The thing about cyber attacks is that it’s impossible to know where they came from. So, if they happen, you can blame anyone.
The other thing is that you do not even need to explain what was done.
This was proven with the Donald Trump Russia Election Hacking narrative. Someone sent a phishing email to John Podesta, and a few Russians made small-scale Facebook posts (at least they were made from Russian IPs), and suddenly you had this Russia Interference narrative where no one could even explain exactly what was happening, but it was scary.
The final thing is that you do not even need to prove that anything happened. You can claim anything, and be believed by a certain portion of the population.
If you put all of that together, and you happen to be a government – that’s a really beautiful thing.
All levels of Australian government, critical infrastructure and the private sector are being targeted in a “sophisticated state-based” cyber attack, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has revealed.
Mr Morrison confirmed the intrusion was conducted by “a sophisticated state-based cyber actor”.
“This activity is targeting Australian organisations across a range of sectors, including all levels of government, industry, political organisations, education, health, essential service providers, and operators of other critical infrastructure,” Mr Morrison said.
“We know it is a sophisticated state-based cyber actor because of the scale and nature of the targeting and the trade craft used.”
Mr Morrison declined to name who was behind the cyber intrusion.
“What I simply can confirm is there are not a large number of state-based actors that can engage in this type of activity, and it is clear based on the advice that we have received that this has been done by a state-based actor,” Mr Morrison said.
“With very, very significant capabilities.”
…
Mr Morrison said it was unclear what the motivation of the cyber attackers were following the intrusion on the Australian government, critical infrastructure and businesses.
He said he was not putting any time frame on when it began, saying there has been an ongoing effort to undermine Australia and the frequency of the attacks has increased.
“It is difficult to understand what one’s motivation might be for that,” Mr Morrison said.
“What is of interest to us is that it is occurring and what we are focused on is the practices that they’re employing and we have some of, if not the best, agencies in the world working on this and that means that they are putting all of their efforts in thwarting these attempts.
“I can confirm that they have thwarted many, but this is a very complex area and it requires constant persistence and application and that’s what they’re doing.
“We know what is going on. We’re on it but it is a day-to-day task that we’re applied to and we will continue to do that to keep Australians safe.”
The prime minister said intrusions on Australia’s cyber network were “not new”.
“But frequency has been increasing,” Mr Morrison said.
“The purpose of raising this matter here today is to simply raise awareness of these specific risks.
Here, we have the only evidently true statements from the Prime Minister, buried underneath the panic headline. Nothing is happening, except business as usual, but he wanted the public to be thinking more about Cyber Terror and China Bad.
As we reach Peak Democracy, politicians will stop using sentences, and speak directly in talking points. He will just say, “Cyber Terror! China Bad!” and the media will repeat that textually.
No explanation will be given, a lot like right now.
Let’s briefly break down the evidently untrue statements:
Everyone is under attack
Literally no system failures have been reported in any of these institutions.
Normal people can understand the difference between cyber-surveillance, where they get into your system and copy information, and a cyber-attack, where they get into your system and break it.
But these politicians pretend that you cannot understand this simple difference, so they blatantly say surveillance is an attack.
This claim is like if Russian satellites took pictures of secret American military installations, and they said it was a Russian satellite attack.
It is complete nonsense, and you are expected to believe it.
They know a state-based actor did this
The attack connections always route through Tor, the darknet. There is no way of correlating what comes out of the darknet with what goes into it. That is the point of the system.
So, no one knows where intrusive connections originate from.
As for the intrusions themselves, these are done by script kiddies.
This means they are not software developers who write their own scripts, but just people who use scripts anyone can find, like what the CIA leaked from Vault 7.
This is the difference between an engineer who designs a gun, and a thug who operates a gun. Engineers have money to make, so they have no reason to run around pwning random systems, or shooting people on the street. That is work for the thugs.
It is exceedingly rare that someone designs a special machine for killing someone on the street, when there are general machines that do that just fine.
Pictured: The Stuxnet of killing people on the street. Very rare.
Everyone has equal access to the methods of almost all intrusions, and most intrusions and attacks are done with the general toolkit.
So, if there were any evidence that anything had happened, this claim is like if someone got shot on the street and they were saying that very few companies are sophisticated enough to engineer guns, and started speculating about which gun manufacturer had planned the killing.
It is complete nonsense, and you are expected to believe it.
The Prime Minister knows what’s going on
On a technical level, this claim is obviously false.
These politicians are professional talk-prostitutes and they are all too old to know what is going on with computers.
He is being advised by the intelligence community about what is going on.
On a political level, this claim is also false.
What he probably thinks he is doing here is just spinning the reality that people try to break into systems every day into saying “Russia China Bad Scary – Vote Government!”
What he is actually doing, is conceding policy-making authority to the intelligence community. So, let me try to explain that.
This is predictive programming.
It is an instance of the larger campaign of cyber-terror predictive programming that began with “Russian Election Hacking” and as in that case, politicians, media and the public will go along with it because it can be used to blame someone for something.
But this is much more significant than random hype blame.
This is training the public to accept a system where the intelligence community can declare that we have been attacked and that someone in particular is responsible, with no evidence.
This is giving them a power to do a 9/11 type Cyber Terror False Flag event, and reshape both foreign policy and Internet policy.
Only they know if or when they will do this.
But now that the public has accepted the invented reality, they have this power.
First, they would need to actually crash some systems.
This would not be hard to do.
On October 21, 2016, some angry gamer did a DDoS on the DNS provider Dyn, and crashed the whole Internet for the day in large swaths of North America and Europe.
The three-letter black hats could do a much better job than that one kiddie. They could pwn the whole Internet in the same way, at least for a couple of days.
People would totally freak out.
They would also flock to television, which would tell them to Blame Foreigners. Trump does China Bad, and CNN does Russia Bad, so they could just blame China, or blame both, and everyone would be happy.
If the slutocracy were cut off from the selfie assembly line for a few days, they would come crawling on their knees willing to do anything, to be subject to anything, to get back online.
The government would do to them the first thing you can think of to do to a woman in that situation, and the public would thank them for this.
First, they could do normal 9/11 type mass hysteria event things – invade Venezuela, or some African country, or whatever-istan proxy war.
Second, they could cut off all trade with China, because at that point, they would say that we were at war, even though we wouldn’t be. This would totally devastate our economy.
We shouldn’t be in a position where shutting down trade with China would devastate us, but we are.
Finally, they could activate the Internet Panopticon.
A Panopticon, for those who don’t know, is a psychological experiment prison design, where it is set up so that anyone can be watched at any time.
This has a tremendous influence on the behavior of the prisoners, even if they are not usually watched, because they are aware that they may be being watched. That was the point.
Of course, we are already in a situation where our devices randomly record us and use this information to build a detailed personal record and psychological profile of everybody, maintained by social media corporate servers, which are assumed to be accessible by the NSA, which logs all traffic metadata.
The problem is that normal people are unaware of this and still behave incorrectly, as if they had some privacy.
What they need to do is get to a situation where everyone is constantly reminded of surveillance – more than what Google Ads do to remind people of this by serving them ads related to their private conversations.
They could create a situation where the intelligence community is DDoSing everyone and blaming Russia/China, and also running a “national security” DDoS protection service that American companies would be required to use, which would only serve whitelisted IPs associated with a person or group legally responsible for everything it does.
People could be told that they had to accept this for the Internet to work again, and they would accept it. The illusion of privacy would be broken.
A few mass shootings later, this information would be shared with contact tracers, social workers and law enforcement, to conduct preemptive psychological wellness checks on people with unusual internet behavior.
And, people would still say that they had free speech. Just, safety.
In conclusion, I don’t know if they will do this.
But, we are now in a situation where anything can happen, so we have to think preemptively about what can happen.
And, the public has been programmed to accept these cyber hoax narratives, for whatever reason. That is an incredible situation.
They can do anything with it.