Vulnerability Alert. And a speculation on Benghazi

View 762 Sunday, February 10, 2013

ALERT ALERT

All right, maybe a bit over dramatic, but it is important.

There is a deadly new vulnerability that relies on features of some routers. The router is your first line of defense, the firewall, and if a hacker gets past that it’s a lot easier. I won’t explain the vulnerability, but I will recommend that you immediately go to GRC https://www.grc.com , go to the Shields Up page, and do the test he indicates. If your router is vulnerable it will tell you, and you should immediately take action. If you have never done the Shields Up vulnerability test, it’s always worth doing once in a while, but just now there is a new vulnerability out there, and bad guys are just exploiting it. This is a time sensitive alert.

Joe Zeff suggests that this link https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2 leads directly to Gibson’s Shields UP and may be more stable.  For those who might be a bit concerned about letting an outsider test your defenses, I can say that I have known Steve Gibson for decades and so have a great number of people I know including many you have heard of, and I know of no one who has ever questioned Gibson’s competence or integrity. 

Interesting. According to a pamphlet about to come out, Stevens was in Benghazi with inadequate security because Brennan was running ops against Al Qaeda leaders in the area, reporting directly to the President and outside the normal chain of command – thus State had no idea Brennan was throwing rocks at the local hornet nests.

Stevens was allegedly there as part of US efforts to collect Libyan arms, arms which Brennan would then divert without Stevens’ knowledge to another unnamed conflict – presumably Syria.

This still doesn’t strike me as the whole story, but it may be a significant part of it.

The story is at

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2276139/David-Petraeus-CIA-directors-bodyguards-exposed-affair-Paula-Broadwell-claims-Benghazi-The-Definitive-Report.html#axzz2KVQpNCmp.

It starts out about Petraeus being blindsided by this also (also allegedly deposed by a coup among CIA subordinates) but eventually gets to:

"IN THEIR OWN WORDS: AUTHORS SAY BOOK IS THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE ACCOUNT OF THE BENGHAZI ATTACK

‘Benghazi: The Definitive Report’ is a short read at just 83 pages.

However, it is packed with little-known details and exclusive information and background about the consulate attack. Here are a few key excerpts from the book:

(Deputy National Security Advisor) John Brennan also ran a highly compartmentalized program out of the White House in regard to weapons transfers, and Stevens would not have been trusted with that type of information. Stevens likely helped consolidate as many weapons as possible after the war to safeguard them, at which point Brennan exported them overseas to start another conflict.

During the rebellion against Gaddafi and in the aftermath of his death, Libya and North Africa became a staging ground for a dizzying array of operations by SpecOps, paramilitary forces, and international private military contractors working for everyone from European nations to multibillion-dollar oil corporations.

What we do know is that the British Special Air Service (SAS) landed in Libya at some point—probably the secretive intelligence gathering component of the SAS called ‘The Increment,’ which works alongside MI-6.

Elite counter-terrorist operators from America’s Delta Force were deployed to Libya as ‘analysts,’ which allowed President Obama to declare that America did not have any boots on the ground but was simply providing air support for the rebels. The reality was that Delta Force had a small contingent instructing the rebels in the finer points of weapons and tactics.

Behind closed doors, President Obama had given his counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, carte blanche to run operations in North Africa and the Middle East, provided he didn’t do anything that ended up becoming an exposé in The New York Times and embarrassing the administration. In 2012, a secret war across North Africa was well underway.

With JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), Brennan waged his own unilateral operations in North Africa outside of the traditional command structure. These Direct Action (DA) operations, unlike the traditional ISR missions mentioned above, were ‘off the books’ in the sense that they were not coordinated through the Pentagon or other governmental agencies, including the CIA. With Obama more than likely providing a rubber stamp, the chain of command went from Brennan to McRaven, who would then mobilize the men of ISA (Intelligence Support Activity), SEAL Team Six, or Delta Force to conduct these missions.

With a small element launching from an airfield in a European nation, JSOC operations targeted Al Qaeda personalities within Libyan militia organizations. In the weeks before the Benghazi tragedy, they most likely hit a known associate of Al-Suri in order to get him to “up periscope” and increase his visibility, which would then make it possible for JSOC to run a targeted operation to kill or capture him.

The aftermath of one of these secret raids into Libya would have grave consequences for all of them, including former Navy SEALs Ty Woods and Glen Doherty. SOFREP believes the Benghazi attack on 9/11/12 was blowback from the late-summer JSOC operations that were threatening the Al Qaeda-aligned militant groups (including Ansar Al-Sharia) in Libya and North Africa, now a leading base of operations for Islamic extremism.

‘Benghazi: The Definitive Report,’ written by Brandon Webb and Jack Murphy, is published by William Morrow Company, an imprint of HarperCollins. It will be available for download in eBook format on Tuesday."

Porkypine

I have no knowledge on this subject. It is not unreasonable and I know nothing that contradicts it either. It does explain why Stevens was there in the first place – why a consulate in Benghazi rather than the embassy building in Tripoli – and why there was less security than you might expect; and of course it explains why that consulate was a target. But consistency is not confirmation, and I post this for speculation.

I am paying the bills and doing other preparations  for my trip east..

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More later.

‘As you know, officers of the Torrance Police Department attempted to kill Mr. Perdue.’

<http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-torrance-shooting-20130210,0,3955268.story>

Roland Dobbins

The LA Area police continue to be – well, the tactful phrase is “In a state of high alert”.  The siege mentality has died down just a little, but there are still signs of panic amidst police who have been on duty and in a state of high alert too long. The terrorist is not likely to be on the mountains, and no one knows where he has gone to ground.  It is an interesting study on just how much disruption one man can cause.  I once had a student who did a term paper on that subject, and it frightened me: I persuaded him not to publish it and arranged for him to go to graduate school at the Center for Strategic Studies.  He now works sometimes with my son in the Pentagon.

And of course Oath of Fealty by Niven and Pournelle is written on the assumption that there was a highly successful terrorist operation in Los Angeles.