Tag: FBI

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-Top News USA

‘Russian diplomats in US threatened by FBI, CIA’

According to the NDTV reports, The CIA, US Intelligence and the U.S. State Department did not respond to the allegations…reports Asian Lite News

Russia’s ambassador in US alleged that Russian diplomats in US are being threatened with violence and U.S. intelligence services try to establish contact with them.

Russian ambassador Anatoly Antonov said that since Russia invaded Ukraine, face-to-face meetings with U.S. officials had ended, NDTV reported.

“It’s like a besieged fortress. Basically, our embassy is operating in a hostile environment … Embassy employees are receiving threats, including threats of physical violence,” NDTV quoted him as saying.

“Agents from U.S. security services are hanging around outside the Russian embassy, handing out CIA and FBI phone numbers, which can be called to establish contact,” He added.

According to the NDTV reports, The CIA, US Intelligence and the U.S. State Department did not respond to the allegations.

Meanwhile, Moscow has demanded that the United States immediately stop persecuting Russian journalists and provide them with normal working conditions, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Friday.

“We demand that the trampling upon Russian journalists be immediately stopped and that they be allowed to work under normal conditions, in accordance with the standards of freedom of speech that Washington loves to tout so hypocritically,” Zakharova said in a statement.

The spokeswoman said that more restrictions are being constantly imposed on the Russian journalists accredited in the US to make their work more difficult or to intimidate them into leaving.

Zakharova said that the US continues its “Russophobic witch-hunt” of pressuring “unwanted journalists” using security services into covering events in a way that benefits Washington.

She noted that the Federal Bureau of Investigation recently attempted twice to involve a head of a Russian correspondent office in Washington in “compromising cooperation,” saying it was yet another example of the unprecedented pressure Russian journalists have to face.

Meanwhile, the United States has targeted 8 Sberbank executives and 27 Gazprombank executives, as well as Moscow Industrial Bank and its ten subsidiaries in its latest sanctions package, the White House announced in its Fact Sheet on Sunday.

“The United States also sanctioned eight executives from Sberbank- the largest financial institution in Russia and uniquely important to the Russian economy, holding about a third of all bank assets in Russia; twenty-seven executives from Gazprombank – a prominent Russian bank facilitating business by Russia’s Gazprom, one of the largest natural gas exporters in the world; and Moscow Industrial Bank and its ten subsidiaries,” the Fact Sheet said.

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-Top News USA

FBI ‘tested’ Pegasus spyware’s capabilities

Pegasus is capable of silently infecting phones and accessing camera and microphone feeds, contacts, texts, and more….reports Asian Lite News

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has reportedly confirmed that it had a license to use Israeli company NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware and it tested out the software’s capabilities.

According to The Washington Post, the FBI insisted that the software was never used “in support of any investigation”.

The report, however, said that there were at least discussions within the Bureau and Department of Justice about how the FBI might go about deploying the spyware.

Pegasus is capable of silently infecting phones and accessing camera and microphone feeds, contacts, texts, and more.

“It’s a worrying detail — NSO has repeatedly claimed that Pegasus cannot be used on phone numbers with a +1 country code and is only allowed to be used in countries outside the US,” The Verge said late on Wednesday.

The FBI didn’t confirm other details, such as the allegation that it had racked up a $5 million bill with NSO and that it renewed a contract for Pegasus at one point.

The FBI reiterated a statement that it will “routinely identify, evaluate, and test technical solutions and problems for a variety of reasons, including possible operational and security concerns they might pose in the wrong hands”.

The NSO Group has been blacklisted by the US government on doing business with tech companies based in the country.

Tech giant Apple in November 2021 filed a lawsuit against the NSO Group, seeking a permanent injunction to ban the Israeli company from using any Apple software, services or devices.

Apple admitted that a small number of its users may have been targeted by a NSO Group’s exploit to install Pegasus on Apple devices.

Apple also sent threat notification alerts to victims of state-sponsored hackers, beginning with Thailand, El Salvador and Uganda.

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-Top News USA

FBI releases newly declassified record on 9/11 attacks

The document, released on the 20th anniversary of the attacks, is the first investigative record to be disclosed since President Joe Biden ordered a declassification review…reports Asian Lite News

The FBI late Saturday released a newly declassified 16-page document related to logistical support provided to two of the Saudi hijackers in the run-up to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The document describes contacts the hijackers had with Saudi associates in the US but offers no evidence the Saudi government was complicit in the plot.

The document, released on the 20th anniversary of the attacks, is the first investigative record to be disclosed since President Joe Biden ordered a declassification review of materials that for years have remained out of public view.

Biden had encountered pressure in recent weeks from victims’ families, who have long sought the records as they pursue a lawsuit in New York alleging that senior Saudi officials were complicit in the attacks.

The Saudi government has long denied any involvement. The Saudi Embassy in Washington said Wednesday that it supported the full declassification of all records as a way to “end the baseless allegations against the Kingdom once and for all.”

The embassy said that any allegation that Saudi Arabia was complicit was “categorically false.”

Biden last week ordered the Justice Department and other agencies to conduct a declassification review of investigative documents and release what they can over the next six months. The 16 pages were released on Saturday night, hours after Biden attended September 11 memorial events in New York, Pennsylvania and northern Virginia.

Victims’ relatives had earlier objected to Biden’s presence at ceremonial events as long as the documents remained classified.

The heavily redacted record released Saturday describes a 2015 interview with a person who was applying for US citizenship and years earlier had repeated contacts with Saudi nationals who investigators said provided “significant logistical support” to several of the hijackers.

The documents are being released at a politically delicate time for the US and Saudi Arabia, two nations that have forged a strategic — if difficult — alliance, particularly on counterterrorism matters. The Biden administration in February released an intelligence assessment implicating Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the 2018 killing of US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi but drew criticism from Democrats for avoiding a direct punishment of the crown prince himself.

Regarding September 11, there has been speculation of official involvement since shortly after the attacks, when it was revealed that 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudis. Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida at the time, was from a prominent family in the kingdom.

The US investigated some Saudi diplomats and others with Saudi government ties who knew hijackers after they arrived in the US, according to documents that have already been declassified.

Still, the 9/11 Commission report found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded” the attacks that al-Qaida masterminded. But the commission also noted “the likelihood” that Saudi government-sponsored charities did.

Particular scrutiny has centered on the first two hijackers to arrive in the US, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. In February 2000, shortly after their arrival in southern California, they encountered at a halal restaurant a Saudi national named Omar al-Bayoumi who helped them find and lease an apartment in San Diego, had ties to the Saudi government and had earlier attracted FBI scrutiny.

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Technology USA

FBI to treat ransomware incidents as terror attacks

FBI to treat ransomware incidents as terror attacks

President Joe Biden said last week that his administration was “looking closely” at whether to retaliate against Russia for a recent ransomware attack….reports Asian Lite News

Taking a tough stand on growing ransomware attacks, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and US Justice Department have announced to treat such cyber incidents as terror attacks.

Christopher Wray, Director of the FBI, told The Wall Street Journal that the country is facing a similar challenge like 9/11, and the Bureau has identified about 100 different types of ransomware, several of them being traced to Russia.

“There are a lot of parallels, there’s a lot of importance, and a lot of focus by us on disruption and prevention. There’s a shared responsibility, not just across government agencies but across the private sector and even the average American,” Wray told WSJ on Saturday.

President Joe Biden said last week that his administration was “looking closely” at whether to retaliate against Russia for a recent ransomware attack.

“We’re looking closely at that issue,” Biden told reporters at the White House when asked if the US would retaliate against Russia for the latest ransomware attack.

Major meat producer JBS USA said that it suffered a cyberattack and notified the administration that the ransom demand came from a criminal organisation likely based in Russia.

The latest ransomware attack came weeks after a similar cyberattack targeting Colonial Pipeline, which forced the company to shut down approximately 5,500 miles of fuel pipeline for days.

Senior Justice Department officials were quoted as saying in reports that ransomware attacks would be investigated in a manner similar to terror incidents.

Biden said last month that he would raise the cybercrime issue in talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin when they meet in Geneva on June 16.

Relations between Washington and Moscow have been adversarial in recent years.

The two sides have obvious differences on issues related to Ukraine, cybersecurity, human rights, and US election interference.

Alarmed at repeated cyber-attacks on the country, Biden last month signed an executive order, implementing new policies to improve national cybersecurity.

Admitting that the US is facing persistent and increasingly sophisticated malicious cyber campaigns that threaten the public sector, the private sector, and ultimately the American people’s security and privacy, Biden said that the government must improve its efforts to identify, deter, protect against, detect, and respond to these actions and actors.

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