If the Iran Nuclear Deal Collapses, Iranian Hackers Will Target These U.S. Companies

 

If the Iran nuclear deal fails, U.S. companies will suffer never-before-seen security breaches thanks to Tehran’s “hacker army.”

This particular cyber militia has been honing its skills and expanding since 2013. That’s when then-Iranian President Hassan Rouhani increased the country’s cybersecurity spending 12-fold, Business Insider reported in 2015. Rouhani allocated roughly $19.8 million to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Tehran’s military) to up its cyber capabilities.

India, Pakistan join China and Russia-led security bloc

 

Asian rivals India and Pakistan on Friday formally joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a security bloc spearheaded by China and Russia, despite bilateral tensions bubbling over Kashmir.

Leaders of the largely symbolic body — including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping — formally signed off on the sub-continent duo’s accession at the annual SCO summit in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana.

EU crafts defence plan in Trump’s shadow

EU battlegroups could form the core of the new “multifunctional civilian and military capabilities” (Photo: Public Affairs Office

 

A jumbo-sized meeting of 56 EU foreign and defence ministers endorsed a plan to create a mini military HQ and to have joint rapid-reaction forces on Monday (14 November).

The EU foreign service will create the HQ, called “a permanent operational planning and conduct capability”, which will command “non-executive military missions”, such as training the Libyan or Iraqi military, but not combat.

They also agreed that the EU needed its own joint forces that could be sent, if needed, to “situations of high security risk in the regions surrounding the EU”, for instance, in Africa, but said those types of operations would be commanded out of national HQs.

Is Germany Still in the Race for Australia’s Biggest Arms Deal of the Century?

Angela Merkel is aggressively pushing for Germany to win a contract to build 12 submarines.

Tomorrow’s issue of Der Spiegelfeatures a story on Angela Merkel’s efforts to secure one of the largest arms deals in Germany’s history. The article discusses the, according to a German government source, “outstanding” opportunity for the German arms industry should the German manufacturer ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) be awarded the contract to build up to twelve new submarines for the Australian Royal Navy.  TKMS’s offer, the 4,000 tons HDW class 216 is a submarine, specifically designed to meet Canberra’s needs, which is looking to replace its aging Collins-class submarine fleet.

Treasury Department Seeking Survival Kits For Bank Employees

Emergency masks, solar blankets to be delivered to every major bank in the U.S.

The Department of Treasury is seeking to order survival kits for all of its employees who oversee the federal banking system, according to a new solicitation.

The emergency supplies would be for every employee at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which conducts on-site reviews of banks throughout the country. The survival kit includes everything from water purification tablets to solar blankets.

Russia launches huge air defense exercises close to Ukraine

Russia has announced large-scale air defense exercises along its Ukraine border. The move is being perceived as a show of strength by Moscow, and is likely to further raise tensions in the region.

Russia has announced large-scale air defense exercises along its Ukraine border. The new military drills will involve around 100 aircraft, and will be staged from Monday through to Friday this week, a Russian air force spokesman told the Interfax news agency.

NATO reports new Russian troop build-up near Ukraine

Kiev (AFP) – NATO on Thursday reported another build-up of Russian forces near Ukraine as its new president put in place key pieces of his pro-Western government and embraced an EU trade pact that has been bitterly fought by the Kremlin.

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But the Kremlin’s good will was immediately put in question by new charges from NATO that Putin had seen “at least a few thousand more” troops to the border in a reversal of a withdrawal he had begun at the start of the month.

Japan & Australia consider submarine deal that could rattle China

TOKYO/SYDNEY (Reuters) – Japan will get the chance to pursue an unprecedented military export deal when its defense and foreign ministers meet their Australian counterparts in Tokyo next month.

Japan is considering selling submarine technology to Australia – perhaps even a fleet of fully engineered, stealthy vessels, according to Japanese officials. Sources on both sides say the discussions so far have encouraged a willingness to speed up talks.

Pentagon eyeing immigrants who arrived illegally

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon is weighing allowing some immigrants brought illegally to the country as youths to serve in the military, a unilateral step by the Obama administration as immigration legislation remains stalled in the Republican-led House.

The announcement came Tuesday as House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, defended his election-year decision to rebuff a narrow immigration measure pushed by a GOP congressman to achieve a similar goal.

The Pentagon consideration would apply to immigrants who arrived illegally as kids but already have received work permits and relief from deportation under a program President Barack Obama announced two years ago, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. More than 500,000 immigrants have benefited from the program.

Haglund: Sweden and Finland closer to NATO than ever

Finland’s Ministry of Defence Carl Haglund says he believes Russia’s actions in Ukraine have brought Finland and Sweden closer to NATO now than they ever were in the past.

During his party’s conference in the southern coastal city of Hanko on Saturday, the Swedish People’s Party (RKP) Chair Carl Haglund spoke of the Ukraine crisis and its ramifications, defending Ukraine’s right to sovereignty and self-determination.

Russian units transferred from securing the Sochi games to the Ukraine border

debkafile’s military sources report that units of the Russian forces which formed a steel ring around the Olympic Winter Games that ended in Sochi Sunday were flown and shipped Monday, Feb. 24 to Russian bases at the Ukrainian Crimean port of Sevastopol, as Moscow refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new authorities in Kiev.

Giant Russian Air Force transports and rapid deployment forces were placed on alert at the Rostov on-Don base east of the predominantly Russian-speaking southeastern Ukrainian town of Donetsk.

Russia creates Arctic military district

The military build-up in the Arctic is underway.

In 2014 Russia will create a new military structure, which will be called the Northern Fleet – United Strategic Command (NF-USC). General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces informed that the mission of the new unit would be the protection of Russian national interests in the Arctic.

The active work in this direction started last year, after President Putin’s televised appeal to the Minister of Defense “to pay special attention to deploying infrastructure and military units in the Arctic.”

PLA needs bigger guns and tanks for its growing soldiers

The People’s Liberation Army is replacing its weapons because its young soldiers are getting bigger, the PLA Daily has reported.

The average PLA soldier is now 2cm taller and his waistline 5cm wider than the average soldier two decades ago, a report by the General Armament Department’s chemical decontamination institution revealed.

It did not state the average measurements of height and waistline.

The report said that because many of the army’s current weapons were designed based on soldiers’ sizes some 30 years ago, a soldier of normal build today would feel cramped in the tanks and find the firearms too short to use.

U.S. Navy to deploy ‘Star Wars’-like laser system this summer; electromagnetic rail guns not far behind

BATH, Maine — Some of the Navy’s futuristic weapons sound like something out of “Star Wars,” with lasers designed to shoot down aerial drones and electric guns that fire projectiles at hypersonic speeds. That future is now.

The Navy plans to deploy its first laser on a ship later this year, and it intends to test an electromagnetic rail gun prototype aboard a vessel within two years.

Iran blatantly defies five key Geneva Pact commitments – heads for nuclear arsenal

In short, what Iran is seemingly looking to do is be able to up the production capability to where it can build nuclear weapons within two weeks. A two week time period would be too short of a period of time for most nations to react, especially as nations today are forming ‘coalitions’ in order to mitigate political backlash. Throw in the usual stalling/delay tactics as well as Russia and China blocking all efforts in the UN, combined with a United States that is slowly bringing resources to the Asian “pivot” and we might have a perfect recipe for disaster. Once again, Israel will find itself mostly alone with its back against the wall and left no choice but to strike preemptively or in reaction to an attack — neither make a difference now.

Iran’s utilization of advanced IR-2m centrifuges for enriching uranium, in violation of the interim Geneva accord, was presented by the US and the five powers Wednesday, Jan. 8, as the main difficulty in its implementation. This claim allowed the follow-up meeting to take place in Geneva on Thursday, Jan. 9.DEBKAfile’s Iranian and intelligence sources report that this was a lame excuse to account for the real situation, which is that Iran has not even started implementing any part of the Geneva accord it signed last November 24. The follow-up talks this week are not expected to break out of this impasse, any more than the first round did on Dec. 19-20.

This is because the obstacles are far from technical; they arise from Iranian domestic politics.  Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has fenced in President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammed Jawad Zarif with hard-line objectors to the tactics employed till now by the Iranian team, led by Iranian deputy foreign minister Abbas Araqchi. In future, negotiators will be required to refer all the conclusions reached with the powers to the policy-making levels in Tehran for approval and abide by their guidelines.