Guest Post: Surviving an Active Shooter – By Fmr SEAL TEAM 6 Operator – Rob O’Neill

Posted: 19th December 2015 by th3j35t3r in General
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Introduction

A few weeks ago we all watched with heavy hearts events unfolding in San Bernardino. I wondered would things have turned out differently had the people caught up in the situation been more ‘actions on’ prepared. I know that there’s some ‘training’ provided in schools, and other facilities to prepare folks for an active shooter situation, but I’m pretty sure it boils down to everyone piling into a closet and hoping for the best.

I decided I needed to do a blog post on surviving an active shooter scenario, and I decided it needed to come from a place of authority on such matters. So I enlisted a buddy of mine to help out and do it as a guest post. My buddys’ name is Rob O’Neill (@McHooyah on Twitter). He happens to be the SEAL TEAM 6 (Special Warfare Development Group) operator in the assault stack on Operation Neptune Spear who came face to face with Usama Bin Laden in his bedroom and shot him stone-cold dead. So you should put your ears on, and listen up, it might just save your life….

Surviving An Active Shooter Scenario – By Rob O’Neill

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How to Win a ‘Cyberwar’ with ISIS.

Posted: 20th November 2015 by th3j35t3r in Anonymous, Press Coverage, Wikileaks
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“Never interrupt the enemy while he’s making a mistake’ ~ Napoleon

I’m gonna start with one simple sentence: We have the upper hand here. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it, but make no mistake WE HAVE THE ADVANTAGE, just as long as we don’t squander it. Here’s why:

Nearly 6 years ago, as many of you know I started taking down jihadist recruiting, propaganda websites and forums. At that time they were often self-hosted servers, or offshore hosting providers, they were not prevalent on US social media like they are today. Most of the targets I chose were hosted overseas. My strategy then was really simple. I was trying to make it as difficult as possible for the bad guys to trust and maintain their own servers, and lines of communication. I figured I’d herd or funnel them into a smaller space, because smaller spaces are easier to watch. 

Today, there are very few of these overseas Jihadist services left up and running. They pretty much gave up trying to keep their boxes online and, as we have seen, have moved over to US based technology. Everything from Telegram, and Surespot etc for messaging and Cloudflare for protecting their ‘online assets’ from people like me, and obviously Twitter and Facebook to spread their propaganda. So I’d say that strategy I was working on for all those years was relatively successful. Why?

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Public Service Announcement: Media folks, ‘Anonymous’ are Suckering You.

Posted: 17th November 2015 by th3j35t3r in Anonymous, Press Coverage
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“The problem with ‘Anonymous’ quotes from the internet is you can never tell if they are true or not” ~ Abraham Lincoln

NOTE: THERE ARE UPDATES AT THE BOTTOM.

Pointing out the obvious is getting really tedious. But, in the absence of anyone else doing it, and with the new rash of crap coming from their cheeto-stained lips, combined with the fact that *some* media are actually buying into their rhetoric and bluster it’s only fair that there’s a counter-balance provided. After all we’re all about ‘freedom of speech’, right?

Yesterday ‘Anonymous’ came out with yet another of their oh-so-scary videos ‘declaring war on ISIS‘. I about fell of my perch laughing. Yes, it’s the EXACT same tired old footage of a pre-pubescent pasty faced XBOX LIVE addicted shit-weasel in a Guy Fawkes mask that they re-use over and over with a different audio track overlaid warbling about how they are gonna ‘hunt ISIS down’ yadda yadda. I bet when ISIS woke up this morning this wasnt the 72 virgins they expected.

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Sincerest Form of Flattery? Well, I Guess So.

Posted: 28th October 2015 by th3j35t3r in Anonymous, General
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“It’s better to fail in originality than succeed in imitation.” Melville

Let’s talk a little bit about motivation. I’ll start with my own. Nearly six years ago I noticed (before they invaded social media) that Jihadists were leveraging the internet via forums hosted by themselves on their own servers, to radicalize & recruit a homegrown threat. This got under my skin and I wanted to do what I could to disrupt their activities. That was my motivation, I was pretty successful, nobody had previously gone down this path.

How cute, another imitator.

While some of my actions over the years have generated some media interest, this was never my primary goal. As I keep saying ‘fame is lightning, you can no more seek it out than you can avoid it’, and I can assure you I turn down far more interviews than I accept and there’s a slew of journalists out there that can attest to this.

So last week, somebody linked me to an article about ‘A single hacker is taking down racist and homophobic sites one by one’ by @Epro over at Venturebeat (again). I’d like to point out that the subject of the article who goes by @SgtBilko420 on Twitter, has (surprise surprise) started trying to whack ISIS sites too. Now don’t misunderstand me, I’m all for disrupting the bad guys – as long as that’s the actual motivation. Make no mistake, these kids don’t understand or believe in any of their stated ’causes’, their ’causes’ are just excuses. They are just looking for press attention. I decided to take a quick look at what this kid was up to.

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CIA Director Brennan AOL ‘Hack’ – What You Need To Know

Posted: 22nd October 2015 by th3j35t3r in Anonymous, General, Hacker Tracker

“If you shake a tree with dumbasses in it, don’t be surprised when dumbasses fall out” ~ Me

Let’s get to it.

The So-Called ‘Hack’

Recently media reported that CIA Director John Brennan’s PRIVATE AOL (I know right?) email had been ‘hacked’. This is a misconception. The account was not ‘hacked’ it was Social Engineered. Social Engineering basically means you are really good at being full of shit. You lie to people to solicit information from them, either by phone or email. In this case the perps fooled a Verizon employee (who are Director Brennan’s cell provider) into giving them what were essentially security question details – in this case the last 4 digits of his Credit Card among other things, and they used this information to facilitate a ‘I forgot my password and need to reset it’. This is how they ‘hacked’ the account. Unimpressive. No wait, I take that back, the impressive thing is that this kids scrotum has dropped low enough for his voice to sound like an adult. I digress.

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Guest Post By Branndon ‘ShadowDXS’ Pike

Posted: 14th October 2015 by th3j35t3r in General
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“Be humble, be gracious, and make peace with inner fears before stepping out into the limelight and allowing yourself to be subjected to all of humanity”. ~ Maximillian Degenerez

Funny how things work out. I never thought I’d see this day, and I never thought I’d let a guest write a blog post. Here’s a very much shortened backstory as to why.

I get trolled by losers. A lot. One of the worst persistent offenders over the years has been Branndon Pike AKA @ShadowDXS on Twitter, here’s an example of his ‘work’. Recently though, I’d noticed a huge change in him. I asked around, and some good people, @NetSecrex (Dan Ford) and @Sehnaoui (Khalil ‘Pilgrim’) informed me that Branndon was trying to get his shit together and had finally got a pretty decent job. I was skeptical. A short time later Branndon followed me on Twitter, so I followed him back. I told him I’d heard the good news, and offered some advice and support. Turns out old Branndon isn’t the dumb shit he pretends to be. This was a few weeks back now, last night we had a chat and I asked him if he wanted to share his story of turning from troll to human via my blog. So here we are. I’m happy to say I *think* I can call Branndon a friend, and I have a new found respect for him, you should too. I often say to trolls ‘I’ll make you famous’, I once said it to Branndon too, so I guess I’m keeping that promise right now, only under the right circumstances. Anyhoo, without further fanfare, I’ll hand you over to a NEW IMPROVED Branndon Pike in his own (PGP signed) words:

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Five years…
For five long years I have gone out of my way to show my ass to anyone willing to look at it. I never gave a damn about how it effected others. It was always about pissing off anyone and everyone that wanted to flex. I remember how my history with th3j35t3r started. It was October of 2010, I was reading up on WikiLeaks and how they had to branch out to massive amount of mirrored sites due to a massive DDoS attack, for what seemed like a lifetime. After some quick google searching, I found a few links to twitter. Then I found the person claiming responsibility for said attacks. The first tweet I read from him was an open Q&A on #Jester in 2600.net <http://2600.net/>’s IRC. Mind you, this was around the same time that Anonymous was in full on asshat mode.

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Cyber Jihad 2.0 – Where We’re going Wrong

Posted: 7th July 2015 by th3j35t3r in General
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‘Never interrupt the enemy when he’s making a mistake’ ~ Napolean Bonaparte

I guess, if ‘ole Napolean was around today, and at the front of a ‘cyber-jihad’ the quote of his I placed directly above would rather read ‘never interrupt the enemy when he’s leeching off our constitutional rights’… and here’s why:

Today I watched a CSPAN hearing on “Social Media & the Next Evolution of Terrorist Recruitment”. (Side note I notice that Mubin, in the 1 hr 55th minute uses the quote “Be Like Water”, it’s probably a coincidence). That’s right, today, not last week, not last month, and not a couple of years ago. Today. I guess in a way I’m glad the threat and offensive counter-measures I’ve been conducting and documenting right here on this blog for 5 years is finally getting some ears to prick up.

Those who have followed me for the longest time will recall my strategy on dealing with the threat of jihadis radicalizing, recruiting and even training homegrown threats online. Back then, they weren’t nearly as prolific on social media as they are today. Partly b/c they now have large swathes of ‘Anonymous’ doing their cyber bidding for them. They had their own websites, forums and discussion boards hosted in ‘unfriendly nations and states’. They were managed by themselves and almost always had an English speaking section, for the US-based homegrowners to keep up with the latest techniques, tactics and procedures they were concocting.

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Constitutional Awareness Program

Posted: 29th May 2015 by th3j35t3r in General
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“The US Constitution doesn’t guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

There’s a a couple of common misconceptions regarding our Constitution that I keep running into as I navigate my plotted course through the internet. They are such common problems with some people, I am dedicating a blog post to clearing it up once and for all. Be advised, I can lay it out here, but no matter how hard I try, I cannot understand this stuff for you.

Let’s start with some basic facts
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The First Amendment to the UNITED STATES Constitution prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights. Here’s the actual text “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

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Wikileaks Are Really Scraping the Barrel

Posted: 22nd May 2015 by th3j35t3r in General, Wikileaks, WikiSneaks
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Assange's OKCupid Dating Profile Pic“Those who don’t know the value of loyalty, can never appreciate the cost of betrayal.” – Unknown Author

Recap. For those unfamiliar with my previous writings regarding ‘Wikileaks’ you can catch the heck up right here, here, and here, in that order. I really am trying to stop going on about Wikileaks and Assange, but the bloviating self-righteous shitbird just keeps on pulling stunts to endanger our personnel and, as of right now civilians too. Sidenote: Fig 1.0 Assanges OKCupid Pic >>

So what’s happened now?

Well, two weeks a go a ‘project’ popped up calling itself the ‘Transparency Toolkit’ (Website). The project (so far) created an unimpressive script to crawl Linkedin profiles looking for keywords such as ‘intelligence’, ‘military’, UAV’ drone’ etc on US citizens profiles. Once it found one or more of these pre-defined keywords it would pull everything about that Linkedin user (including resume, photo, name, location etc) into a database. They then released this database on Github in JSON format so that it could be mined and manipulated by anyone. So what, I hear you say, they just collected already public information on a particular demographic (if you are a member of Linkedin that is) and dumped it in raw data format. Here’s the three gimps behind it:

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Pay It Forward

Posted: 6th March 2015 by th3j35t3r in General
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“There’s no respect for others without humility in one’s self.” ~ Amiel

When I set out on this ‘caper’ over five years ago I never imagined how things would turn out. A lot of positive things have occurred. Things like making the cover of both Newsweek, and Homeland Security Today Magazine, TV coverage on both MSNBC and NBC, my laptop being displayed in the International Spy Museum in Washington DC and much more.

And this week something else happened. I was ‘named’ in TIME Magazine’s list of the 30 Most Influential people on the Internet. Think about that for a minute. At the time of writing there are 3,079,544,187 (give or take) people using the internet in the world.

This list has just 30 people on it. I was and am still, totally stunned. TIME lists were first published in 1999 as the result of a debate among American academics, politicians, and journalists, the list is now an annual event. Although appearing on the list is often seen as an honor, TIME makes it clear that entrants are recognized for changing the world, regardless of the consequences of their actions. The final list of influential individuals are exclusively chosen by TIME editors with nominations coming from the TIME alumni and the magazine’s international writing staff.

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‘Wikisneaks’ – Trouble in paradise?

Posted: 16th April 2015 by th3j35t3r in Wikileaks, WikiSneaks
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“The ship of democracy, which has weathered all storms, may sink through the mutiny of those on board.” ~ Grover Cleveland – 22nd and 24th President of the United States of America

This is a recap of today’s events, surrounding Wikileaks, who I have mentioned on this blog previously both here and here, with ‘brevitized’ (yes I made that word up) backstory as follows;

You’ll recall that following the release of the movie ‘The Interview’, which cast crazy lil Kimmy, supreme leader of North Korea in a somewhat bad light there was a… let’s call it a… ‘cyber-response‘. This response boiled down to an attack on Sony’s ‘cyber assets’. The perps called themselves the ‘Guardians of Peace’ and the FBI was quick to announce the perps were in fact the North Koreans themselves, but many, me included, believe it to be the work of China AND the NORKS, while others believe Russia was involved. Either way, it was not some lame-ass ‘Anonymous’ or similar hit, it was, without doubt a state sponsored attack. This attack resulted in huge amounts of Sony records, emails and documents being stolen.

The now…

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