And Another Thing: Chase Was Hit Before July 4th Too…

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell Ph.D.
July 14, 2017

Yesterday, I blogged about the silver “flash crash” of July 7, and earlier this week, about the NASDAQ flash crash, but, just in case you might have thought these were nothing but accidental “glitches” from the “coincidence” side of the glitch family, rather from the esteemed branch of the family of deliberately planned glitches, it looks as if things might be leaning definitely to the “deliberate action” side of the equation, according to this article shared, once again, by Mr. G.B.:

Nationwide outage hits Chase bank customers before 4th of July

Chase’s system went down coast to coast, but what’s very intriguing here is the suggestion that Chase might have been dealing with its own glitches, which it was calling “improvements”:

A message on the Chase website explained to customers that the outages were due to the bank “making a few improvements”according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The bank said customers would not be able to access their information or schedule bill payments or transfers.

However, customers reported that entire branches had been shut down Monday, while others complained they were unable to pay their rent and bills, withdraw money from ATM’s, or even access their information over the phone or in person.

Now, as you might have guessed, I have all sorts of wild and crazy high octane speculations running through my head reading this, not the least of which is the thought that “two is coincidence, three is a conspiracy.” On my view that these types of events are the results of some systematic probing of financial cyber-architecture vulnerabilities, then targeting the NASDAQ, a commodities market, and Chase Manhattan, a large international bank, makes a lot of sense.

But that’s not the only thing running through my head, so let’s speculate on the very end of the twig, where the weight of speculation far exceeds the amount of evidence to prop it up.

Let’s posit a hypothetical bank, say, Deutsche-Manhattan-Cheese Banco dei Flaschi di Cesspool, and let’s say that, just before the beginning of August, when the entire country of France goes on vacation holiday, Deutsche-Manhattan-Cheese Banco dei Flaschi di Cesspool announces in the Toulouse Daily Whistle, that it is going to shut down its systems to make improvements just before the next holiday, stranding thousands of Frenchmen at their ATMs and keeping Paris unusually populated for the month of August. That’s quite an improvement, for during this period of being “down,” one might – just as a kind of hypothetical high octane speculation – be able to access the funds that its depositors could not access, and via a variety of cutouts, fronts, and so on, be able to place gobs of trades, make huge amounts of money, keep it all off the books (remember, the system is down – just before the holidays – to make “improvements”), trigger various flash crashes in various markets, and perhaps even target specific equities to be re-evaluated because of the reset when the circuit breakers kick in and halt all the trading.

But of course, nothing like that could ever happen, because we all know that big international mega-banks like Deutsche-Manhattan-Cheese Banco dei Flaschi di Cesspool are cleaner than a Wall Street toilet.

And thank goodness too, because I was beginning to lose my faith in crony finance crapitalism.

See you on the slip side…

Read More At: GizaDeathStar.com
________________________________________________

About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.

Deutsche Well: Cyber Attacks On Russian Financial Institutions…

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell
December 8, 2016

While everything else has been going on, it seems that Russian financial institutions were again under cyber-attack according to this story that appeared in the English-language service of Deutsche Welle (carried also on AP and Reuters), in this story shared by Mr. M.M.:

Russia repels cyber attack on financial systems: FSB

This comes after a TASS story by Yuri Smityuk that appeared on Dec. 2:

Russian banks expect a powerful cyber attack and prepared to repel them

What caught my attention, however, was the Deutsche Welle story, and these items:

Russia’s security agency thwarted a cyber attack aimed at destabilizing the country’s financial system, according to the agency’s statement Friday.

The Federal Security Service (FSB), said unnamed attackers planned to flood Russian social networks with comments and send mass text messages with false comments warning of the imminent collapse of major banks and financial systems in the country.

The FSB received information on “plans by foreign secret services to carry out large-scale cyberattacks from December 5,” it said in a statement.

It said the attacks would originate from computer servers in the Netherlands owned by Ukrainian company BlazingFast, based in Kiev.
(Emphasis added)

Then, later in the story, we find this piece of confusing information:

Two people in Ukraine, believed to be in control of the 900,000 hacked devices that formed the massive “AVALANCHE” botnet, were arrested as part of a series of police raids in 10 countries, German authorities announced on Thursday. German leaders hinted at Russian involvement.

The leader is left with the lingering impression that the Ukrainian attack mentioned in the fourth paragraph of the article is the same network that had two of its leaders arrested in the 10-country international raid, which Germany is maintaining had Russian involvement, leading to the possibility that Russia staged an attack on itself, and blamed it on hackers in Kiev, The Ukraine.

In today’s world, anything is possible of course.

However, in this case, I don’t think that scenario is at all plausible. There’s another high octane scenario that I think lurks in between the lines of those first four paragraphs. For the sake of argument, let’s accept the FSB’s (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopaznosti Rossiyskoi Federatsii, Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) explanation here at face value, namely, that the attacks originated in the Ukrainian company BlazingFast, through servers in the Netherlands. For the Ukraine to launch a cyber-attack on Russian banks and its banking system – even through a corporate cats paw, on its own is absurd. It would only fuel the tensions between the Ukraine and Russia, and hand Mr. Putin yet another talking point on the whole western-instigated mess there. Meanwhile, Germany was strongly hinting that Russia was behind the attacks:

Continue Reading At: GizaDeathStar.com
_____________________________________________________________

About Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.

 

Russia Launched Anti-Hacking Center One Day Prior To US Elections

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell
November  15, 2016

Over the past couple of days I’ve been blogging about some very strange goings-on that were taking place during the run-up to the American elections, and immediately thereafter. This has included strange trips of US Secretary of State John “Ketchup” Kerry, cyber-attacks on Russian banks that occurred just as polls were opening in the USA, and an all-too-convenient explosion of a Russian powerplant at the Arctic city of Murmansk, with a population of over 300,000, and in a key region of Russia’s defensive system for its naval forces, including the all-important naval and submarine base at nearby Polyarny. In my high octane speculations about these events, I suggested that they were not coincidental, but perhaps either cyber-attacks being staged either to aid Mrs. Clinton, to warn off the Russians, or to prepare a softening up of Russia in conjunction with current NATO deployments against that country in anticipation of a Clinton victory. Howsoever one parsed the motivations and players behind these events, however, I argued that they pointed to coordination and deliberate attack.

There was another story that appeared during the election hoopla and broohaha that tends to confirm these views, and it appeared on Russia’s RT news site, and was shared by Ms. S.:

Russia launches dedicated anti-hacking center for defense industry

The timing here is significant in my opinion, for this story appeared on Nov 7 on RT’s site, one day before the US elections. Obviously, launching such a center means that this center was in the planning and development stage for some time, and the Kaspersky announcement of cyber attacks a few days later seems to indicate that the center was up and running, coordinating with the world-famous Russian cyber-security firm, in defeating those attacks.

In my high octane speculation of the day, however, the timing of the announcement suggests that the Russians might have been sending a message to the West, namely, that they were expecting something to happen, given all the hysteria in the USA about potential Russian attempts to manipulate the computerized voting machines and attempt to swing the election for Mr. Trump. Personally, I was always quite suspicious of these stories, for Russia’s own polling probably showed them what the internal polling for Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton were showing them, namely, that she was going to lose, making any such Russian effort not only superfluous, but risky. This was never a real possibility, though we now hear Frau Merkel echoing the Clinton campaign on this score in Germany. The massive amount of voter and election fraud being reported in the USA prior to and during election day suggests that this was mostly coming from inside the USA, and largely from Mrs. Clinton’s covert supporters, rather than from Russia.

If the Russians were sending messages, then I suspect that this adds a bit of strength to the argument I’ve been advancing in the past couple of days, namely, that the Murmansk explosion and the cyber attacks on major Russian banks were part of one operation, a kind of “double whammy,” attacking a sensitive military area’s infrastructure while simultaneously attacking their banking system. If one had limited countermeasure resources, which…

Continue Reading At: GizaDeathStar.com
______________________________________________________________

About Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.

And In Russia, Power Stations Were Blowing Up & Banks Experienced…

Source:GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell
November 14, 2016

Yesterday I blogged about the strange visit of US Secretary of State John “Ketchup” Kerry to the continent of Antarctica while on a global-trotting diplomatic tour, and right in the middle of what may have been the most important election in US history. All this context, I argued yesterday, may point to a hidden “diplomatic purpose” to his visit there, rather than the “climate change” non-explanation hinted at in the official US State Department announcement. After all, Secretary Kerry can state in Washington at foggy bottom and read the Antarctic climate change data. He doesn’t need to fly there, especially in the middle of an otherwise exclusively diplomatic tour.

But there were other very strange stories going on during the election run-up as well. On the day of the election itself, if the following story shared by Mr. S.D. is to be believed, apparently a power station near the northern Arctic city of Murmansk, and a key area of Russian naval deployments (the large Arctic submarine and naval base of Polyarny is nearby), exploded, a man in the Russian consulate was found dead, and helicopters were landing in a Moscow suburb with a heavy police deployment there:

Massive energy blackout in Murmansk, Russia after reported blast at power station (VIDEOS)

One website, The Daily Coin, notes in its article (“What the Hell Just Happened in Russia: Powerstation Explosion in Naval Base Region – Helicopters landing on Moscow Streets – Dead Man Found at Russian Consulate in New York”), that the occurrence of this during the American election, taking place on the same day, might have been triggered by a virus like Stuxnet, and implies and speculates that with the accusations prior to the election that the Russians might try to “hack” them, that perhaps all this was a little “too coincidental” and might have been a ploy of some sort to initiate a crisis and influence the American elections. If so, it apparently backfired, as to my knowledge, no major coverage was given to the story, and the Russians were not responding with threats and recriminations, though, as the RT article points out, a special commission has been appointed to study the event. That implies, of course, that they might have their suspicions. After all, it’s not every day that Russian power plants explode, particularly in militarily sensitive regions to that country, and particularly on the very day of an historically important American election.

But wait, there’s more. Two days later, according to this article shared by Mr. V.T., the Russian cyber-security firm Kaspersky, stated that five Russian banks had apparently been the targets of some sort of cyber-attack, as reported by Yahoo; here’s their story:

Massive cyberattack hit five top Russian banks: Kaspersky

Now, you’ll have noticed something about those attacks, but in case you didn’t, here’s the relevant passage:

Moscow (AFP) – A massive cyberattack has hit at least five of Russia’s largest banks, Moscow-based internet security giant Kaspersky said Thursday.

The country’s largest lender, state-controlled Sberbank, said it had been hacked into on Tuesday but managed to neutralise the attack automatically without disturbing its operations.

Kaspersky said in a statement that the distribution of denial attacks (DDoS) began Tuesday at 1300 GMT and targeted “the websites of at least five well-known financial institutions in the top 10” in Russia.

The attacks were still continuing on Thursday. Most lasted around one hour but the longest lasted almost 12 hours, Kaspersky said.

DDoS attacks involve flooding websites with more traffic than they can handle, making them difficult to access or taking them offline entirely.

These attacks saw as many as 660,000 requests being sent per second using a network of more than 24,000 hijacked devices located in 30 countries. More than half the devices were in the United States, India, Taiwan and Israel, Kaspersky said. (Emphasis added)

Note that these attacks (1) began at 1300 hours Greenwich meantime, that is to say, at 1PM London-time, which would have made it 8AM, US eastern time, in other words, as polls had just begun to open in the Eastern and Central time zones of the USA, and that (2) these attacks came from addresses in the USA, India, Taiwan (a close ally of the USA, and the seat of, well, let’s just say, certain NGO [non-governmental organizations] like the former World Anti-Communist League, with its close ties to the American intelligence apparatus, and, incidentally, to post-war Nazis), and Israel. (Another note on the Taiwan: recall that during the Watergate crisis, it was discovered that CREEP, The Committee to Re-Elect the President, was still receiving money and contributions, much of it being laundered through Taiwan, long after Mr. Nixon’s landside victory over Senator George McGovern in 1972. The World Anti-Communist League didn’t cease to exist, but simply re-branded itself. For its associations to Nazis, see Martin A. Lee’s The Beast Reawakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s Spymasters to Today’s Neo-Nazi Groups and Right Wing Extremists, pp. 189, 226n).

The clear implication of Kaspersky’s statements was that the USA was taking no chances about Russian cyber-operations during the American election, and in the context of the power plant explosion in Murmansk, the possibility that the latter might have been such an attack increases, in my opinion.

But that’s not my high octane speculation. Prior to the election, most of the claims that the Russians might attempt a cyber-operation in the American election was coming from people in and around the Clinton campaign. Also circulating in the American media, mostly among the independent free press rather than from the corporate globalist lamestream media, were reports of “counter-coups” being led against the Clinton campaign by ad hoc elements of the American deep state, in support of Mr. Trump(see the various allegations and statements made by Dr. Steve Pieczenik). Most readers here are aware that I’ve always taken the position that Mr. Trump’s campaign represented precisely some faction within the American deep state that was not on board with the neocon agenda of the past three Administrations, i.e., of Mr. Clinton, Mr. G.W. Bush, and of Mr. Obama. The curious absence of mention of these stories among the corporate globalist media, especially on election day, when it would seem to have benefitted Mrs. Clinton, if indeed, the left’s assertions of Russian meddling were true, is noteworthy. If anything, Mrs. Clinton’s approval of the sale of uranium to Russia would seem to belie her vicious anti-Russian rhetoric during her campaign. So might one be looking rather at an operation that was designed more…

Continue Reading At: GizaDeathStar.com
_______________________________________________________________

About Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.

 

First The DNC, Then Darth Soros, Now It’s The…

Source:GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell
August 21, 2016

OK… I admit it: all the recent hacks are just downright bizarre. First the Democrookery National Committee was hacked and its emails released, revealing a clear case of the DNC bending its own always-malleable “rules” to make sure Senator Sanders came nowhere near the nomination. Of  course, if he did come too close to the needed delegates (and it appears he did), then the will of the people in the so-called party of  the people can always be overturned by the Presidium’s “super-delegates”. The problem here is that the hack claims to have been done by a private group of cyber-vigilantes upset with the way things were being handled in the DNC in D.C. (that stands for District of Corruption, for all our foreign readership. And I know all the letters are probably confusing. The recitation of random letters and anagrams as if they are meaningful and decent English is an American thing, so bear with me). Then, of course, we had the hack of Darth Soros, revealing a what roiling pustules of activities the Sith Lord has been up to recently, from the Ukraine, to European refugees, and support for his young apprentice, Darthillary. (Seriously, one can almost imagine him waving his fingers and shooting bolts of blue lightning, or at the minimum, saying “These are not the emails you’re looking for.”)

Well, now you can add the Reichsicherheithauptamt… I mean, the National Security Agency(NSA), to the list of hacked groups, in these articles shared by Mr. S.D., T.M., V.T., and others:

The NSA cyber-weapon auction is a total smokescreen — here’s what’s really going on

Here’s why the supposed NSA ‘hack’ is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before

And lest we forget the bit about Darth Soros, here’s that story:

Thousands of Soros docs released by alleged Russian-backed hackers

Now, before we get to today’s HOS (high octane speculation), let’s pause and consider WWH (What We Have):

1. Who has been hacked? The DNC, Darth Soros, and now, the NSA.
2. Who hacked them? Well, a strange assortment of “private groups”, with the latest hack of the NSA claimed to have been done by a group calling itself “the Brokers’ Group”, after technicians for the Russian cyber-security firm Kaspersky supposedly uncovered the NSA’s front group, which was called the “Equation Group.”  (See this Zero Hedge article: MYSTERIOUS GROUP HACKS NSA)
3. WDTW? Well, it appears TW either to influence the American election, or in the last instance, just plain ole money, in the form of Bitcoin, for their efforts.

Now, all of this brings us to our HOS of the day. Suppose, for a moment, the Russians are behind all of this, which is indeed the CO(considered opinion) of the first two linked articles:

But experts say that this is all a smokescreen for a not-so-subtle message from Moscow to Washington: Don’t mess with us.

“It’s a smokescreen, there’s nothing real about this,” John Schindler, a former NSA analyst and counterintelligence officer, told Business Insider. “This is Moscow’s way of upping the ante in the spy war, and sending a message no one can miss [which is] ‘we have you penetrated, we’ve got you by the balls, don’t push us.'”

He added: “The Russians are making a power play because they think they can right now.”

The previously-unknown Shadow Brokers created a number of social-media accounts earlier this month on Reddit, Github, Twitter, and Imgur, before announcing on August 13 its “cyber weapon auction,” which promised bidders a “full state sponsor tool set” from a hacking unit believed to be within the NSA known only as “The Equation Group.”

It released a 234-megabyte archive on various file-sharing sites with one-half being free to view and use — which numerous experts say is legitimate — while the other half was encrypted. The winner of the auction, the group said, would get the decryption key.

But an auction for hacking tools and exploits is not something that ever happens, experts say. Instead, exploits are bought and sold on the black market for hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars, in private.

There’s something else going on here, and it seems like it has nothing to do with a hacking group looking for cash.

And even Edward Snowden has joined the “Russians are Behind it” chorus:

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden offered his opinion on the underlying message behind the “auction” in a series of tweets on Tuesday, notably pointing the finger at Russia as being behind it.

Now at one level, all this makes a great deal of sense, for after the DNC hack, party commissars were quick to point the finger of blame at Russia. That too makes sense, since the Russians know a Darthillary presidency might be more of the same neocon unipolarism we’ve seen since 9/11, on steroids. But, weighing in against this view is the fact that Darthillary expedited the shipment of refined uranium… to Russia. (And that raises questions of its own, for Russia is perfectly capable of refining uranium on its own. So was Russia acting as a middleman for someone else? Or just in a hurry to build more bombs for the inevitable showdown with the very person and her backers who expedited the sale?)  My point here, is that the “Russians did it” chorus on the DNC hack is standing on shaky bleachers.

A Russian hack of Darth Soros makes eminent sense, and even more sense, than on the DNC. Soros’ role, especially since his emails were released, in the Ukrainian mess, is well-known, as is Russia’s outlawing of NGO groups (such as Soros’). From the Russian point of view, such groups are nothing but gangs, racketeering operations, and front groups for “revolutionary” activities enjoying the protection of western law, governments, and powerful patronage. In this context, a Russian hack of the NSA to send messages also makes sense.

But what if(here’s our HOS) the meme of private groups being behind this is true after all?  What would this mean? What would the implications be? It would first mean nothing less than that someone is spending time and money to…

Continue Reading At: GizaDeathStar.com
_________________________________________________________________

Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.

Central Banks Hacked, But What Aren’t They Saying?

Source: GizaDeathStar.com
Dr. Joseph P. Farrell
May 21, 2016

Many readers sent various versions of the first article here, which formes the backdrop for the second article, and today’s high octane speculations. Please note: last Thursday’s News and Views was cancelled because I was unable to obtain assistance with the new upgrades we’re making, so today’s blog is essentially what I recorded, but was unable to upload, to You Tube.

So what’s today’s  blog (and last Thursday’s News and Views) about?  Well, someone is hacking central banks, in particular, the New York Federal Reserve:

http://www.cutimes.com/2016/05/16/hackers-steal-81-million-from-new-york-fed?ref=rss&slreturn=1463676653&page=2

Now note the last paragraph of this article:

“The attackers clearly exhibit a deep and sophisticated knowledge of specific operational controls within the targeted banks, knowledge that may have been gained from malicious insiders or cyberattacks, or a combination of both,” Morey Haber, vice president of technology at the Phoenix-based BeyondTrust, said. “The hackers allegedly learned from internal resources what systems need to be attacked, whom to contact, and what vulnerabilities should be leveraged. The art of the hack then became a simple exploit to exercise due to the insider threat.”

So what do we have? In this article we have (1) “hackers” have hacked the NY Federal Reserve, with no mention of who the suspects might be, and (2) the statement is made that “knowledge… may have been gained from malicious insiders or cyber attacks, or a combination of both.”

Continue Reading At: GizaDeathStar.com

—————————————————————————-

Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.