Cyber Security 411: Online Privacy Guide for Journalists 2019 from vpnMentor, is a must-read, and its knowledge base effectively aids reporters and laypeople alike, especially in the wake of ‘Collection #1’, one of, if not the, largest security breach on record.

‘Vigilance!’

You do not need J.K. Rowling’s “Mad-Eye” Moody to reinforce the point.

Paranoia is in the air around us (not just talking about POTUS here), and there is good reason when it comes to security for one’s self.

Well over 600,000 cyber attacks have crossed the global airwaves in the past 22 hours alone [see them in real time with FireEye Cyber Threat Map: https://www.fireeye.com/cyber-map/threat-map.html].

Even those working in cyber security can use a resource that easily conveys the importance and specifics of the craft to the public in a way they can absorb.

First we will touch on the need for journalists to have these hammers, nails, and gloves in their tool belt.

But all of these things should be utilized, or at the least be kept in mind, by anyone whose name and email are subject to being scraped and used to spread malicious materials to friends, family, colleagues, and contacts alike.

So aside from the cyberwar and its attacks that have erupted more than 454 times a second today, there is another disturbing war going on.

And this makes the protection of journalists and their sources all the more paramount.

In the United States there has been a progressive up scaling in the war against whistleblowers since the Clinton Administration, if not earlier.

You would think in the wake of Nixon it would be different.


Without whistleblowers and insightful journalism citizens would not have any idea as to what heinous acts a member or members of the government are committing against the folks they are sworn to serve.

Acts such as illegally tapping a political competitor, like Tricky Dick did, must come to light.

And so for anyone who is one of the 772,904,991 unique email addresses recently posted to a popular hacking forum [wired.com], securing the ways in which we choose passwords, store passwords, access communications and encrypt them have to become and remain priority.

Government agencies and black hat hackers can in some way trace all of our digital communication means, via email, call, text, legally or illegally.

The only way to successfully attain some semblance of privacy for yourself and/or your sources is to continue to learn about the new ways in which to protect and employing security methods proven to at least hold the dogs at bay for a period of time.

You can read and download vpnMentor’s eBook PDF-version of the Online Privacy Guide for Journalists 2019 here.

It is an excellent resource spelling out instructions, reliable choices to look into, citing research, and most of all explaining in laymen’s terms how to employ the techniques and tools.

The last of three big points made in their introduction is this: ‘Acting cautiously both in the digital and real world . . . needs to be done to ensure that a journalist’s sources and data are secure and well.’

Another series of great sources and insights can be found on the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Guides & Training page here.

Though it does not have the name “Equifax” attached to it, I am still shocked at the lack of mainstream news coverage for ‘Collection #1’ where 772,904,991 unique email addresses along with more than 21 million unique passwords were uncovered in a popular hacker space.

On have i been pwned, security researcher Troy Hunt’s project, the newly revealed mass, 87 gigabytes worth, of leaked data tops the list of the largest cyber security breaches in history.

If you are not familiar with the site, you can instantly check to see if you have an email account that has been compromised in a data breach of some kind on record.

Those using the same password for multiple sites can find their emails all over numerous areas that have been identified so far using this search tool and you can subscribe your emails to learn if any breach implicates your credentials.

Are your passwords remotely strong enough?

Well the Online Privacy Guide for Journalists 2019 points out that certain combinations can be cracked quite easily while others offer mathematical difficulties culminating in years or centuries for a machine to potentially break.

The Haystack is really cool.

The Gibson Research Corporation’s password strength calculator is a tool dubbed the Haystack and with it you can see that:

A password like “F53r2GZlYT97uWB0DDQGZn3j2e”, from a random password generator, seems very strong, and indeed it is, taking 1.29 hundred billion trillion centuries to exhaust all the combinations even when the software is making one hundred trillion guesses per second. [https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/online-privacy-journalists/]

But that is not to say that even a password like that, when not made randomly, often relies on some kind of pattern or human characteristic that is somewhat publicized in our 1984 world, a repeated number or sports team, perhaps (Mr. Robot fans), can make the code cracking very possible.

I have been told from a cyber security source I trust that a hacker needs only time and patience to learn any target and infiltrate it.

Do not make it easy for them.
 
“Cyber Security 411: Online Privacy Guide For Journalists 2019” was written by R.J. Huneke.

A slight hummmmmm sounded. The air behind Joshua trembled.

“What the?”

A blue glow dropped in front of his face. He jumped in fright. No one should have been able to get near him down there. Audio white noise played from the speaker that was duct-taped to the circular drone’s belly.

“How’s that possible?”

“I worked as a spy for Cyber,” said Waltz. “You might think your computers are locked down, but you seem to have forgotten who I used to be and what I used to do. What do you think a cyber warrior is anyway? Do you think it was hard to hack your security’s little air force?” asked Waltz with scorn.

The bolt struck Joshua in the chest and sent excruciating pain through his torso that spread out to the tips of his fingers and toes. Such totalic agony was wholly unknown to him.

“Fuck you!” he said.

     “No you won’t,” said the loud voice of Waltz. “And just so you know: that little guy I sent down to you . . . let’s call ‘em Hulk . . . Hulk won’t stop until you’re dead . . . and I am free.”

     “STOP!” squealed Joshua. He swung clenched fists into the air, but his feeble attempts fell far short of the bobbing drone. His t-shirt burned. “STOPPPPPP!”

     “This whole place will blow up,” he gasped, “and gas everyone with Ebola for twenty miles!”

“What did you say?” asked Waltz.

“I have to type in the failsafe code every hour or else you’re gone, I’m gone, everyone’s gone. Stop doing this to me, you fuck!”

“I’m listening. Talk fast.”

“Wangluo burrowed out the whole region for me. There are ventilation ducts running for a mile and a half radius around here. All around this, you’ll burn and boil your own putrefied organs!” cried Joshua. The electrocution ceased.

“Explain to me why you’d unleash Ebola on your own neighbors and betray your countrymen for Wangluo,” said Waltz.

“Because I read The Hot Zone and became inspired!” said Joshua with a mad bulge to his bloodshot eyes. Waltz felt sick to his stomach. The guy was joking about the mass murder. Can the Cyber protocol even make it on time?

But he was resolved to go forward. Risks were meant to be taken. Measured, not shaken, not stirred . . . just taken, Waltz thought grimly. God, I hope he doesn’t do it. He has a choice.

“If I can’t watch ‘em die of old age, then you can die watching ‘em suffer cellular liquefaction,” said Joshua. The drone steadied to a hover and began to shoot him again.

     “You sick bastard,” said Waltz incredulously. The drone ceased. “Why?”

There was a sound of typing. Keys clacked hard for a minute, while Joshua writhed on the floor and tried to pull it together. The heli-drone floated in front of him with its blue taser primed and aimed.

     “I grew the Ebola, they provided the dispersal tech. We felt Cyber needed to be crippled, and I’d just relocate to better facilities. So go ahead . . . kill me . . . and you’ll watch the second coming of the plague you fucking fascist pig.”

     HUMMMMMMMM

Smoke rose to Joshua’s nostrils as the bot sent thousand-plus volts of electricity into his gluttonous body again.

     “DIE PIG!”

“You are a psychopath,” said Waltz. The air cracked with thunder.

What Joshua did not realize was that the drone recording his admittance and the threat to unleash the custom-grown Ebola virus strain went not only to the government’s communications system and their monitors, but the live feed carried though to the Cyber President’s TV in the White House and all of the Cyber levels of personnel up to the Cyber Warriors (who would hear about it soon enough once their government building was abuzz and then forward it on to get the attention of the Cyber Elite).

This is a small excerpt from the R.J. Huneke novel CYBERWAR upcoming in October from Pentian Publishing. PRE-ORDERS are available here:  
http://pentian.com/book/fund/601

It was a long time to wait. For William Waltz it was torturous purgatory; a limbo without any semblance of time, except for the agonizing screen’s circulating tumblers. It was hell.

The Wangluo operatives had already abducted a member of the Cyber Coalition ambassador’s office, Moreen DeMarco, and she was to be beheaded on live Internet channels if Waltz did not intervene quickly. The tiny woman was filmed on a chair with a black bag covering her head and upper torso; she held her passport in quivering hands for the cameras. Wangluo denied all affiliation with the radicals who held Ms. DeMarco in a secret location. But Waltz had found them out, confirming the ambassador’s representative was being held in the embassy via her tracking nodules.

The Boston Clam Jam blasted in his headphones with the drums throbbing, Ba-Da BOOM BUM, Ba-da BOOM DUM. It urged Waltz to action, as if there was not anymore pressure for him. His legs shook feverishly, once his typing stopped. He waited.

The United Nations Wangluo Embassy was hallowed ground. He was at a stalemate while the eyes in the sky kept watch over everyone. Without the cameras going blind, he could do nothing. The world would not allow for any transgression on such neutral territory, and the world would answer swiftly with war to protect “the peace.” It was the one safe haven each country’s diplomats could rely on without question, and it was one of the few things that had been able to stalwart peace and stymy a world war.

“Thank the gods for coffee,” he said to himself as he watched the long lines of worms unzipping the protective grids of the security system code. 

The draught of black java was steaming, and the silken tendrils found their way over the keyboard, up and up into his nostrils. It would be his third cup of the night, but he needed it to stay more than awake and warm, to stay focused and alert beyond measure of all but the most adept cyber spies.

Though the Colombian bean was incredibly rare and terribly expensive due to the coffee plant blight in Central and South America, Cyber had responded kindly to his working tool and provided him with a supply monthly. Waltz was low maintenance in regards to the tools he required for his trade. 

Many Cyber Warriors relied on tech implants into their bodies, which meant their bodies were physically in constant upheaval with their own immune systems and their anti-bodies. A simple scrape alongside an A-block phone bio-implanted in the forearm brought heavily amplified infection. Something as simple as brushing cement caused suffering more often than not. The interface of the cellular with the electronic tech was not yet perfected. Such infection required super-engineered antibiotics the like of which only government disease control centers, like Cyber’s and Wangluo’s, were capable of engineering safely.
The indigo clusters pulled apart and disintegrated on the screen. Flashes and swirling numerals marked the security system’s attempts to raise alarms and push Waltz out. The window was short: twenty minutes and all traces of the invasion would disappear. 

He was in.

With a slow, sloppy pull from his mug, Waltz finished the coffee and ran across the rooftop. Night and the thick rain had given him the cover needed to evade the restaurant’s meager cameras, and they had no thermal sensors. Unfortunately, the grid Waltz’s virus had just taken offline was wholly separate from the establishment across the street.
As he rushed to the ladder on the side of the building, a heavy firedoor swung open and bashed him off of his feet. The security guards were more than the typical retired cops, they were tall, square, blocks of muscle that took advantage of his falling. They quickly pummeled his head and ribs. All thought, the racing streams riding the coffee buzz, abandoned Waltz. 

“Clearly you guys are Russian mafia-” 

A fist cracked his jaw and cut him off. His nose was next and the smell of blood filled him. He struggled to get off of his back while the two giants kicked and jabbed with freakish speed.

“Ex-KGB?”

An elbow connected with his temple.

“That’s a joke, guys. I’m sure you have no fucking idea who the KGB were.”

Waltz entered the fetal position and tried to roll. Heavy boots swarmed his back from one guard and his ribs and gut from the other. The thin layer of Kevlar beneath his clothes was the only thing saving him from being crippled permanently.

His pocket vibrated. There were only fifteen minutes left to save Moreen DeMarco’s life. There were only fifteen minutes left to prevent an all-out cyberwar. Shielding his face as best he could, Waltz put together enough thoughts to form a swift plan. 

Fifteen minutes.

Time slid away, like the rain on the slippery metal roof. In between pummeling blows, he reached back and pulled the laptop from his pack. The guards anticipated his using it as a shield. Instead, he rolled with it to the nearest deep puddle and plunged it home.

God, I hope the super-ion battery’s charged enough, he thought. 
As the guards each aimed to break the device in half with their punting of it, Waltz seized their ankles. As he grasped their pasty, almost luminescent skin in the night’s storm, he leaned his own elbows into the sizzling computer, and the three of them were jarred with agonizing electrocution.

“AARRRRRGGGGG!”

They were thrown in three different directions away from the shorted machine. The already dark and shadowy world dimmed to black.

* * *

ZZZZZmmmm. 

The vibration of his A-block woke Waltz to a start. He had training in the most adverse of circumstances and dealing with a digitally electrified world’s infrastructure on a daily basis, he was quite resistant to all but the deadliest of high voltage shocks.

He turned and threw up, the coffee boiling his esophagus horribly as it exploded across his black suit and then sputtered onto the rainy rooftop in Eastern Russia. Oh man, he thought, there’s only ten minutes left. I have to get her out, if it kills me.

Being born with a fair share of hard lumps offset by a good amount of luck, Waltz sat up and realized that despite their enormity, the mafia restaurant security guards were still unconscious. Their white dinner jackets were soaked with grime; their heads were lying against doused steel, and their sunglasses were cracked. But they were asleep. 
Waltz was free to go. Then he noticed the miniature ocular computer on the side of their glasses. They had been filming him. And he did not have time to undo the oncoming assault of mob guys protecting their territory that were surely on the way.

“No wonder the embassy allowed the restaurant to open right across the street from it,” he said. “No one in their right mind would trespass here.” He laughed at himself and coughed, holding what was surely many a bruised and broken rib. 

“Stay focused, genius. Time’s running out on her.”

Despite being barely able to walk, he rummaged along the rooftop until he found an air conditioning unit and the 220-volt lines coming into it. His experienced hands were unbroken and did their work on autopilot:  wires were exposed, the ground’s disconnected, and the rest were shorted against the metal casing. Sparks, smoke, and fire erupted upward. 

Waltz shielded his eyes and hurried away to the nearest ladder. He slowly lowered himself down the three-story building, wincing with every movement and every rung of the slimy ladder. Thunder rocked his recovering eardrums.

Since the cameras were down, he walked through the front gate and right on into the embassy. The U.N. representative, his name plaque said he was Sergio, looked curiously at Waltz’s drenched suit and beat up face and started to pick up a phone to call security over.

The buzz went off again. Five minutes was left until the system went back online and captured him.

Five minutes.

“Oh that won’t be necessary my good man,” said Waltz in perfect Russian. “Can I call you Sergio?”

“You may,” said Sergio answering in Russian. “Are you alright?”

“No, I am not. I was just mugged. They took my laptop, my wallet, and left me to-“

“Oh my god, are you alright?”

“I’m afraid I’m hurting a great deal. I need help, Sergio.”

“Let me call you a paramedic-“

“What’s going on here?” said a guard cutting off Sergio.

She was armed with a M6 semi-automatic rifle approached with her barrel pointed toward the floor. Her head was shaved. She looked ready to go ten rounds in a boxing match without showing a bruise.

Cameras lined the desk, the walls’ crown molding, the ceiling and many of the floor tiles. Big Brother’s eyes were everywhere. And Wangluo was blind for almost five more minutes.

Suddenly, Waltz slumped and feigned shifting woozily. He collapsed to the floor. As the guard leaned down, he grabbed her M6 and clocked her across the side of the head. She fell to the tile, passed out. 

“Come on, Sergio. You’re going to bring me inside to where you’re keeping the Cyber lady, Moreen DeMarco.”

“You can’t-“

“Move or die, Serg,” said Waltz, “it’s up to you. But choose quickly.”

The somewhat round U.N. agent led the Cyber Warrior through a few long hallways in the lush mansion hurrying as though his fervent waddling was the only thing that would save his life. Sergio gingerly opened the door to the wing’s powder room where Ms. DeMarco was gagged and tied to a heavy wooden chair. There was a bucket below her, filled with refuse, but not a sign of the guards.

Waltz pointed to the floor in front of Sergio to indicate he stay put. Sergio looked down, and got bonked on the back of the head. Waltz caught him and lowered him to the wooden floor. The weight of Sergio was sheer agony, as it was to move so quickly.

Waltz slipped to the bedroom door, which was ajar. Inside the dim room was a thick fog of cigar smoke where half a dozen men sat in a circle cheering with fistfuls of paper as a woman rolled a set of dice. He caught the crimson glow of someone’s bionic eye, but they were focused on the bottle beside them and the rattle of the cubes. Fuck it, he thought.

Waltz stepped back to Moreen DeMarco and untied her. As she took off the blindfold, he held his finger over his lips in a sign of silence. She nodded, took out the gag, and pointed to her bruised and battered legs and signed for him to pick her up.

What does she want me to do, fall over? I know she’s small but I’m barely walking here. Damn it, why did I have to go and knock out Sergio? He could’ve lifted the bitch.

To his utter horror she opened her mouth to persist:

“Pick me up,” she whispered.

“I will murder you right here and now, and make you watch as I gouge my own balls out with that fork,” he said pointing to a catering cart nearby, “if you speak out loud again.”

He did his best to lean down and let her put a slender arm over his shoulder. As she rose, her feet stumbled and nearly fell out from under her. She grasped hold of his side with her other hand, and he felt something pop; a rib moved in a wholly unnatural way.

Waltz straightened her up and with his free hand bit into his fist as pain threatened to make him pass out. His lungs throbbed and swelled and restricted his breathing. 

The stars started to fade from his vision when his phone vibrated another warning: he had two minutes to exit unseen.

I’ll never make it, he thought. 

They ambled out of the powder room and he looked both ways, immediately regretting again knocking out the only guide he had for the building, Sergio. He had no idea where to go to reach the exits he had mapped out and get out on time; there was just the way they had come, the lobby, and it was sure to have people investigating the sloppily disposed of guard that he had foolishly left on the middle of the floor in his hurry. 

I’m not thinking clearly, he realized. It’s only the pain. The pain is not going to get the better of me. I can drown it out. His ear buds had long since fallen out, but the sound of guitar soloing filled his head anyway and pushed away the paralyzing agony.

He stopped and turned Moreen around. They headed back to the powder room. 

“You can’t take me back,” she protested.

“Shut the fuck up,” he whispered. His eyes glowed threateningly, preternaturally, almost as if they were bionic and red, but they were not – they were just furious. The music came back and he sought peace, found peace.

* * *

The alarms sounded blaringly. Waltz’s song snapped off in his head. He hurt so much. And the clangor made his head heavy with pain.

From the cramped storage of the catering cart, he sat with his charge on his lap. How they fit in that tiny coffin, he did not know. Every time Moreen shifted her weight needles fired in his broken body. He hated her guts. 

They were wheeled down to the shipping area where the food carts were swapped for ones laden with more sustenance for the guests at the embassy. Talk of the escape and the lack of any video evidence added mystery to the story; it was thick in the voices of the staff. They were just meagerly paid servants, but Cyber was feared all the same . . . and for good reason.

THE END.

This is a work of fiction exclusive to Cyberwarseries.com and was written by author R.J. Huneke. It explores the protagonist of Cyberwar, William Waltz, and takes place before the events of the book, but within the world of Cyber. 

PRE_ORDER this upcoming novel Cyberwar for as little as $10 on the publisher's site here: http://pentian.com/book/fund/601

It seems the character Sheetrock wants to speak his mind, despite the book not being out yet. Well I have too much respect for the man to deny his simple request, so here is an exclusive excerpt from Cyberwar where the humble miner nicknamed "Sheetrock" gets to loose his mind.

I hope you enjoy it.

~RJH

Some people have a song constantly playing in their head. Sheetrock was one of these, and he knew it. The young drill captain figured the smart people fed their soul with music every day, because one: Jesus loved music, and two: rolling down the river of audio helped keep the record from skipping. Whereas those that despised the music echoing in their brains, scoffed openly of it, and resisted it to the extreme, those people often got jarred into the realms of insanity. They beat on the player Jesus had given them and as a result their records did, on occasion, skip. 

No matter the near-death run, the loss of his colleague and lover, or the freezing cold downpour, the David Byrne horns in his head blared on, and he welcomed the beauty of the earth, grimy as he was treading the soaked wooden dock. He whistled while his cargo unloaded, weighed, and purchased. It had taken all of an hour; it was the reason Sheetrock chose to land in Port Jeff in the first place: easy access to the scales and the buyers. Within another hour a quick sale had commenced.

With the payment transferred instantaneously upon completion of the cache transaction, Sheetrock walked swiftly with a slight limp toward the town’s bank (his knee had blown out in a ten kilometer benefit run and the rain’s moisture did it in). He had already handed each of his crew a payroll check that they knew would come into fruition once they had finished emptying the ship’s cargo hold, but he wanted to confirm with his own dark eyes that his personal account totaled twenty-eight million and change. He could finally afford to spend it all.

There was a slow methodical scraping as his muddy miner’s boots found the doormat outside the federal bank on the corner of Main Street. The heavy footwear were sealed, along with the black leathery jumpsuit that was made for rigorous activity in the oxygen deprived canals of space. He had not bothered changing. He was too eager. 

At least the rain’s washed the dust off my ass, thought Sheetrock as he walked into the bright lights of the taupe room. The large man could not have looked more out of place. A mile or two up the road was the derelict sidewalks of the Station, where none of the black market shufflers would ever have looked at his unshaven face and his stained and patched up space suit and given it a second glance. In the bank, he was almost two feet taller than the shortest tellers, and they stared open mouthed as though he was the second coming of the Messiah.

There was no one in line, but Sheetrock was a slave to ritual so he entered the velvet rope lane and followed it in three snaking switchbacks before a prim, older woman with the biggest eyeglasses he had ever seen waved him over.

“Hello. I’d like to make a withdrawal-“

“Fill out the pad, sir,” she said before he could complete his sentence. He reluctantly bent and wrote sloppily on the screen with a pen that was tied to the counter and did not allow his long arms to lift it far enough to be comfortable writing in the lines.

“As for the amount . . . Rosemary,” said Sheetrock noting her nametag, “I put in for it two weeks ago, but I don’t know exactly how much is in there. I want all of it.”

“Very well, sir.” 


She tilted her round head back to look him over and confirm his face with the scan she had on the screen in front of her. It was a feat that seemed a difficult one without there being any visible sign of a neck on her, and the blue eyes behind her enormous glasses bulged in the magnification as she took all of him in.

A frantic clacking of keys was heard, as she composed herself. Rosemary, the banker, seemed to be in a perpetual hurry.

“That’s the amount you have there, sir.” She pointed down toward his screen. “The supervisor’s already verified your request and approved it. Do you have a suitcase or some kind of carrier for the withdrawal?” she asked querulously.

“Jesus please be with me today,” his whisper to himself was a growl that she heard quite plainly. “I’m soaking wet and fresh off the ship. Does it look like I have a suitcase with me, Rosemary?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Do you have some kind of transportation case?” he asked impatiently. The round face tilted a little, like a bird’s.

“Deposit cases are available for two hundred dollars each. Are you sure you don’t want to go-”

“Listen, little lady, lord knows that twenty-eight million’s not going to fit into the envelopes you normally give me my cash in, now is it?”


*     *     *


Two large gray storage containers were brought in front of the counter, where Sheetrock paced. He signed for them hurriedly, and a resonant tone crackled and cut off the elevator music that had been playing. Everyone looked up, startled. A booming electronic voice took over the loudspeakers:

“THIS IS A CYBER ALERT: A 7 P.M. CURFEW IS NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR HOMES NOW.”