Comment: Large-scale successful attacks are the stock-in-trade of the Pentagon's new CYBERCOM cyber-warfare division:

Doing its part for the empire: Google threatens to pull out of China 'over censorship'

Comment: The idea that Google has donned the role of knights in shining armour and suddenly developed concern for "human rights" is risible given its unctious predatory market behaviour this past decade. Many governments, especially the US government, routinely monitor ALL emails with the help of its obedient assistants at Google. So what is really going on here?

It's important to realise that we're not looking at "human rights activists" in this case, but separatist groups like the Uighur World Movement, essentially a US intelligence operation to destabilise China (as we witnessed in the summer of 2009). With its headquarters in Germany and the US, it's little wonder that the Chinese government is keeping tabs on this trojan horse.

The last time a 'massive hack' was attributed to an East Asian country, it soon emerged that the Pentagon's new cyber-warfare unit had been testing its capabilities: the third party false-flag cyber-attack that blamed North Korea was traced to servers in the UK and was likely a trial run for attacks like yesterday's on China's largest search engine.

From our July installment of Connecting the Dots:

By Way of Deception, Thou Shalt Do CyberWar

Set against a background of media hystrionics about cybercrime and claims of multimillion-fold increases in 'cyberattacks' against American government and corporate websites, Team Obama announced the introduction of a new CyberSecurity Office within the White House, complete with Cyber Czar to coordinate policy. With its emphasis on 'defensive' strategy to counter the threat posed by those cybercriminals 'out there', we naturally wonder if the timing relates to the announcement earlier this summer of the Pentagon's new CyberCommand (CYBERCOM) unit, whose definition of the concept of 'defensive strategy' is somewhat more plastic. If past activities are anything to go by, we can expect the Pentagon to preemptively launch cyberwarfare against cyberterrorists by engaging in . . . cyberterrorism.

Never wanting to feel left out of imperial projects for total world domination, the UK followed up with an announcement of its own: "this [cyber security] work was previously handled by an office related to the security services, and it will now be widened out." In other words; we are making overt what we've been doing covertly for some time because the conditions are now suitable for us to come out and tell you that we hate you and seek to watch everything you do, say, buy and think in order to control you.

Every cyberwar needs good cyberwarriors. If soldiers are hired killers, then the Pentagon's virtual warfare requires hired hackers. Profiteers in death like Raytheon are only too happy to step up to the plate and announce its recruitment drive:

"President Obama recently announced that cyber security is one of our country's most urgent national security priorities," reads the ad. "Raytheon is answering that call by hiring more cyber warriors this year to help fight the digital cyber war."

Raytheon also has positions available for something called "media sanitation specialists."

The latter probably refers to workers skilled at erasing data from hard drives and other storage.

Lest there be any doubt as to the 'defensive' nature of these new weapons of mass disruption, the military makes it quite clear that it will be 'taking the battlefield to the enemy':

The Pentagon plan calls for an offensive capacity, one that will deploy cyber weapons against imperialism's adversaries [...] designating CYBERCOM a STRATCOM branch all but guarantees an aggressive posture.

Others within the defense bureaucracy are far more enthusiastic, and forthright, when it comes to recommending that cyber armaments be fielded as offensive weapons of war. Indeed,

Armed Forces Journal featured a lengthy analysis advocating precisely that:

The world has abandoned a fortress mentality in the real world, and we need to move beyond it in cyberspace. America needs a network that can project power by building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack. (Col. Charles W. Williamson III, "Carpet Bombing in Cyberspace," Armed Forces Journal, May 2008)

Infected computers are referred to as "zombies" that can be controlled remotely from any point on the planet by "master" machines. Unwary users are often "spoofed" by hackers through counterfeit e-mails replete with embedded hyperlinks into "cooperating" with the installation of malicious code.

While criminals employ botnets to generate spam or commit fraudulent transactions, draining a savings account or running-up credit card debt through multiple purchases for example, botnets also have the capacity to launch devastating distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against inadequately defended computers or indeed, entire networks.

In other words, should an "individual theatre commander" desire to suddenly darken a city or wreck havoc on a nation's electrical infrastructure at the behest of his political masters then by all means, go right ahead!

These operations will deny, degrade, disrupt, destroy, or deceive an adversary. We will enhance our capabilities to conduct electronic systems attack, electromagnetic systems interdiction and attack, network attack, and infrastructure attack operations.

Simply put, the Pentagon intends to build an infrastructure fully-capable of committing high-tech war crimes.

And the best part about it is. . . CyberCommand will be placed in the capable hands of the NSA, that same ubiquitous behemoth super-spy agency responsible for spying on millions of American citizens during the Bush years. It becomes apparent that Obama's Cyber Czar office for cyber crimes is really political cover for the entrenchment of everything illegal the media created a false hoopla over towards the end of Bush's reign.

'Cyberterrorists' conveniently christened the new regime by hacking websites in a Denial of Service (DoS) attack we are told continued for several days. Sites affected were located in South Korea and the US, the most high-profile of which was the White House website, hit on July 4th no less. While a US government spokesman reassured us on the one hand "that these types of Internet attacks happen everyday on government networks", that government sites were unaffected and that it was premature to say whodunnit, South Korea's intelligence agency immediately fingered North Korea as the source.

As we noted at the time,

the nature of global IT systems are such that 'cyber attacks' can be made to appear to come from any source. Given the benign effects this attack produced, we think it more probable that this was an 'in-house' test of operational capabilities, especially coming so soon after the White House announcement that CYBERCOM is operational and will soon be interfering with internal affairs in a country near you.

Furthermore, framing North Korea conveniently fits its current role as useful bogeyman and deflects attention from certain other countries currently deploying cyber attacks in geo-political hotspots.

Well the Americans got one thing right when they said it was premature to identify the source of the attacks, because an investigation later found the source to be the UK:

We found a master server located in UK which controls all of the 8 C&C servers to make a series of cyber-attack last week. So the source of the attacks has been identified to be in UK. The existence of master server has never been reported before.

there have been 166,908 zombies from 74 countries around the world that have been used for the attacks.

Remember what was said above:

Infected computers are referred to as "zombies" that can be controlled remotely from any point on the planet by "master" machines. Unwary users are often "spoofed" by hackers through counterfeit e-mails replete with embedded hyperlinks into "cooperating" with the installation of malicious code.

This appears to be how this 'false-flag cyber operation' was executed.

And yesterday's cyber-attack looks like another such operation. The first red flag to note is that the hacks into the Gmail accounts of the "human rights activists" took place in December. Is it just an amazing coincidence that the day before Google Inc. should declare "cyberwar" on behalf of so-called "human rights activists" (but really on behalf of its Pentagon masters), China's Google equivalent - Baidu - is knocked off line? Not only that, but the attack is made to look like it came from Iran!

Baidu, China's Largest Search Engine, Hacked by "Iranian Cyber Army"

Accused of "censorship" and 'being anti-free speech', these two countries, China and Iran, are in fact defending their networks from the Pentagon's cyber-warfare" in the form of DDoS attacks and directed propaganda coming through sites like Google and Twitter.