Another Cyber False-Flag to Lock down the Internet

First came Stuxnet, then Flame and Duqu. Now, prepare for Gauss

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | AUGUST 13, 2012

The efforts to bring about full control of the free internet are about to receive another jolt, as a new cyber bug known as Gauss is fast spreading around the world collecting information from banking institutions, commercial transactions and other data.

Gauss was discovered by Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based computer security firm. According to its workers, Gauss is from the same making as Stuxnet and Flame, two computers viruses launched by the US and Israel to disrupt Internet services, especially in the Middle East.

Gauss is then a new form of cyber false-flag launched by governments that have an interest in kidnapping the web to make it of their own while curtailing access and free speech. The virus has been targeting banks, social networks and e-commerce, among others. It has been stealing login and password information as well as email and instant messaging data.

Gauss’s actions have been felt more strongly in the Middle East, in countries such as Lebanon, while in the West, the virus attacked computers at CitiGroup Inc.’s and Paypal. The specificity of the attacks already has many people buzzing about whether this virus could be used to create glitches that would cause a financial disaster, something of the kind seen in Wall Street, where financial transactions were affected by a ‘malfunction’ which caused great pain to investors. No need to emphasize that Wall Street is also connected to the World Wide Web, and that any strong attack on financial business could at the very least shut down the exchange.

People at Kaspersky Lab, among other computer technology companies are still trying to determine the reach that this virus has had so far and whether it is a bug carrying out surveillance in order to later execute a massive attack, or if it will start spreading its own poison around the financial world. The only information that has now been confirmed, is that Gauss is indeed a state- sponsored cyber-espionage tool. “Researchers from the security software manufacturer Symantec Corp, confirm Kaspersky Lab’s summation that Gauss is related to previous government-created cyber warfare viruses,” reports Occupy Corporatism.

Previous to Gauss, Stuxnet and Flame were used to attack technological infrastructure linked to the production of nuclear energy in Iran by entering the online systems and installing surveillance and .exe programs in an effort to slow down and destroy Iranian infrastructure. “After looking at Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame, we can say with a high degree of certainty that Gauss comes from the same ‘factory’ or ‘factories.’ All these attack toolkits represent the high end of nation-state-sponsored cyber-espionage and cyber war operations,” said Kaspersky Lab in a communiqué.

A common reason given by governments in order to justify these kind of attacks is the need to be vigilant when it comes to Middle East threats, especially movement of monies between what the US and Israel consider dangerous governments or traditional terrorist groups. Of course this is a lie, as the US government itself has, in numerous occasions authorized terrorist groups to carry out financial transactions in order to support their operations. This happened in Libya and is now happening is Syria, where the US Treasury has officially announced their support for the terrorist rebel groups who are fighting the Syrian Army.

While the US government congratulates itself for its fight against terrorism and money laundering — which is in itself questionable — its Treasury Department is publicly enabling terrorists in Syria to fund their operations against the local government. Back in November 2011, a report on Pravda revealed how US and other global baking entities were being used to hide dirty money from the drug trade. In that specific case, banks around the world allowed the circulation of $352 billion dollars in drug cartel money. According to the same report, billions more in drug money had been injected into the economy in previous years.

These cyber attacks are examples of double false-flags, not only because they cause disruption in transactions and commerce, but also because they have the intended purpose of being used as excuses to ramp up the corporate power-grab of the Internet. Something similar has been happening in the United States in the realm of the Second Amendment and gun rights in general, where two mass shootings have brought the calls for gun regulations back onto the main stream.

According to Kapersky Lab, the makers of Gauss went to a great deal of trouble to hide the purpose of the virus by using sophisticated encryption codes that may take a few months to break. International organizations interested in controlling the web, such as the United Nations, has warned governments worldwide about the threat posed by Gauss. Paradoxically, there isn’t anything more threatening to the Internet than the management of its infrastructure by one single entity, which is what the UN wants. The UN’s cyber security coordinator, Marco Obiso, said in a statement that “we don’t know what exactly it does. We can have some ideas. We are going to emphasize this.”

Parallel to the UN’s efforts to divert attention from its intent to manage the web all by itself, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is said to be studying any possible threat that Gauss may present to the country. “The department’s cyber security analysts are working with organizations that could potentially be affected to detect, mitigate and prevent such threats,” said DHS’ Peter Boogaard.

The same kind of attacks now being conducted by the US and Israel against other nations’ infrastructure, are the reasons why highly advanced technological states such as Russia, the United States and China have called for the adoption of harsher cybersecurity policies in order to defend their own countries. Is it because they intend to keep on causing cyber attacks in order to call for more Internet control, or is it because they know that their infrastructure will be the subject of attacks in response to their non-stop terror attacks on other nations?

One fact is clear. The only cyber attacks the world has witnessed so far haven’t come from fringe terrorist organizations, crazy individuals with the technology to send out a massive attack on sensible systems or rogue governments in the traditional sense. All of the major attacks have come from the collaboration of very advanced countries who publicly call themselves the victims of attacks, but that privately are the ones carrying out such attacks.

Could the next attack be one that will enable governments like the US, China or Israel to justify an even more dangerous attack on inoffensive nations? Or perhaps it will be a chance to cause a major financial attack in addition to imposing significant restrains on those who access the Internet and what can be uploaded or downloaded, for example. A worldwide attack of major proportions on the financial industry would certainly be a handy tool to carry out more financial terrorism of the kind being conducted right now against developed and developing nations.

We will have to wait and see. Meanwhile, it is clear that any attempt to curtail Internet freedom will not go unnoticed by the public because we already know the cyber terrorists’ modus operandi.