downed.

However, the target “rode right through the blast and kept going,” the pilot wrote, adding that he “watched a passerby load the bodies into a truck and drive them to a hospital. They are all dead.”

The account was corroborated by a military official involved in the operation who spoke to the site on condition of anonymity. While the Afghan on the radio – whose name or connection to the Taliban was never discovered – drove off through the smoke like a “Bond villain,” the official said the “two adults and a toddler on the other motorcycle ... were killed right off.”

Drone operators told the site about being disillusioned with the task force, whose Marines had apparently already given up on Helmand. By 2019, the province was largely under the control of the Taliban, with “virtually no American ground patrols ... and not many Afghan military ones”.

One of the drone pilots told me they would fly into new grid squares each day and watch from above, "waiting for them to fuck up," so they could drop a hellfire missile on someone.

— Jack Murphy (@JackMurphyRGR) August 24, 2021

According to the outlet, the military had “transitioned from intelligence-driven targeting to using a target engagement criteria” such as holding a rifle, but the threshold for coming under suspicion could be easily crossed by unarmed adult men.

Last year, the DoD released air power summaries for Afghanistan that showed a six-fold increase from less than a thousand strikes in 2015 to 7,423 strikes in 2019.

According to a 2017 report by the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, Barack Obama “vastly [expanded] and [normalized] the use of armed drones for counterterrorism” to the tune of 542 strikes, killing roughly 3,797 people in various countries.

Under Donald Trump, authorization for drone strikes was delegated to field commanders as part of a National Security Council strategy to get the Taliban to agree on an exit strategy for US forces."

SpaceX’s Mechazilla Is More Mind Blowing Than You Think!

NASA's Next Search for Life Is in Extraterrestrial Oceans