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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work
@hostilespectrum.bsky.social
2.7K followers 300 following 1.2K posts
Former intel, now academic @NDU_CIC, @TheKrulakCenter, @SIWPSColumbia @ColumbiaSIPA, @CyberStatecraft, @ElliottSchoolGW, @PAISWarwick. Apolitical, views=own
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 2
The overarching analytic theme of futures estimates for the coming year (+/- 6months, in span of Moore) is that of brutal reset on long deferred pressures. 🧵
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 20
And an entire year’s expected political espionage game will not materialize for them. While you love to see it, at the same time know that those APT teams will have to do new and possibly creative things this year to make up for the shortfall, even if only for their own internal metrics.
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 20
Imagine for a minute how the adversary intrusion operators feel, who having put all of the work into another year’s campaign against Davos events, find that basically no one is attending this year because center of gravity is absolutely in DC at the moment.
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 19
Going into a national security special event with a staggeringly bright communications footprint involving absolutely no fail missions, it sure would have been nice to have confidence that SALT TYPHOON has been evicted from US telecom networks before now.
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 19
First impression is one of a very committed assault element.
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 19
Apparent counterrevolutionary / revenge hits against Iranian judiciary figures involved in extrajudicial prisoner killings & moharebeh cases, reads like something out of John Wick, with edged weapon engagement used to acquire battlefield pickup small arms.
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 19
The precedent that service footage may circulate in this manner will be critical for future poison pen claims, especially those involving Pacific regional tensions and conflict interactions (such as fabricated claims about war crimes).
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 19
Beyond a few idiots posting to Red Note in their military & other gov roles, there is substantial incentive for United Front to surge video exfiltrated from cyber espionage, in new placement under hijacked or synthetic identities.
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 18
Claude instructed kitchen table nuclear ☢️ experimentation livestream is definitely a 2020s reboot of the Manhattan Project (1986) movie. Or perhaps that sad story about the Boy Scout who tried to build a neutron source by scraping together americium.
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 18
One really ought to be concerned about the errors in Apple Intelligence presentation of news. Because when even Cupertino cannot get it right, the roll your own LLMs being pushed across agencies & services for national security missions almost certainly aren’t going to be better.
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 18
Precisely the point of the conversation. And if this is so difficult to estimate in the simplest and most common of defensive actions, than how much harder to measure countering interactions
hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 18
State practice in offensive cyber countervalue targeting of objects of military - economic potential have defined international norms far more decisively than any number of aspirational prohibitions. This is the agreed fight, whether we like it or not.
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 18
inattention (where any further implant is good enough for immediate purpose, so why waste time thinking and just grab first tool to hand).
hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 18
intrusion workloads as consequence of earlier ops being burned. But case is confounded by the likelihood that this may be just individual operator preference, error (especially for those with limited skill on keyboard following conditional checklists), or
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 18
It is tempting to think that adversary actors exploiting BeyondTrust may getting nervous about possible attention following headline disclosures, & are rotating in other similar tooling for survivability. This would be an excellent example of discrete, measurable reaction suggesting additional
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 17
or any such asset. What else?
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 17
One wonders what is so critical that GUGI recover, or destroy in place, when diving on the sunken hulk of a smugglers' vessel lost due to poor maintenance, incompetence in wartime retreat. As a first impression, one might assume exquisite cryptographic material, but this is table stakes
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 17
A ransomware crew claiming hits on multiple medical targets, including hospital and psychiatric practices, and also hitting a historic convent operating since 1578, very much tells you what kind of scum you are facing off against.
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 17
of control in every enterprise. This is authoritarian state power exercised directly.
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 17
Framing Chinese government interactions with RedNote as meetings with “government relations” to discuss “concerns”, as if these were ordinary Western lobbyists, is a fundamental analytic error. The Communist Party issued orders to a subordinate Party cell, mandated as a mechanism
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 17
in formally accredited programs, on the same topics.
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 17
of university intelligence studies degrees for the requirement. Whatever one thinks about the value, or lack thereof, of certs it is odd to see equivalence made between what is at best 40 engagement hours vice somewhere between 1300 to 3600 program hours demanded
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 17
One knows job markets are tough for those coming into the game, but distortions are becoming ever weirder. Saw a billet circulating for what is essentially an entry level analytic role that demanded specific intelligence professional certification, explicitly rejecting substitution
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 17
This is not a post about rockets. 🚀
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 17
and then driving those choices to the breaking point in testing. Because nothing else will so clearly demonstrate what is absolutely critical to success, and where one’s abstract view of hard choices needs to change in the face of unforgiving pressure. There are lessons here.
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hostilespectrum.bsky.social
JD Work @hostilespectrum.bsky.social · Jan 17
an endless series of choices that balance tradeoffs of necessary and desired characteristics. One can spend years to decades analyzing these to find optimized solution sets, and these will still be imperfect. But down in Texas they are taking best estimates,
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