excerpted:
“..In essence, the CIA created a system for embedding a messaging feature hidden in the search box of hundreds of cheaply manufactured fake websites. The word “hidden” should be used here in an extended sense – a new Reuters report provided over three hundred sites and showed that even a cursory glance at their publicly available HTML source code revealed labels such as “message”, “create” and “password” . And because the agency purchased domain names in bulk, the websites were assigned IP addresses sequentially, making it almost trivially easy to identify the entire network once a few of the agents were located...”
The left is running them. Ergo, standard results. I never thought I’d reach a time when there is virtually no portion of the government that I respect. And as a retired officer who had a wonderful career - this includes the woke joke of a military currently donning clown costumes and feigning competency.
This is a Babylon Bee fake news article isn’t it?
https://www.theinteldrop.org/2022/10/19/america-is-alarmed-the-cia-is-losing-agents/
Maybe it’s because the CIA is concentrating on recruiting perverts and leftists (actually the same thing).
...I mean, we all know about the FBI...
Obama.
Obama, Clinton, and Bidens have turned national defense into a joke.
I never understood why Lee (and a few other ones I’ve forgotten their names—-Aldrich Ames was 1) were not executed.
I mean if their betrayal costs the lives of Americans and costs hundreds of millions as well as endangering national security. How worse could it be and why even keep capital punishment on the books?
This is what happens when you recruit diversity over stone cold intelligence officers with experience. CIA relied on the government credit card and no-experience college kids: which leads to sophomoric operations.
DIA is in the same mess, but add in 20 years of incompetent women screwing their way up to the GG-15 ranks in record fashion.
I would quit too. It must be demoralizing to have to post that much idiotic Ukrainian propaganda on Free Republic all day.
I’m going out on a limb and suggesting it was either an outsourced contracting firm, or a diversity hire, responsible for the compromised websites.
Yeah, but their inclusion and equity numbers are WAY up! Maybe even have a perfect ESG score. /s
With low IQ, atheistic, self-serving political hacks like this in charge, its hard not to root against the CIA
There’s honest work at Jiffy Lube.
This level of slovenliness is deeply shocking and inexcusable for a spy service with the resources and experience at the disposal of the CIA. But there are additional layers of hypocrisy and bitter irony that have been less discussed.
The episode coincided with the Justice Department intensifying its war on whistleblowers.
—
The CIA is yet another government agency rotting from the inside, but doing everything it can to protect itself from anyone who dares call attention to the rot. The result of the rot and ineptitude in this case is a bunch of dead CIA agents... and no one is held responsible. Rinse and repeat.
There is a difference between CIA Officers (CIA government employees) and CIA Agents (informants recruited by the CIA Officers). If the CIA is losing Agents, the people they recruited overseas are being rolled up by other intelligence services. The CIA does not hire Agents, they hire Officers.
Clown show.
Hi.
Didn’t the Chicoms hack into the U.S. Office of Personnel Management?
Oh that’s right, in 2015. 0bama/Biden
And you wonder why assests are getting terminated?
Bless your little heart.
5.56mm
The CIA is in the bottom 20% so far as our Intelligence agencies are concerned. They need to be purged.
Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents
AUGUST 15, 2018, 5:13 PM
...
When CIA officers begin working with a new source, they often use an interim covert communications system—in case the person turns out to be a double agent.
The communications system used in China during this period was internet-based and accessible from laptop or desktop computers, two of the former officials said.
This interim, or “throwaway,” system, an encrypted digital program, allows for remote communication between an intelligence officer and a source, but it is also separated from the main communications system used with vetted sources, reducing the risk if an asset goes bad.
Although they used some of the same coding, the interim system and the main covert communication platform used in China at this time were supposed to be clearly separated. In theory, if the interim system were discovered or turned over to Chinese intelligence, people using the main system would still be protected—and there would be no way to trace the communication back to the CIA. But the CIA’s interim system contained a technical error: It connected back architecturally to the CIA’s main covert communications platform. When the compromise was suspected, the FBI and NSA both ran “penetration tests” to determine the security of the interim system. They found that cyber experts with access to the interim system could also access the broader covert communications system the agency was using to interact with its vetted sources, according to the former officials.
In the words of one of the former officials, the CIA had “fucked up the firewall” between the two systems.
U.S. intelligence officers were also able to identify digital links between the covert communications system and the U.S. government itself, according to one former official—links the Chinese agencies almost certainly found as well. These digital links would have made it relatively easy for China to deduce that the covert communications system was being used by the CIA. In fact, some of these links pointed back to parts of the CIA’s own website, according to the former official.
The covert communications system used in China was first employed by U.S. security forces in war zones in the Middle East, where the security challenges and tactical objectives are different, the sources said. “It migrated to countries with sophisticated counterintelligence operations, like China,” one of the officials said.
The system was not designed to withstand the scrutiny of a place like China, where the CIA faced a highly sophisticated intelligence service and a completely different online environment.
As part of China’s Great Firewall, internet traffic there is watched closely, and unusual patterns are flagged. Even in 2010, online anonymity of any kind was proving increasingly difficult.
Once Chinese intelligence obtained access to the interim communications system, penetrating the main system would have been relatively straightforward, according to the former intelligence officials. The window between the two systems may have only been open for a few months before the gap was closed, but the Chinese broke in during this period of vulnerability.
Precisely how the system was breached remains unclear. The Ministry of State Security might have run a double agent who was given the communication platform by his CIA handler. Another possibility is that Chinese authorities identified a U.S. agent—perhaps through information provided by Lee—and seized that person’s computer. Alternatively, authorities might have identified the system through a pattern analysis of suspicious online activities.