Sunday, August 9, 2015

Woyane and the Million dollar hacking scheme

August 8, 2015
by Yilma Bekele
You can take your family and friends on a Caribbean cruise. May be buy a one way ticket to Las Vegas and hope to turn it into four million. Who needs a return ticket when you are going back to wherever you came from by private plane? There is one little thing wrong with this scenario. The million Dollar is not your money. You are entrusted by the people to spend it wisely. Can we start again?
One Million US is about twenty Million Ethiopian Bir. I am sure that kind of money can build a library or two. You can purchase a sturdy pump to use both for irrigation or bring water to the village. Imagine how many teachers can be trained with that kind of dough? The list is endless for a poor country like Ethiopia. At the moment the proud nations exists on handout from foreigners. The budget is balanced by heavy subsidy from European Union and generosity of few rich countries. Our country is on Welfare.
The rogue and amateur Ethiopian government hackers attempts
So think hard before you spend that hard earned money collected from the poor citizen. How would you spend one million US if you are the Ethiopian government? Remember that you are aware of the sad state of education, the lack of potable water, the dismal state of the health care, the shortage of food among other problems – how would you allocate that twenty Million Bir?
Yes it is a little confusing on one hand to say the economy is growing double digits and on the other hand stretch your hand out since you cannot pay your bills without the kindness of others. So the Diaspora all over the world that sends money to family, the Diaspora that build condominiums on illegally obtained land and the foreign sponsors are the lifeblood of Woyane. Of course they pooh pooh the Diaspora contribution and hide the foreign alms.
How to spend the million plus US dollars is not a theoretical question. The dictatorship under the late dead PM Banda Meles Zenawi was faced with such issue. Well to tell you the truth by the mere fact that they control the purse they are forced to make a choice on how to spend the money the collected through taxing the citizen, selling Coffee and cereal and other revenues at their disposal. A normal government will submit the budgeting and the Parliament discusses the proposal invite opinions from the citizens and approves or disapproves based on the needs of the constituents that elected them and the welfare of the country as a whole.
It does not work like that in ‘democratic’ Ethiopia. The parliament is a bunch of illiterate and weak individuals recruited and appointed by the TPLF Party. The voting part is for foreign consumption as evidenced by the testimony given by President Obama. The TPLF Party based on the Tigrai core group but purporting to be representing all of Tigrai controls the Parliament (Legislative), Executive (Co-Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Defense Minister, Federal Affairs Minister, State Security, National bank, etc) and the Judiciary. No one ethnic group has controlled Ethiopia like this before!
So it looks like Meles Zenawi and Debretsion Gebremichael decided to spend our money by hiring a British (Gamma Group) and an Italian (Hacking Team) security companies to hack into the computers, mobile phones and Skype accounts of Ethiopians. How did we find that out. Surprise, surprise the Italian company company ‘hacking Team’ itself was hacked! More than 300GB of documents was made public and our Ethiopia was in the midst of this. We might be poor, we might be technologically backward but TPLF was willing to spend a million dollars to purchase this offensive technology to spy and get the upper hand. The hacking was announced via Hacking Team’s own compromised Twitter account, what a sweet revenge!
So what did Meles and Debretsion use this ‘offensive technology’? They were caught red handed by researchers at the Citizen Lab—a digital watchdog group at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.
The first hacking attempt against ESAT was targeting the Amsterdam ESAT studio. An individual using the name Yalfalkenu Meches sent an article but when they tried to open the attachment they noticed it was prepared in a different format. Citizens Lab was able to show using Skype logs from the targeted computer. Here is a brief illustration:
Ethiopian government hacking attempts
The alert ESAT manage (may the Gods bless him/her) did not open the file and confronted the individual. Here again is the exchange from Skype.
Ethiopian government hacking attempts
The Woyane bastard did not give up but tried a new trick.
Ethiopian government hacking attempts
That was formated to look like a word document but it was not. According to Citizens Lab ‘A user who opened the file saw a blank Word document, which quickly closed itself. The document exploited a bug in Microsoft Windows (CVE-2012-015844) to run a program that downloaded and executed a file’
If you don’t succeed the second time try again seems to be the way the Ethiopian Information Network Security Agency (INSA) Debretsion’s outfit operates. Thus their third attempt was aimed at ESAT’s studio In Virginia USA.
Ethiopian government hacking attempts
ESAT and Citizens Lab were already aware of Woyanes workings and this time they confronted Debretsion’s lackey and here is the conversation.
Ethiopian government hacking attempts
Ethiopian government hacking attempts
Citizens Lab of course made their investigation official. When asked by reporters an Ethiopian Embassy spokesperson Tesfaye Welde claimed ‘Ethiopia did not use and has no reason to use any spyware or other products provided by Hacking team or any other vendor inside or outside Ethiopia.’ Today thanks to smart hackers that hacked this enemy of Ethiopia Company we have the original thank you email from dictator Meles and a copy of the million dollars he paid so he could buy more time and abuse our people and nation. That is one million dollars that could have gone to schools, libraries and clinics.
The second time they were caught when they tried to hack ESAT’s Managing Director Ato Neamin Zelek’s computer using word document by hijacking an email address they have obtained previously.
Ethiopian government hacking attemptsAto Neamin promptly forwarded the suspicious email to Citizens Lab. Lo and behold it was no other than Debretsion of of INSA knocking again. It seems like the morons have used the the same command as before and the servers are shown to be registered to Ethio Telecom. The hacking Team’s Operations Manager was heard to have said ‘(Citizens Lab) found the source of the attack because these geniuses used the same email address they had used in the previous attack to send the doc with the exploit.’ so much for Woyane smartness,
Today the TPLF minority regime is being forced to answer to charges of illegal spying on foreign soil. In the US it is considered a Federal crime and the court has allowed the case to continue. There will be many others that will come out pretty soon. Citizens Lab is looking at more computers and doing a deep investigation suitable for the courts.
We Ethiopians have long ago understood the cheap, criminal and shameful character of Woyane. We are not surprised by anything coming out of Arat Kilo. To the outsider it is surprising how a small poor country would find itself using twenty first century technology to monitor its own people. They are always surprised how brazen and reckless Woyane’s are. Again to an Ethiopian there is no surprise here. Woyane kills in broad daylight and demands the victim’s family pay for the bullet. Woyane is so used to such outrageous conduct inside the country it is only natural they would try the same abroad too.
They have hacked the computers of a vast majority of those they suspect are working to dismantle their criminal enterprise. They are are so paranoid they think all of us are the enemy and they will spend millions so they could uncover ‘plots’ find ‘compromising’ information for blackmail or coerce individuals to work for their criminal enterprise. It is a temporary solution for a deep seated problem.
My dear Ethiopian family and friends as you can see what has been said by many about the destructive and criminal nature of the people in power has not been a figment of someone’s imagination. I wrote this so you can see clearly what the independent experts have found about the regime and its practice.
It has been said plenty of times that “woyane cannot be reformed.” It has been carrying out this criminal activity since its inception. It is too late to talk of reform. Removal by any means without prejudice is the only option left to the peace loving people of Ethiopia. The gallant effort that is being waged by our patriots is the only medicine to get rid of this virus.
The current smart way of fighting TPLF led by Patriotic Ginbot7 is the last chance we have as a country before they turn our homeland into another Iraq, Libya, Syria or Yemen. That is what is awaiting our country if we do not come together to get rid of the common enemy. Every Ethiopian is a hidden patriot ready to strike at Woyane when the time arrives. Be a patriot and love your mother.
I have included links that would make a good reading before you go to bed.

No comments: