Posted on 02/16/2018 1:24:45 AM PST by TigerLikesRooster
All Eyes on North Korea
Intelligence agencies are surging resources to focus on the Korean Peninsula.
With talk of a bloody nose strike against North Korea being debated in Washington, public attention has focused on conventional military preparations for a U.S. attack on Pyongyang. Less noticed, but possibly even more telling, is the surge in recent months of intelligence resources.
Senior officials have made no secret of the fact that the administration is ramping up its intelligence capabilities to focus on the Korean Peninsula, but six sources familiar with U.S. planning described a nearly unprecedented scramble inside the agencies responsible for spying and cyber warfare.
/snip
The Defense Intelligence Agency had an oh, shit moment after the holidays, another source described to FP, when contingency planning to shift resources toward East Asia kicked off in earnest. Some experts working on areas such as counterterrorism and counternarcotics are suddenly getting new assignments, or fear they soon might, and are being told to shift their gaze to the Korean Peninsula instead, yet another source indicated.
The Defense Clandestine Service, an espionage wing of the DIA, has ratcheted up its presence in the region. The government is working on putting the elite of the elite on the peninsula to collect and respond, a separate former military intelligence official told FP.
/snip
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...
P!
Bump!
So much for the “Don’t tell the enemy what our plans are” philosophy!
Russia’s power play in North Korea aimed at both China and US
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/01/asia/russia-north-korea-analysis/index.html
The powerful intercontinental missile tested by North Korea late last year is highly likely to have been built with foreign blueprints or parts, according to a new technical analysis that describes multiple similarities between Pyongyangs new missile and ones built by the Soviet Union decades ago.
The new report builds an elaborate, if partly circumstantial, case linking North Koreas newest missile to Soviet designs dating as far back as the mid-1960s. The evidence includes striking similarities between the Hwasong-15 and a family of Soviet-era missiles, including one that was developed by Russian engineers but abandoned before production began, according to the report prepared for Janes Intelligence Review, a British-based journal that focuses on international security threats. A draft of the report was provided to The Washington Post.
Ted Striker: My orders came through. My squadron ships out tomorrow. We’re bombing the storage depots at Daiquiri at 1800 hours. We’re coming in from the north, below their radar.
Elaine Dickinson: When will you be back?
Ted Striker: I can’t tell you that. It’s classified.
Priyom reverse-engineers North Korean DPRK-ARQ diplomatic modem
Since the reactivation of V15 in June 2016, North Korea is back in the numbers station world. Probably spurred by the escalating international tensions around the nuclear ambitions of the North Korean regime, monitoring of Radio Pyongyang and V15 has hit a bit of a craze - with reports that sometimes get a bit overly enthusiastic about radio signals sporadically heard under Radio Pyongyang on the same frequency, yet unrelated, such as the Common and Precious Morse beacon from Germany; or of correlation patterns between V15 transmissions and upcoming missile tests by the North Korean regime, from enthusiasts probably oblivious that V15 messages simply follow a known, predictable bi-monthly schedule.
The FSK waveform quickly yielded a basic synchronous packet structure. But that turned out to be only the first step of many. Beneath these small 8-byte packets, slowly emerged a sophisticated multi-mode, full-duplex protocol, with several regional variants coexisting on the network, and an impressive list of link control command codes. Beneath this protocol, the payload too revealed several message types, and a complete binary header structure; we struggled but managed to identify and understand, one by one, the purpose of each field; and we observed how they tied in with the topology of the embassy network and the way messages were distributed and relayed. In the mean time, being able to decode and identify the stations behind these data bursts, we could list up a schedule of all the known links and contacts involving each embassy.
Although there are still a few details here and there left to clarify, and only one third of the embassy network has been precisely mapped so far, the Priyom team is proud to share and publish this research: it is the first time to our knowledge that the DPRK-ARQ protocol and operations get publicly documented to this extent and in such depth - although we imagine that intelligence agencies were already familiar with this knowledge! Visit our diplomatic stations section to read all the details.
http://priyom.org/blog/priyom-reverse-engineers-north-korean-dprk-arq-diplomatic-modem
A Crab’s Guide to WebSDR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJTH3TZRP_4
and here is the link to the Web SDR
http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
Happy hunting!
North Korea will probably be p-d:
In this case, the GRU sought to make it appear as though the intrusions were the work of North Korean hackers by using North Korean IP addresses and other tactics, said the officials.
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