Weekly Security Brief - May 5th

by **Sabre** 5/5/2014, 22:44

Dilitas Weekly Security Brief

This email has been compiled from current, open source data supplied through contacts within Diplomatic Posts, law enforcement agencies and UK intelligence services.

The information herein is to keep you informed of the current security situations within the UK and the rest of the world. Please feel free to forward this document to colleagues.

If you require more specific information on any other prevailing matters, please contact us at info@dilitas.com detailing what you require and we will respond to you.

Regards,

Christopher Cully

Managing Director

The threat to the UK from International Terrorism is SUBSTANTIAL

The threat to Great Britain from Irish Republican Terrorism is MODERATE

Domestic:

Terrorists are changing tactics to slip under the radar after being given ‘full sight’ of GCHQ tradecraft by whistleblower Edward Snowden, a counter-terrorism director has warned. Stephen Phipson, one of the Government’s most senior counter terrorism officials, said the surveillance leaks published in the Guardian newspaper had led to a ‘substantial reduction’ in intelligence on suspects as they have changed their methods of communication. The director at the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism said the release of information from the Snowden documents had given extremists ‘full sight’ of tools and techniques used by the British listening station GCHQ, which had had a ‘severe’ effect on spying operations.

Late on 30 April, two men were arrested over terrorism-related offences in London. One man, aged 50, was arrested in Westminster on suspicion of encouragement of terrorism and possessing information useful to persons preparing or committing acts of terrorism. The second, 57, was arrested in Barnet on suspicion of encouraging terrorism. The arrests were made by officers from the Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command. It is understood the arrest in Westminster was made at a residential address and not near any major landmark.

British al-Qaeda operative Saajid Badat used the internet identity of "sacrifice72" while researching terrorist targets online because of the interpretation of the Koran that Islamic martyrs will be rewarded with 72 virgins in the after-life, a US court has heard. Badat confirmed that he used the identity while looking for possible Jewish-related targets such as synagogues and diamond merchants in South Africa. The court was also told that the British government has spent £75,000 on benefits and allowances for Badat since he was released from prison in 2010 after serving just five years of a 13-year sentence in return for agreeing to testify in terrorism cases in Britain and the US. Badat, who has since renounced Islamic extremism, said that he was not aware of the totals, but that many of the benefits are the same as the assistance provided to any former prisoner.

Northern Ireland and Eire:

On 30 April, the Sinn Féin leader, Gerry Adams, was arrested by Northern Ireland police in connection with the 1972 murder of Jean McConville. Mrs McConville, a 37-year-old widow and mother of 10, was abducted from her flat in the Divis area of west Belfast and shot by the IRA. Her body was recovered from a beach in County Louth in 2003. Last month, Ivor Bell, 77, a leader in the Provisional IRA in the 1970s, was charged with aiding and abetting the murder. There have also been a number of other arrests over the murder recently. The case against Bell is based on an interview he allegedly gave to researchers at Boston College in the US.

The son of Jean McConville has said his family's fight for justice will go on. Michael McConville was speaking after Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams was released without charge after being questioned over the 1972 killing. Mr Adams claimed there was a "sustained, malicious, untruthful campaign" against him. Mr McConville said his family would fight "to the bitter end" for justice. Jean McConville, a 37-year-old widow, was abducted from her Belfast home, shot and secretly buried. Her body was found on a beach in County Louth in 2003.

Northern Ireland’s First Minister wants his Sinn Féin deputy tried before a court if enough evidence exists. Martin McGuinness has denied allegations made by a former IRA prisoner linking him to the organisation in 1980, long after the former commander said he left the republican paramilitaries. DUP First Minister Peter Robinson said, “He, like any of the rest of us, should be brought before the courts and tried.” He told the Stormont assembly a guiding principle of his party was that everybody should be subject to the law - and he included Mr McGuinness, who he said has made no secret of his involvement with the IRA.

A 69-year-old man was detained in Co Antrim for questioning about the McGurk's Bar bombing in 1971. The development follows a Police Service of Northern Ireland review of the historic case ... The bombing was carried out by the UVF, but had initially been presented by the RUC as an accidental "own goal" by the IRA, prompting speculation that the dead might have included IRA members who were carrying the device.

Nationalist councillors have rejected a demand to immediately remove the name of an IRA convict from a play park but opted to open talks with the Equality Commission over the controversial matter. At a Newry and Mourne council meeting, it was decided that discussions should begin with the commission following heavy criticism it had levelled against the authority over its decision to retain the name Raymond McCreesh on one of its parks. In 1977, McCreesh was convicted of attempted murder, conspiracy to murder, firearms offences and PIRA membership. He died in the Maze hunger strike four years later.

International:

Fears of an impending offensive by Ukrainian forces are growing in the pro-Russian stronghold of Sloviansk, sources inside the city say. Ukraine's army cut off the main road into the city on Sunday, squeezing its hold on rebel fighters. A reporter inside Sloviansk told the BBC that residents expect the city to be stormed. Last week, rebels shot down two Ukrainian helicopters on the outskirts of Sloviansk.

President Goodluck Jonathan has admitted that Nigerian security forces still do not know where more than 200 abducted girls are being held. They were taken three weeks ago from their school in Borno state by suspected Islamist militants. President Jonathan was speaking for the first time since their disappearance amid growing criticism of the response. He has come under fire for not speaking earlier and his government has faced increasing anger from the public. "We promise that anywhere the girls are, we will surely get them out," he said in a live TV broadcast.

The global body supervising the surrender of Syria's chemical weapons is to investigate fresh claims that a less dangerous – but still lethal – chlorine gas has been used in recent attacks on opposition areas. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has announced it will investigate allegations that chlorine has been used at least nine times since February, killing scores of people and wounding hundreds more. The move follows intensive lobbying from the US and France who have both indicated in the past fortnight that they believe the Syrian government has been responsible for the attacks.

A German diplomat has been injured in a suspected kidnapping attempt in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, security officials say. Gunmen tried to force a vehicle carrying the diplomat and a colleague to stop in the southern district of Hadda, home to many embassies. When the diplomats refused and fled from the scene, the gunmen opened fire. The identity of the assailants was not known, but kidnappings of foreigners by armed tribesmen and militants linked to al-Qaeda are common in Yemen. The German foreign ministry confirmed that a 4x4 vehicle belonging to its embassy in

Sanaa had come under fire.

At least one person was killed in two explosions in Egypt's South Sinai on Friday morning, state media reported. One person was killed and five others were wounded in a suicide bomber attack on a security roadblock in early Friday morning in El-Tour, 50 km away from the famous tourist resort of Sharm El- Sheikh, in Egypt's South Sinai, said the state-owned Al-Ahram Arabic website. The bomber wearing an explosive belt blew himself up in the checkpoint, killing a soldier, Ahram quoted security forces as saying. Another bomb hit a bus in the same area in South Sinai, leaving at least four factory workers injured, said official news agency MENA. Also on Friday morning, a bomb exploded at a traffic kiosk in the eastern Cairo district of Helipolis in Egypt, causing casualties, state-run Ahram online reported. Since the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi by the army last July, a wave of explosions hit the restive Sinai Peninsula against security men and their premises. Lately, the blasts moved to the capital and the Nile Delta cities. A recent governmental report said the death toll from such attacks reached nearly 500 people, most of them soldiers and policemen. The army has launched a large-scale operation since Morsi's removal to uproot the crime hideouts in the restive Sinai. The al- Qaida-inspired Ansar Beit al-Maqdis group claimed responsibility for most of the attacks.

Spain has started an operation against messages glorifying terrorism on social media websites. According to the Interior Ministry, a total of 17 individuals have been arrested in raids across the country, most of them from the Basque and Navarra regions. It is believed that the suspects have links to the Basque separatist militant group ETA as some messages called for ETA uprisings against the state.

On April 30, the State Department submitted Country Reports on Terrorism 2013 to the US Congress as required by law. The report provides the Department of State’s annual assessment of trends and events in international terrorism that occurred from January 1 to December 31, 2013. It includes a strategic assessment, country-by-country breakdowns of counterterrorism efforts, and sections on state sponsors of terrorism, terrorist safe havens, and foreign terrorist organisations. The report notes that one of a number of key developments was that the terrorist threat continued to evolve rapidly in 2013, with an increasing number of groups around the world – including both al-Qaeda affiliates and other terrorist organisations – posing a threat to the United States, its allies, and its interests. Terrorist attacks rose 43% worldwide in 2013 despite a splintering of al-Qaeda’s leadership and a sprawling global counter-terrorism campaign...

A key American aide of hate preacher Abu Hamza suggested setting up a terrorist training camp in the United States so British Muslims could learn to fire guns and practice warfare tactics. “Shooting is illegal in the UK and I thought they could then go from America to Afghanistan,” James Ujaama told the New York terror trial of the one-eyed cleric. “I told Sheikh Abu Hamza about this because we had talked about this before.” Ujaama drove nine hours from his home in Seattle to tiny Bly, Oregon, to check out a potential camp where he said the arid mountainous terrain was similar to parts of Afghanistan. Asked by the prosecution about Hamza’s views on religious warfare, Ujaama said, “His views on physical jihad training was it was obligatory – every Muslim should engage in it.”

The US Navy has created an online code-breaking game in an attempt to recruit the next generation of cryptologists. The role-playing game is called ‘Project Architeuthis’ and will be released on Facebook over the coming days. The game follows the storyline of a US naval cryptologist sneaking aboard an enemy submarine in order to rescue the chief architect of the US weapons program. Players will decode complex clues sent by the digital cryptologist to discover the location of the submarine and rescue the high profile prisoner.

The US Marine Corps is launching a novel beta test with commercial wireless carriers that, if successful, could save the Corps as much as $10 million a year while providing more Marines mobile access to USMC data. It could also shake up the Defence Department's current position on using personal smartphones at work. The initiative, which begins next week with AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, will test whether the wireless carriers can successfully deliver a secure, corporate- managed operating environment on personally owned, commercially available smartphones while

also meeting the government's legal requirements.

An urban guerrilla group that has been dormant in Greece for four years claimed credit a week ago for a car bomb explosion on 10 April outside the Bank of Greece in Athens. Revolutionary Struggle, a group operated by Nikos Maziotis and Pola Roupa, claimed it set off the bomb in “striking the interests of the European economic oligarchy,” in a 20,000-word manifesto posted online. Maziotis and Roupa disappeared in 2012 while awaiting trial for previous terrorist-style attacks, and the bomb and message indicate they have returned, along with their group. The proclamation linked the blast, in which no one was injured, to past explosions at international bank branches in Athens and the Athens stock exchange, and to the upcoming visit of German

Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A bomb and knife attack at a railway station in China's western Xinjiang region has killed three and injured 79 others, officials and state media say. The attackers used explosives and knives at Urumqi's south railway station on Wednesday, officials said. The local government described it as a "violent terrorist attack" but said the situation was now under control. China's President Xi Jinping, who has just visited the region, has promised to step up anti-terrorism efforts.

Cyber News:

UK businesses are being dealt a double whammy when it comes to cyber security as an increase in spending on protecting companies is being compounded by the fact that one attack can now cost over £1 million despite the number of attacks decreasing. A study that was commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills showed that companies have to shell out more money to stop servers from becoming compromised by hackers. “There has been a significant rise in the cost of individual breaches. The overall cost of security breaches for all type of organisations has increased. 10% of organisations that suffered a breach in the last year were so badly damaged by the attack that they had to change the nature of their business,” stated the report. Larger organisations saw the average cost of the worst security breach of the year rise from between £450,000 and £850,000 in 2012 to between £600,000 and £1.15 million in 2013. The picture was just as bleak for small firms and showed that the average cost has risen to between £65,000 and £115,000 compared to between £35,000 and £65,000 for the year before.

In a sign of just how seriously Europe is taking the cyber threat, more than 400 cyber security professionals from 29 countries and 200 organisations are today beginning a biannual cyber exercise coordinated by the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA). It is not the first time ENISA has produced this event, but this year’s will be the largest such “stress test” of the continent’s ability to withstand massive cyber-attack. The online event brings together various Cyber Security Agencies, EU bodies, Telecoms operators, tech companies and energy providers. Those involved must detect and tackle various challenges based on 16 different cyber-security incidents. The technical part of the exercise takes places in a distributed manner across all of Europe.

America's security and intelligence agencies are teaming up with airline manufacturers to defend against a catastrophic cyber-attack that could cripple the air traffic control system, interfere with the computer systems used by modern aircraft, and potentially even bring down a plane. As part of a new program, which will be run from a federal facility outside Washington, US government personnel will work alongside private-sector aviation employees to share information about computer security threats, government and corporate officials said. Their goal is to spot malicious hacker activity on computer networks and to improve the security of airline manufacturing, during which complex software programs that could create entry points for hackers are installed on passenger aircraft.

Microsoft has warned of a new security flaw in all versions of its Internet Explorer web browser for Windows PCs. A patch has yet to be released for the crocked code. Vulnerability CVE-2014- 1776, to give the problem its formal name, allows miscreants to hijack at-risk Windows computers. It's all due to “the way Internet Explorer accesses an object in memory that has been deleted or has not been properly allocated”, the software giant has explained. The flaw means the browser “may corrupt memory in a way that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user within Internet Explorer".