Dan Winter lections about ET origins Etc.

I stumbled on these lections made by a guy called Dan Winter. His lections tells a pretty good history of mankind chronologically. Everything falls in place and is understandable. Only thing you need is, open mind:

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Top 10 Most Mysterious Secret Societies

Everyone of you have your own list of these, but here’s something:

10. Blackwater: This isn’t so much a secret society, but rather a private army. Actually a corporate army that is, publicly funded, but privately accountable. They offer mercenary services including infantry, navy and police enforcement to whoever will pay their price. Since they’re not a government organization, they are frequently called in to help settle disputes that are too secretive or distasteful for public services to be involved with, like policing the survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

9. The Order of the Skull & Bones: It’s one of those upper crust Ivy League student societies dedicated to manipulating the next generation of the power elite. Oh great, another one. Is anything real anymore? They mockingly refuse membership to all without family names like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Bush. Yeah, those Bushes.

8. The Freemasons: Cloaked in secrecy, brothers of this fraternal organization are not allowed to invite new members, nor share any of their secret handshakes, passwords and strange rituals they have to perform, in order to advance in seniority within the organization.

7. Rosicrucians: This mystic Christian fellowship was founded by a group of 8 doctors, alchemists and sages in the 1400s, in a quest to destroy the one true ring. Joking aside…that would be cool, but instead, they actually dedicated their entire lives to providing free health care to any who needed it, and would appoint a successor to replace them after they died. Why does this sound similar to Obamacare?

6. Ordo Templis Orientis: The Order of the Temples of the East was originally founded as an offshoot of the Masons, kind of like the Stonecutters but without Steve Gutenberg. But it underwent radical changes when an occult magician known as the Great Beast, Aleister Crowley, took over the leadership.

5. Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn: This is yet another occult group that grew out of the Masonic and Rosicrucian traditions, but with a much stronger emphasis on ritual magic like spell-casting, astrology, astral travel, crystal balls and potions. A young Aleister Crowley was one of the order’s most famous members before he left to really get his freak on.

4. The Knights Templar: Founded almost a thousand years ago as a kind of highway patrol for pilgrims in the holy land, they were originally called the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ. Their emblem was of two knights riding on a single horse, emphasizing the Order’s poverty.

3. The Illuminati: As the unofficially self appointed spokesperson for the Illuminati, I am in no way whatsoever authorized to tell you, We don’t really exist, so please stop asking. We are not managing the New World Order through YouTube.

2. Opus Dei: Opus Dei is in the form of some sort of organization within the Catholic Church that may be hiding something important and according to many critics allegedly acts as, well, if they’re better than other Christians. It is claimed that they strongly emphasize the belief that “everyone is called to holiness and that ordinary life is a path to sanctity.” I gotta say, that’s a pretty deep statement.

1. The Black Hand: This secret military society in the Balkans was formed in 1911 with the aim of liberating the Serbian people from Austro-Hungarian rule. Their half-baked plan was to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand (yes, like that Franz Ferdinand), who was the heir to the Austrian throne, assuming that this would initiate a war between Austria and Serbia. The first two assassination attempts with a car bomb failed to injure the Archduke and his wife and they managed to escape.

In5D Addendum

Gregg Prescott, M.S.
Editor, In5D.com

My list is somewhat different:

1. The Bilderberg Group

2. Opus Dei

3. Illuminati

4. Committee of 300

5. Freemasons

6. Knights Templar

7. Skull & Bones

8. Thule Society

9. The Priory of Sion

10. Rosicrucians

Bilderberg Group: The Bilderberg Group, Bilderberg conference, Bilderberg meetings or Bilderberg Club is an annual private conference of about 120–150 political leaders and experts from industry, finance, academia and the media, established in 1954. About two thirds of the participants come from Europe and the rest from North America; one third from politics and government and the rest from other fields.

The reason why I have the Bilderberg Group number one is because of the influence they have over world events versus many of the other groups who are more localized.

Honorable Mention: Knights of Columbus, The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine

Source

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25 Things We Did As Kids That Would Get Us Arrested Today

If you haven’t noticed that World is a stupid and boring place nowadays. When I was a kid we explored the World with our friends and our senses. Now everything is protected and forbidden. We have a life and one purpose of life is learning and you don’t learn if everything is done for you and you don’t explore the World. It’s sickening that kids today are sitting at home playing video games when they should be with their friends outside and explore the wonderful World which we are living.

Here’s a a nice article about the things what for example I did when I was a kid and hey… I’m still alive and well…

With all of the ridiculous new regulations, coddling, and societal mores that seem to be the norm these days, it’s a miracle those of us over 30 survived our childhoods.

Here’s the problem with all of this babying: it creates a society of weenies.

There won’t be more more rebels because this generation has been frightened into submission and apathy through a deliberately orchestrated culture of fear. No one will have faced adventure and lived to greatly embroider the story.

Kids are brainwashed – yes, brainwashed – into believing that the mere thought of a gun means you’re a psychotic killer waiting for a place to rampage.

They are terrified to do anything when they aren’t wrapped up with helmets, knee pads, wrist guards, and other protective gear.

Parents can’t let them go out and be independent or they’re charged with neglect and the children are taken away.

Woe betide any teen who uses a tool like a pocket knife, or heck, even a table knife to cut meat.

Lighting their own fire? Good grief, those parents must either not care of their child is disfigured by 3rd-degree burns over 90% of his body or they’re purposely nurturing a little arsonist.

Heaven forbid that a child describe another child as “black” or, for that matter, refer to others as girls or boys. No actual descriptors can be used for the fear of “offending” that person, and “offending” someone is incredibly high on the hierarchy of Things Never To Do.

“Free range parenting” is all but illegal and childhood is a completely different experience these days.

All of this babying creates incompetent, fearful adults.

Our children have been enveloped in this softly padded culture of fear, and it’s creating a society of people who are fearful, out of shape, overly cautious, and painfully politically correct.  They are incredibly incompetent when they go out on their own because they’ve never actually done anything on their own.

When my oldest daughter came home after her first semester away at college, she told me how grateful she was to be an independent person. She described the scene in the dorm.  “I had to show a bunch of them how to do laundry and they didn’t even know how to make a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese,” she said.  Apparently they were in awe of her ability to cook actual food that did not originate in a pouch or box, her skills at changing a tire, her knack for making coffee using a French press instead of a coffee maker, and her ease at operating a washing machine and clothes dryer.  She says that even though she thought I was being mean at the time I began making her do things for herself, she’s now glad that she possesses those skills.  Hers was also the room that had everything needed to solve everyday problems: basic tools, first aid supplies, OTC medicine, and home remedies.

I was truly surprised when my daughter told me about the lack of life skills her friends have.  I always thought maybe I was secretly lazy and that was the basis on my insistence that my girls be able to fend for themselves, but it honestly prepares them for life far better than if I was a hands-on mom that did absolutely everything for them.  They need to realize that clothing does not get worn and then neatly reappear on a hanger in the closet, ready to be worn again. They need to understand that meals do not magically appear on the table, created by singing appliances a la Beauty and the Beast.

If the country is populated by a bunch of people who can’t even cook a box of macaroni and cheese when their stoves function at optimum efficiency, how on earth will they sustain themselves when they have to not only acquire their food, but must use off-grid methods to prepare it? How can someone who requires an instruction manual to operate a digital thermostat hope to keep warm when their home environment it controlled by wood they have collected and fires they have lit with it?  How can someone who is afraid of getting dirty plant a garden and shovel manure?

Did you do any of these things and live to tell the tale?

While I did make my children wear bicycle helmets and never took them on the highway in the back of a pick-up, many of the things on this list were not just allowed, they were encouraged. Before someone pipes up with outrage (because they’re *cough* offended) I’m not suggesting that you throw caution to the wind and let your kids attempt to hang-glide off the roof with a sheet attached to a kite frame. (I’ve got a scar proving that makeshift hang-gliding is, in fact, a terrible idea). Common sense evolves, and I obviously don’t recommend that you purposely put your children in unsafe situations with a high risk of injury.

But, let them be kids. Let them explore and take reasonable risks. Let them learn to live life without fear.

Raise your hand if you survived a childhood in the 60s, 70s, and 80s that included one or more of the following, frowned-upon activities (raise both hands if you bear a scar proving your daredevil participation in these dare-devilish events):

  1. Riding in the back of an open pick-up truck with a bunch of other kids
  2. Leaving the house after breakfast and not returning until the streetlights came on, at which point, you raced home, ASAP so you didn’t get in trouble
  3. Eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the school cafeteria
  4. Riding your bike without a helmet
  5. Riding your bike with a buddy on the handlebars, and neither of you wearing helmets
  6. Drinking water from the hose in the yard
  7. Swimming in creeks, rivers, ponds, and lakes (or what they now call *cough* “wild swimming“)
  8. Climbing trees (One park cut the lower branches from a tree on the playground in case some stalwart child dared to climb them)
  9. Having snowball fights (and accidentally hitting someone you shouldn’t)
  10. Sledding without enough protective equipment to play a game in the NFL
  11. Carrying a pocket knife to school (or having a fishing tackle box with sharp things on school property)
  12. Camping
  13. Throwing rocks at snakes in the river
  14. Playing politically incorrect games like Cowboys and Indians
  15. Playing Cops and Robbers with *gasp* toy guns
  16. Pretending to shoot each other with sticks we imagined were guns
  17. Shooting an actual gun or a bow (with *gasp* sharp arrows) at a can on a log, accompanied by our parents who gave us pointers to improve our aim. Heck, there was even a marksmanship club at my high school
  18. Saying the words “gun” or “bang” or “pow pow” (there actually a freakin’ CODE about “playing with invisible guns”)
  19. Working for your pocket money well before your teen years
  20. Taking that money to the store and buying as much penny candy as you could afford, then eating it in one sitting
  21. Eating pop rocks candy and drinking soda, just to prove we were exempt from that urban legend that said our stomachs would explode
  22. Getting so dirty that your mom washed you off with the hose in the yard before letting you come into the house to have a shower
  23. Writing lines for being a jerk at school, either on the board or on paper
  24. Playing “dangerous” games like dodgeball, kickball, tag, whiffle ball, and red rover (The Health Department of New York issued a warning about the “significant risk of injury” from these games)
  25. Walking to school alone

Come on, be honest.  Tell us what crazy stuff you did as a child.

Teach your children to be independent this summer.

We didn’t get trophies just for showing up. We were forced, yes, forced – to do actual work and no one called protective services. And we gained something from all of this.

Our independence.

Do you really think that children who are terrified by someone pointing his finger and saying “bang” are going to lead the revolution against tyranny? No, they will cower in their tiny apartments, hoping that if they behave well enough, they’ll continue to be fed.

Do you think our ancestors who fought in the revolutionary war were afraid to climb a tree or get dirty?

Those of us who grew up this way (and who raise our children to be fearless) are the resistance against a coddled, helmeted, non-offending society that aims for a dependant populace. In a country that was built on rugged self-reliance, we are now the minority.

Nurture the rebellion this summer. Boot them outside. Get your kids away from their TVs, laptops, and video games. Get sweaty and dirty. Do things that makes the wind blow through your hair. Go off in search of the best climbing tree you can find. Shoot guns. Learn to use a bow and arrow. Play outside all day long and catch fireflies after dark. Do things that the coddled world considers too dangerous and watch your children blossom.

Teach your kids what freedom feels like.

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Chronic Fatigue and Spiritual Awakening

Have you noticed that if you are spiritually awaken it could be very consuming? I have been very very tired lately and keeping this blog is like burden. You try to awake people into this reality, but they are in sleep. You think that you are the only one who is awaken and the whole World is against you. Here are some tricks you could use to ease your fatigue:

Today’s topic is about the fatigue that many of you feel during your awakening shifts. It can be pretty intense. You may feel like you can never get enough sleep at night, and after awhile, all you want to do is sleep. But sleep may not be the right nourishment here, and I’ll talk a little bit about how I dealt with this fatigue and some of the issues that it may be representing.

What Is Not Awakening Fatigue

But before we go too far, let’s set some ground rules. If you are really super tired a lot of the time, you should definitely consult a doctor. The reasoning is that there are lots of strange illnesses out there, and I strongly encourage you to use all available tools before jumping to a conclusion that you must be having a spiritual awakening if you’re so tired.

Furthermore, let me illustrate a few scenarios about what is also not awakening fatigue:

  1. You do 19,000 different things during the day and get only 4 or 5 hours of sleep at night.
  2. You’re very psychic and have gotten entangled in hexes or trying to save other people energetically.
  3. You don’t sleep/you’re an insomniac (While those of us who get waves of energy may have nights where we can’t sleep, being an insomniac is something else).

These are a couple of instances that come to mind immediately that I’ve noticed some people attempting to connect with a spiritual awakening.

For most people, the answer is this: do less. For the psychics, the answer is to disentangle from these psychic wars and/or psychic savior nonsense that you’ve gotten involved in. You should NEVER be trying to harm another energetically. There are terrible consequences to everyone involved for doing something so mean and unconscious. Perhaps almost as bad is the way some psychics link up energetically to others to try and help or save them. We all have the lessons that we are here to learn, and it’s not up to us to try and save people like that.

Learning How to Learn on the Spiritual Path

What Spiritual Awakening Fatigue Is

Okay, so I think we’ve covered the important basics, i.e. see a doctor, don’t do 9 million things in a day, get a full night’s sleep, etc. Now, for those of you in awakening, you’ll go to a doctor, and they’ll find nothing wrong with you. If you are also doing 9 million things a day, then that has to go to. But you’ll find as you do less, that you are still really, really tired. It’s like eating, meditating, and maybe…MAYBE an afternoon walk is all the energy that you have. You are also moving through moments of profound silence, stillness, and love (These are the real signs of awakening, btw. Check out “5 Signs of a Spiritual Awakening” for more on this). When all of this is coming together, you can be pretty sure that the fatigue you’re feeling is from awakening.

Why?

Part of what happens is that we’re being transformed on every level of ourselves. Some parts of us transform very easily. Some do not. We will find more resistance or density in certain areas of ourselves. But just because there is density there doesn’t mean that there’s anything bad in you. It’s just dense…like a rock. How much energy do you need to turn a rock into a gas? Come on physicists out there. I’m sure you’ve got an equation for this. But you get the point. You need a lot. For those of you going from a liquid into a gas, you still need a lot of energy to make that transformation, and with most or all of your energy tied up in that transformation, you don’t have much energy for the world.

Letting Go of Resistance

The biggest thing that most of us learn is to let go of resistance. Whether it’s the mind not believing that it can get through this transformation or the wounded heart believing it’s not worthy of all this divine love, resistance slows down the transformation. The greater resistance you have, the greater and greater exhaustion you’re likely to have after your spiritual awakening.

Consider that we’re like caterpillars going into our chrysalises. We need a lot of time in there to become butterflies, but we can’t fully give ourselves to that transformation if we’re already trying to fly before we have wings or if we’re still trying to crawl all over the place. I know that you think that you don’t have time, but if you don’t make time, you’re going to crash. And it won’t be pretty.

Because inside, your soul–the real you–has already chosen this path. And you need to come into acceptance of it. If you don’t, then you’re still resisting the change. It’s time to let go of that resistance. It’s absolutely exhausting. Resisting your spiritual awakening will take away every last bit of energy you have until you can’t get off the floor and people are deciding to put you in a mental facility.

Well, serious help is already here; it’s you. It’s you and God, which are becoming one and the same. Because we are all God. We are all both the parts and the whole of God. This is what happens when we lose duality and blend into the Divine oneness. So just let go. If you are tired, then rest.

It’s okay. Really.

Meditation and Energy Support

For about 3 to 4 years in my awakening shift, it felt like my subconscious was on overdrive to integrate all the energy that had poured into me. I was integrating all of me. It’s amazing how much bigger we are than what we perceive. It’s amazing how cut off we are from ourselves, and we are cut off by our own unconscious choosing. That makes the re-merger intense. Many of you who are going through this intensity know what I mean. The biggest things that I’ve found to help through the fatigue have been meditation and other energetically supportive tools. But even these only go so far. So much of shifting is allowing, and then engaging in making changes that feel true to your heart after allowing.

In years past, after a night of sleeping but not sleeping, I would meditate in the morning. Sometimes I did energy visualizations to replenish my system. By the end of meditation, I would feel like I had some energy to do things. Having friends, a spiritual community, or a spiritual teacher to support us is also important at different times. Some people who are close to nature will go for short walks to energize. And if you naturally get a lot of energy from nature, perhaps you will stay out there longer. Some of you practically are flowers and seem to do photosynthesis. I had one friend who immediately perked up when she went out in the sun.

So you get the idea. The fatigue is coming from lack of energy or rather, a lack of energy for doing anything but transforming. You actually have tons of energy, but it’s otherwise pre-occupied. It’s kinda like having 20 GB of RAM, but it’s all being used right now. Your computer can’t do anything else until the first set of operations are done. But just because you do get a little energy from time to time to do more things doesn’t mean that you should do lots of things during this time period. Do what you have to, and then trust that the rest will attend to itself.

Helping Others to Understand Your Needs

One of the biggest things people have trouble with is explaining to others their needs during these shifts. I encourage a lot of people to have journals so that they can understand what’s going on. Until you can explain to yourself what’s going on in your own words, you won’t be able to explain it to anyone else. Of course, this is part of why I write this blog: I’m encouraging you to find your own words and to realize that nothing is wrong. You’re doing fine. Just relax into this shift. Make space for it, and let go.

I know some of you are married, have children, live with family, and/or are in committed relationships, and this can cause a lot of strain on the other person/people at times. There’s no easy way around it, but as I said, you’re going to need to find your words to help the people in your lives understand what’s going on. People who really love you will work with you. If not, your awakening has simply shown the rotting foundation that you’ve been trying to build relationships on. It’s best to go find a better structure to build a new one on, but first, you’ve got to finish demolishing and re-building this relationship with yourself.

The Shadow and Dispelling the Darkness Phase

The Return of Normal Sleep

Because awakening can move a lot of energy, people often have their sleep disrupted, and that disruption can lead to a lot of fatigue and tiredness. There’s a whole host of ways that people no longer sleep normally as the initial shifts and transformation rolls through. Night time psychic visions and sudden abilities to have out-of-body experiences are some of the things that can change someone’s sleep as their hidden talents emerge thanks to the awakening. The processing of old pain and issues submerged in the subconscious is another thing that can turn dreams into serious nighttime workouts. Finally, the amount of energy moving through someone is like being wired on caffeine all night long. It can be difficult to calm things down enough to go to sleep much less to get any deep, normal sleep.

Personally, I had quite a few issues with sleep for the first several years of awakening, but in one of my huge shifts at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, I really opened to this fatigue and accepted just how little energy I had for anything else. After that shift, my heart opened up to a new level and all kinds of things transformed including my ability to sleep restfully at night, which I have been forever grateful to have back. So what I’ll remind you repeatedly in these blogs is this: your shifts after awakening are temporary, and allowing them is the quickest and most painless (but not discomfort-free) way to shift and grow.

For more about spiritual awakening and sleep in general, I encourage you to check out this blog post.

Last Thoughts on Spiritual Awakening and Fatigue

Spiritual awakening is never about punishing you. Nothing is going wrong. You are transforming. Things are actually going very right, perhaps for the first time in your life. All the suffering that you perhaps didn’t know was there is coming up to be processed and released so that you can be happy, healthy, and whole. As you heal, you can open further and go deeper. Deeper wounds can be illuminated, and your spiritual growth can expand you even more. It is a beautiful and powerful cycle of healing and growth and opportunity to find the truth about who you really are.

The Process of Releasing Pain from Your Energy Body

However, as I mentioned about transforming the rock into a gas, it can take a lot of energy to transform. All the tools that I mention in this blog serve to help you make this process easier–to break apart the rocks that you can break apart and to let go of the things that do not serve you. In so doing, you can alleviate any mental suffering that may arise during this sacred process. And you can rest assured that as you relax more deeply into the awakened space, you will have all the energy available to you to do whatever it is you are here to do.

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The Internet Is Now Weaponized, And You Are The Target

Inter is a weapon, which is used against you. Sadly a great thing has turned out to be a spying machine that is leading us towards NWO:

Zero Hedge
November 17, 2013

By now, thanks to Edward Snowden, it is common knowledge and not just conspiracy theory, that every bit of information sent out into the wired or wireless ether is scanned, probed, intercepted and ultimately recorded by the NSA and subsequently all such information is and can be used against any US citizen without a court of law (because the president’s pet secret NISA “court” is anything but). Sadly, in a country in which courtesy of peak social networking, exhibitionism has become an art form, the vast majority of Americans not only could not care less about Snowden’s sacrificial revelations, but in fact are delighted the at least someone, somewhere cares about that photo of last night’s dinner. However, it turns out that far from being a passive listener and recorder, the NSA is quite an active participant in using the internet. The weaponized internet.

Because as Wired reports, “The internet backbone — the infrastructure of networks upon which internet traffic travels — went from being a passive infrastructure for communication to an active weapon for attacks.” And the primary benefactor: the NSA – General Keith Alexander massive secret army – which has now been unleashed against enemies foreign, but mostly domestic.

Enter the QUANTUM program….

According to revelations about the QUANTUM program, the NSA can “shoot” (their words) an exploit at any target it desires as his or her traffic passes across the backbone. It appears that the NSA and GCHQ were the first to turn the internet backbone into a weapon; absent Snowdens of their own, other countries may do the same and then say, “It wasn’t us. And even if it was, you started it.”

If the NSA can hack Petrobras, the Russians can justify attacking Exxon/Mobil. If GCHQ can hack Belgacom to enable covert wiretaps, France can do the same to AT&T. If the Canadians target the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy, the Chinese can target the U.S. Department of the Interior. We now live in a world where, if we are lucky, our attackers may be every country our traffic passes through except our own.

Which means the rest of us — and especially any company or individual whose operations are economically or politically significant — are now targets. All cleartext traffic is not just information being sent from sender to receiver, but is a possible attack vector.

… which is basically packet injection:

The QUANTUM codename is deliciously apt for a technique known as “packet injection,” which spoofs or forges packets to intercept them. The NSA’s wiretaps don’t even need to be silent; they just need to send a message that arrives at the target first. It works by examining requests and injecting a forged reply that appears to come from the real recipient so the victim acts on it.

The technology itself is actually pretty basic. And the same techniques that work on on a Wi-Fi network can work on a backbone wiretap. I personally coded up a packet-injector from scratch in a matter of hours five years ago, and it’s long been a staple of DefCon pranks.

Traditionally, packet injections has been used mostly for censorship purposes:

The most infamous use of packet injection prior to the Snowden leaks was censorship, where both internet service providers (ISPs) and the Great Firewall of China injected TCP reset packets (RST) to block undesired traffic. When a computer receives one of these injected RST packets, it closes the connection, believing that all communication is complete.

Although public disclosure forced ISPs to stop this behavior, China continues to censor with injected resets. It also injects the Domain Name System (DNS) — the system all computers use to turn names such as “www.facebook.com” into IP addresses — by inserting a fake reply whenever it sees a forbidden name. (It’s a process that has caused collateral damage by censoring non-Chinese internet traffic).

And user identification, especially in making Tor obsolete. That’s right: all users of Tor believing they hide behind the veil of anonymity – you aren’t.

User cookies, those inserted by both advertising networks and services, also serve as great identifiers for NSA targeting. Yet a web browser only reveals these cookies when communicating with such sites. A solution lies in the NSA’s QUANTUMCOOKIE attack, which they’ve utilized to de-anonymize Tor users.

A packet injector can reveal these cookies by replying to an unnoticed web fetch (such as a small image) with a HTTP 302 redirect pointing to the target site (such as Hotmail). The browser now thinks “hey, should really go visit Hotmail and ask it for this image”. In connecting to Hotmail, it reveals all non-secure cookies to the wiretap. This both identifies the user to the wiretap, and also allows the wiretap to use these cookies.

So for any webmail service that doesn’t require HTTPS encryption, QUANTUMCOOKIE also allows the wiretap to log in as the target and read the target’s mail. QUANTUMCOOKIE could also tag users, as the same redirection that extracts a cookie could also set or modify a cookie, enabling the NSA to actively track users of interest as they move across the network — although there is no indication yet that the NSA utilizes this technique.

But all of the above are largely passive interception and surveillance strategies. Where it gets interesting is when the NSA’s mission is…

User Attack

The NSA has a collection of FOXACID servers, designed to exploit visitors. Conceptually similar to Metasploit’s WebServer browser autopwn mode, these FOXACID servers probe any visiting browser for weaknesses to exploit.

All it takes is a single request from a victim passing a wiretap for exploitation to occur. Once the QUANTUM wiretap identifies the victim, it simply packet injects a 302 redirect to a FOXACID server. Now the victim’s browser starts talking to the FOXACID server, which quickly takes over the victim’s computer. The NSA calls this QUANTUMINSERT.

The NSA and GCHQ used this technique not only to target Tor users who read Inspire (reported to be an Al-Qaeda propaganda magazine in the English language) but also to gain a foothold within the Belgium telecommunication firm Belgacom, as a prelude to wiretapping Belgium phones.

One particular trick involved identifying the LinkedIn or Slashdot account of an intended target. Then when the QUANTUM system observed individuals visiting LinkedIn or Slashdot, it would examine the HTML returned to identify the user before shooting an exploit at the victim. Any page that identifies the users over HTTP would work equally well, as long as the NSA is willing to write a parser to extract user information from the contents of the page.

Other possible QUANTUM use cases include the following. These are speculative, as we have no evidence that the NSA, GCHQ, or others are utilizing these opportunities. Yet to security experts they are obvious extensions of the logic above.

HTTP cache poisoning. Web browsers often cache critical scripts, such as the ubiquitous Google Analytics script ‘ga.js’. The packet injector can see a request for one of these scripts and instead respond with a malicious version, which will now run on numerous web pages. Since such scripts rarely change, the victim will continue to use the attacker’s script until either the server changes the original script or the browser clears its cache.

Zero-Exploit Exploitation. The FinFly “remote monitoring” hacking tool sold to governments includes exploit-free exploitation, where it modifies software downloads and updates to contain a copy of the FinFisher Spyware. Although Gamma International’s tool operates as a full man-in-the-middle, packet injection can reproduce the effect. The injector simply waits for the victim to attempt a file download, and replies with a 302 redirect to a new server. This new server fetches the original file, modifies it, and passes it on to the victim. When the victim runs the executable, they are now exploited — without the need for any actual exploits.

 

Mobile Phone Applications. Numerous Android and iOS applications fetch data through simple HTTP. In particular, the “Vulna” Android advertisement library was an easy target,  simply waiting for a request from the library and responding with an attack that can effectively completely control the victim’s phone. Although Google removed applications using this particular library, other advertisement libraries and applications can present similar vulnerabilities.

 

DNS-Derived Man-in-the-Middle. Some attacks, such as intercepting HTTPS traffic with a forged certificate, require a full man in the middle rather than a simple eavesdropper. Since every communication starts with a DNS request, and it is only a rare DNS resolver that cryptographically validates the reply with DNSSEC, a packet injector can simply see the DNS request and inject its own reply. This represents a capability upgrade, turning a man-on-the-side into a man-in-the-middle.

 

One possible use is to intercept HTTPS connections if the attacker has a certificate that the victim will accept, by simply redirecting the victim to the attacker’s server. Now the attacker’s server can complete the HTTPS connection. Another potential use involves intercepting and modifying email. The attacker simply packet-injects replies for the MX (Mailserver) entries corresponding to the target’s email. Now the target’s email will first pass through the attacker’s email server. This server could do more than just read the target’s incoming mail, it could also modify it to contain exploits.

 

Amplifying Reach. Large countries don’t need to worry about seeing an individual victim: odds are that a victim’s traffic will pass one wiretap in a short period of time. But smaller countries that wish to utilize the QUANTUMINSERT technique need to force victims traffic past their wiretaps. It’s simply a matter of buying the traffic: Simply ensure that local companies (such as the national airline) both advertise heavily and utilize in-country servers for hosting their ads. Then when a desired target views the advertisement, use packet injection to redirect them to the exploit server; just observe which IP a potential victim arrived from before deciding whether to attack. It’s like a watering hole attack where the attacker doesn’t need to corrupt the watering hole.

Can anything be done to prevent the NSA’s internet army from running over a world that spends the bulk of its time in its reaches? Not much:

The only self defense from all of the above is universal encryption. Universal encryption is difficult and expensive, but unfortunately necessary. Encryption doesn’t just keep our traffic safe from eavesdroppers, it protects us from attack. DNSSEC validation protects DNS from tampering, while SSL armors both email and web traffic.

There are many engineering and logistic difficulties involved in encrypting all traffic on the internet, but its one we must overcome if we are to defend ourselves from the entities that have weaponized the backbone.

Alas, in the battle against the NSA, the biggest enemy is not the authoritarian state’s Super Big Brother, but apathy itself. It is that war that is by far the most important one, and which America has already lost.

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