Richard A. Clarke, Interviewed

FastCompany contributing editor Alex Pasternack has written-up a superb interview piece with the highly respected Richard A. Clarke, detailing his warnings of significant attack modalities that we all face as a nation, today, and the extreme danger unfolding around us. Today's Must Read!

"FC: The ransomware attacks seem like an interesting case study in how to respond, because some people are paying ransoms and some aren’t, and at great cost. RC: I think what’s interesting to me about ransomware is it’s picking off the low-hanging fruit. You know there’s that old joke that you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to, if there are three or four of you running, you just to run faster than the other guy. Well, that’s kind of the case with ransomware. Ransomware is picking off the slow runners. Ransomware is picking off the people who are spending 3 to 4% of their IT budget on security." - FastCompany contributing editor Alex Pasternack's superb interview of Richard A. Clarke

Apparently, There Is No Longer Clear And Present Danger

Meanwhile, in Governance By Imbeciles news, a troubling a story, via Betsy Woodruff, writing at The Daily Beast, targeting the shuttering of an intelligence analysis group (ostensibly focused on domestic terrorism) at the United States Department of Homeland Security, monikered the 'Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A)'. Also, claims by David Glawe (the new Trump Administration appointee that the grpup's closing makes for enhanced output, yet simutaneously, California's Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reports work product from DHS (regarding actionable domestic terrorism intelligence) is slowing to a trickle). Read it all in Ms. Woodruff's well crafted reportage, and try not to weep for our Law Enforcement Agegenies at both the Federal and Local levels. Today's Must Read.

Tracking Illegal Terrorist Funding Campaigns Via Cryptographic Currencies Tools

With superb research efforts, and the equally fascinating tutorials available for researchers targeting the problematic of illegality in terrorist funding, Brenna Smith divulges what it takes to discover, and subsequently track ill-gotten gains and the funding thereof, through the utilization of BitCoin transactions. Certainly today's MustRead, via Bellingcat. To effectively analyze any bitcoin address, I rely on four main tools:

"A bitcoin blockexplorer — which gives you access to the bitcoin blockchain... BitcoinWhosWho — which is a tool that allows you to look up certain BTC addresses... WalletExplorer — though similar to a block explorer in reporting transaction history... Good ole’ Google search — simply googling BTC addresses can lead you to blog posts..." - via Brenna Smith, writing at Bellingcat