Intel Update - July 20: Rooftops, Drones, and Blue Screens

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the Intel update for July 14th through the 20th 2024 so let's get right to it as many of you know it has been quite a busy week so let's go ahead and start with the event that everyone's talking about and that is the attempted assassination of President Trump at a rally in Butler Pennsylvania I'm not going to get uh into this too much uh as you guys probably know I already dropped about an hour's worth of uh after action review on this uh I have another one that I'm working on as well to compile some of the notes. But but really I just want to hit the highlights for today so there are a lot of knowns and there are a lot of unknowns so here's what we know uh so far we know that a gunman was able to gain access to uh key terrain uh an elevated vantage point on top of a building adjacent to where Trump was giving a speech at one of his rallies in Butler Pennsylvania the gunman was able to fire several shots the total number of shots is Up For Debate. But it Mo most sources seem to agree that it was four shots uh. However this may change as time goes on in any case uh as the shooter was aiming for uh Donald Trump standing behind the podium several of these rounds uh missed Trump and hit uh people in the crowd so at least one fatality uh resulted from that and a couple of others were wounded so again Trump himself was hit in the right ear as we all know and the shooter was engaged and uh stopped by a secret service cat team sniper team so following the incident we do know that the shooter was identified as Thomas Matthew Kooks uh. However that's pretty much all we know uh with any certainty at the moment as many of you know who have been following this story day by day since it happened a week ago every single day there has been some new crazy detail come out uh of the story so who knows you know in another day another week month year we may find uh even more details that contradict some of these uh initial uh data points as far as the unknowns go the the intelligence gaps the things that we are uncertain of uh some of the more important details I should guess really lie with how how was this shooter able to gain access to this facility how was he able to use all of the equipment that he has alleged to have used and how did this incident occur when it seems like there every day that comes out you know more and more details show that you know authorities law enforcement in general were aware of this guy for it looks like several hours beforehand so again these are unknowns we don't have any solid answers to these. However questions are being asked uh a lot of the uh failures that lead up to this this was not just one failure but in in many cases hundreds hundreds of failures led up to this incident being almost successful so so there's there's that uh some more questionable details lie with the uh question of was this incompetence on the part of authorities mostly the Secret Service or was this an instance of malice the US Secret Service intentionally neglecting their role or intentionally setting things up so that the shooter had the best possible chance for Success that is an unknown at this moment I know everyone's thinking it because basically anybody with any sort of very loose tactical experience can tell you that it's going to be a very hard cell to say that some of these details were purely incompetence because virtually no one on the Earth would be this incompetent um one of the bigger stories that kind of is um uh sort of contentious is the director of the US Secret Service uh director cheel stating that the reason that snipers were not on the roof uh that the shooter was on is because it was too Steep and that the the sloped roof uh the pitch of the roof provided a uh Hazard for someone falling off so they did not occupy that position anyone can tell that this is a blatant lie no one is that incompetent so when you see little details like this someone trying to trying to sell an idea uh as being uh incompetence when in actuality it's you know something more more more severe that's a huge indicator you know just you know my my own personal opinion is that well if someone is going to try try to push the idea that oh I'm just so incompetent at my job I'm such a diversity higher at my job I'm so awful at what I do you know please fire me sort of thing if that narrative is less bad than the truth then you have to wonder what the truth is because so far it's really looking like you know this is just not a good situation all around now again I'm sure people who are vastly more qualified than me will talk about this until the end of time. However looking forward we have to sort of understand where we're at um you can you can say and and I I don't know how um I don't know how accurate this is. But I will just share this sentiment for those who may choose to believe it or not I don't know uh there seems to be a sentiment throughout big government throughout the Republican Party even throughout the Democratic party for sure throughout the sort of politically left institutions of disappointment and crestf fallenness and um there's this sort of air of well um something didn't go to plan you know what I mean um now again I'm sure that there will be a lot of debated around this over the years. But a lot of people are saying that well you know the reason that the the RNC is was the Republican National Convention was such kind of a weird atmosphere is because Donald Trump wasn't expected to be there uh you know the the introduction for it was AB you know some people some people argue that it was really indicative of something that another candidate may have been in more in favor of say perhaps Nikki Haley uh and people are drawing you know lines between that and uh the fact that she took so long to drop out of the race. Even though she was doing so horribly you know um I I don't know how how accurate any of this is but I did want to share it because there does definitely seems to be something up with this and it's not just uh the sort of atmosphere of of realizing how serious this is traditionally um a few years ago maybe you know 10 20 years ago you might say all right looking more strategically Trump almost gets killed and this incident would traditionally I I think would result in a cooling of tensions because it would encourage all of the his his political Rivals to kind of think about their words a little bit more they would take a step back realize okay this is a lot more serious than we thought this is not just rhetoric you know that that's sort of an argument uh that that would have hold held you know weight in the past I don't necessarily know if it holds uh this much weight in the future because we're not exactly seeing that we're seeing people being disappointed that the attack didn't work we're seeing people glorify the shooter himself we're seeing a lot of this and if anything we're seeing you know Silence from a lot of uh you know big government kind of organizations and things like that so I don't see a cooling of tension. On the other hand I don't necessarily see a a straightup escalation it just seems like a lot of people are in um you know Plan B mode and that sort of maybe I'm just reading this all wrong I don't know. But it seems to me like like a lot of institutional strategic plan BS are being put in place now this could be uh not necessarily because anyone had prior knowledge of this attack right this could this could be because you know major Democratic donors say well dang it he's he's he's you know almost achieved martyrdom status and now there's no way that he'll lose the election so we're going to have to switch into Plan B I don't know man that's kind of a you know that would maybe be true in the past I don't I don't know if that's accurate today you know it just seems like uh there's a lot more strategic moving around than you know I think that uh we just don't seem to be getting the full story is what I'm trying to say in in any case I know there's a lot of a lot of disorganized thoughts on this already so I'll just I'll I'll move on. But um really moving forward for most Americans uh this really does kind of highlight the fact that you are on your own even if you're in a at an event where the best of the best of the best are providing security that's not good enough anymore uh and you I don't care what um anyone says you the average citizen out there are absolutely Justified and pumping up your your risk assessment level and assuming less risk uh because you don't necessarily want to rely on some of these institutions anymore um right now you know the US secret service has given you know an entire planet the reason and the justification to to up their threat assessment a little bit um with regards to the risk that someone might be taking um in years past it would be almost parisy right to suggest you might be on your own at a at a rally where there's you know 15 agencies providing security nowadays it's like look we're not going to go off the deep end we're not going to you know absolutely be at you know Threat Level Midnight forever. But we also need to realize where we're at and uh risk assessment is one of those things that we probably should put a little bit more time and and effort into considering that um the situation seems to be getting a little bit more serious so again this really just highlights you need to be prepared you need to understand where we're at and. Moving forward it would be probably a good idea to to be a little bit more you know observant of things so again a lot of lessons are going to be learned from this I've already gotten a whole hours worth of just you know me sort of going through my own lessons learned from an information perspective. But I've already I'm already working on some more stuff that might be helpful for the average person out there uh right now there's a lot of talk. But when it comes to the average taxpayer out there this incident doesn't really highlight a a lot of of like every day impacting things this is more of a strategic thing of okay this incident shows Every American where we're at now how how the situation is so again um I think that's probably all the thoughts I've got on that so let's go ahead and uh move on to another major incident which occurred uh a couple of days ago which is the crowd strike it outage now for those of you who are unaware of this uh this did not get as much press coverage as I thought it would considering how serious this outage is essentially crowd strike which is a uh cyber security firm which provides U you know security patches and updates and things like that for Microsoft and for Windows uh they pushed out a bad update and it basically resulted in the blue screen of death for a lot of customers um some reports I don't know how accurate this is. But I have seen this number a couple of times from some security cyber Security Experts um some people say that it may have been as many as 20% of all the computers on planet Earth were affected by this so uh and we can see that already even you know dubious statistics aside we can already see that this is by you know this is up there this is one of the biggest uh security uh IT issues we've ever seen right this makes you know this is on sort of like Y2K level with regards to the you know the potential uh outage except for the fact that this actually did occur you know this really did uh brick a lot of computers around the planet for a while I think that a lot of uh you know citizens probably didn't care or notice about this because their their install of of Windows didn't you know wasn't affected uh this was mostly at the Enterprise level so businesses people who rely on um you know servers and things like that for various Windows products at at more of the ENT priz level not so much at the consumer level so for instance none of my laptops or or systems here failed I don't know of anybody who did uh except for businesses businesses which used uh some of these higher level functions and products from Microsoft so uh really we're talking the the damage from this and the Fallout from this is huge uh it is going to be very very very important to follow this incident as it goes forward and I am absolutely certain that heads are going to roll because of this this is very very serious uh the solution has been provided. However the solution is essentially to to boot into recovery mode and and delete a file uh or two and um you know reboot enough times to where it will sort of work its way out that's the hot fix right now for It Is What It Seems like um. But in terms of the service is affected everything everything was affected so we've got uh 911 call centers going down all around the country uh three major airlines uh grounded their flights they had to issue a nationwide ground stop because of this issue air traffic controllers were affected in some places hospitals are some hospitals are still down there's a couple hospitals in my area well not in my area. But you know a few hours away from me that are that are still down they're they're they've canceled all elective procedures uh and they're running off of basically their War four times standard in the ER and that's it that's all they've got cuz all their computers are bricked. But yeah everybody's down like I've got a couple of UPS packages that are not going to be delivered for a week because UPS is down um you know Amazon I think is okay. But again Amazon uses third party vendor so that's one of those little details here that is is often lost so a lot of businesses are finding out that they may not um they may not be reliant on a particular they may be okay themselves. But they don't know what other systems off sight they're reliant on so again a lot of people were saying um you know banking banking was affected well in some cases banking was affected. But not in the way that you might think so customers were able to get their funds out uh. However some banks which use strange systems uh you know were were down right they weren't able to to provide customer data on things now ACH transfers fine ATMs fine. But the systems that make these things work were affected in some cases so again this this cyber security incident is so widespread I would be here for like an hour and a half listing all the things that were affected that we know about think about all the things we don't know about that you know like government systems are trying to keep on the down low uh because of how serious this is and the reason that I say are going to roll because of this is that time and time again we are reassured by the cyber security industry that you know one company or one guy at one company push cannot push one line of code out and crash the planet. And yet this this happens quite a lot if we remember crowd strike was also at the center of the rushia Gate scandal a few years ago I thought that name it took me a while to put that together. But I thought that name sounded familiar yeah these guys were the ones who claimed that Russia hacked the DNC a few years ago and they were a critical part of the Russia Gate scandal so again not a good look for crowd strike this may not have been malicious okay this this was the company has stated this is not a Cyber attack this is something they did they pushed out some code that was bad uh there you go and it was due to I think it was due to like a memory uh in memory incident memory failure or something like that so again some of the most basic Computing things that are taught at very low levels are how this crashed the planet basically um. But again you know if one guy can do this you know it may not have been a Cyber attack but what's cheaper than doing a Cyber attack we put so much so many billions hundreds of billions of dollars into protecting cyber security infrastructure. And yet the guy who pushed the code out gets a suitcase full of money from someine actor he does it intentionally says it's an accident so. Anyway forensic analysis is going to be done and whoever whoever's on the team that did this if it was one guy or if it was one team they're going to get investigated very heavily uh or at least they should uh to make sure they didn't get a mysterious deposit in their account overnight something to keep in mind is this sort of you know cyber events are going to happen this sort of thing is exactly what you would expect to see if World War II broke out and this is exactly what I was looking for after the uh the Trump assassination attempt this sort of thing imagine for a moment if this crowd strike outage happened at the exact same time as uh the Donald Trump assassination attempt now imagine if it had happened at the exact same time as the colonial pipeline Cyber attack do you see where we're going with this this is not good. And so much of our infrastructure is built on very very very fragile systems that it would very it would do very well to start considering and start going through the analysis of figuring out okay what tech vulnerabilities do I have have because these kinds of incidents definitely highlight that so so yeah I think I've talked enough on that let's move on to uh the incident in massachusett so uh there's been kind of a a hot situation in Nantucket where uh in which about a week ago there was a storm that came through and took out one of the wind turbines and the wind farm out there uh that wind farm uh has been very contentious by itself over the past few years because of course wind farms are nuisances right cause a lot of problems with the fishing industry um and in this case uh one of the wi tur abouts had a catastrophic failure basically just imploded on itself we all know how these um uh incidents kind of occur uh due to you know storm damage and pieces over the past week it occurred a week ago. But it's taken almost a week now for the debris to start washing ashore so there's foam pieces uh fiberglass pieces the Coast Guard has issued to notice saying this is you know a hazard area now um people are are complaining there's kind of a local uproar over this uh because there's a little bit of a scandal in which the Energy company doesn't want to take any responsibility for it local politicians are bought and paid for so it's it's a whole thing down there. But basically most of the beaches in Nantucket on the south side of the island are um closed due to this debris so again another reminder of how fragile infrastructure really is and how some of a lot of these you know as we're starting to find out in the sort of mainstream culture a lot of these clean energy things really aren't so and uh especially when it comes to wind farms so I'm sure this will probably be a hot button issue in the region for a while um. But I don't have any reservations that anything will be done about it substantially so so let's move on to the southwestern region and I just briefly wanted to touch on some of the Scandal uh surrounding the hurricane Barrel response so uh as we know hurricane Barrel rolled through the region uh last week and uh caused widespread power outages throughout the um galvaston Houston area and there has been a lot of Scandal since then it's not there have been a lot of um security incidences involving linemen so a lot of the out of state linemen have reported uh being attacked by citizens trying to as they try to like go to work and restore power in these areas so there have been a lot I haven't been able to nail down a lot of these. But a lot of videos on Tik Tok a lot of linen have been getting on and talking about some of the stuff they've dealt with hard to verify uh there was a story that um some citizens had were you know Good Samaritans right and they were trying you know gave out some uh water bottles to some some guys and one of the water bottles had fenel in it and the uh lineman was hospitalized that's the story I haven't been able to verify that um you know I don't know there there are cases of uh linemen being attacked um or attacking each other in some cases it's just kind of a mess down there well over I think 14,000 or so linemen have been dispatched to the region to to kind of get power back online that's a lot of people so you know it's hard to say how things are working out um. But a lot of linemen have reported that citizens are trying to uh tamper with electrical equipment um trying to turn their own power back on um and it's uh that's very dangerous like exceptionally dangerous so you know normally you don't you you don't normally see this kind of thing happen uh usually you know things like uh utility worker people who are doing the right thing you know trying to like get the power back on you don't tend to see locals try to attack them uh. However that's happening in Houston and it seems to be I don't I don't know if it's one of these like new normal things but definitely seems to be a consideration. Moving forward um we already found out over the Riots of the past couple of years that firemen have already been you know kind of attacked you would think that' be a protected career field you know largely apolitical you know dude's trying to put out fires. But um you know the risks to First Responders are that are not like affiliated with the police that are like purely in a non-politically Charged career field are uh are are definitely getting attacked now it's like man you know so it's something to keep in mind something to consider another reminder to um definitely start investing no matter where you're at in this country definitely start investing in alternative power generation uh I myself have tried to do that over the past U year or two uh the the vulnerabilities to the critical infrastructure in my local area are pretty pretty bad so um. Even though people even for people who don't live in areas where their electrical grid is not super great it would probably be a good idea to to kind of uh definitely in invest in uh you know solar generator solar batteries things like that uh just as you know I've talked about quite a bit before uh with regards to power generation in an emergency you might you might use get a lot more use out of it than you might than you previously thought so uh let's go ahead and wrap things up with the Red Sea area and this is going to be probably a point of contention probably even before this video goes out I guarantee something's going to develop so I just wanted to focus on the merchant Vel Chio lion uh and point out that the conflict in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aiden has intensified over the past few days uh again we have seen the houthis increase their um targeting of commercial shipping and they have increasingly relied on usvs or unmanned surface vessels uh to attack commercial shipping one of the bigger ones that they actually published a propaganda video for was a merchant vessel chios lion uh which was a tanker that they uh slammed a a remote control vessel into uh and exploded right there against the hole so uh I've seen several reports saying that there's a couple of hundred kilometer long uh oil slick from this vessel I don't know if it's sunk yet uh. But looking at the video it's hard to imagine that vessel uh continuing on now granted when it comes to vessels uh any who's done any sort of Naval Doctrine uh Naval Warfare like studying especially out in the Pacific you know that vessels um even even non-w warships can uh uh withstand a lot of damage a lot of damage before sinking um so just looking at a video is kind of it. Even though it looks bad it's really hard to say this is going to result in the vessel sinking. Anyway uh there were a couple of other vessels that were attacked as well uh I haven't had time to sit down and kind of pinpoint which one was which so I'll I'll do more of that next week uh. But once again even me looking at this sort of things these are now obbe or overcome by events because a couple of days ago Yemen the houthis were able to successfully launch a uh cruise missile drone sort of thing um we'll just call it a drone because of its range uh they were able to launch one of their devices uh fly it up the Red Sea across Egypt into the med. And then back into Israel and successfully strike a Target in Tel Aviv again these long range drones that the yenis have developed uh these are exceptionally they're almost identical to what the Iranians have because again the houthis are of course getting Iranian support um militarily so uh this is a big deal because that munition was able to fly about, 1500 miles you know and land in a city uh and it landed just so happened to be in Tel Aviv and a couple couple hundred meters away from the uh US Consulate there so you know the US has got a lot of diplomatic stations in Tel Aviv so it's not just the one site as far as I know. But uh it's not I don't know how likely it is for uh the houthis to aim specifically and hit a a single building from 1500 miles away uh so I don't think they were I think they were just trying to go for the city um any anything they could hit in the city is is good enough for the houthis uh. But in any case it highlights that the United States missed it uh all of the egy missile system defense that we have in the Red Sea in the in the region did not shoot it down did not pick it up uh and it was able to get through Israeli defenses as well so you know it's one of those things where it's kind of an escalation I would be willing to bet that Israel is probably going to respond to that um the houthis have tried several times and they've actually struck uh some Targets in Israel with these long range drones. But they haven't done anything as bold as hit Tel Aviv yet so Israel to save face is going to have to do something so they'll probably hit some Targets in Huda um or something like that uh who knows it's really hard to tell um we'll we'll probably know more by the time this video comes out because this takes many hours to upload. But yeah uh not super great for US forces in the region there's always the chance for the United States to accidentally be brought into the conflict more directly um this incident resulted in I haven't been able to verify with any like super great confidence that uh netanyahu's Speech uh or visit to the United States and speech for Congress has been delayed I would be willing to bet that's probably true uh it makes sense for him to delay uh his actions if if Israel is going to uh initiate some kind of military response um and they're probably going to have to uh because that strike was was too on the nose uh for for uh Israel to to um or or really Any Nation uh to just kind of let that go so. Anyway uh again tensions in the Middle East are not super great right now uh especially considering that we've got our these Untold domestic problems in the United States it's kind of a it's kind of a rough time right now uh going into this election season let's switch gear for a bit and talk about the South China Sea uh again just very roughly touching on it um the Chinese drills in the region South China Sea uh the East China Sea really just the Pacific at large uh these drills have continued and they've basically remained part for the course of what China's done in the past uh China's made some new records they've gone a long way with their vessels uh they've again had a task force off the coast of Alaska uh for a while uh and they uh have achieved some new records with regards to the number of aircraft in the Taiwan straight within 24 hours so that's been kind of a new thing for them to do uh. But for now over the past uh few day four or five days now uh most of the traffic uh in in terms of the aircraft incursions in the Taiwan straight have kind of returned to the normal Baseline of one to two dozen per day so uh again the risk of China invading Taiwan is is fair low at the moment uh. However again I I think that we're hanging too much uh sometimes we're hanging too much um uh sort of tension on whether or not China's going to invade Taiwan or not that's not the only thing China can do China can do a lot of things they can mess with the Philippines down on the scarber sh they can do a lot of things so really in terms of keeping an eye on China it's not just uh I know I get messages like this all the time is China going to invade Taiwan today I don't know. But it's generally speaking probably not uh however just because a Taiwan Invasion may not be imminent within the next few weeks or so doesn't mean that China can't do something else so again they could you know do some uh dipl diplomacy by Naval forces uh in the region and they're definitely doing that so uh they can mess with kinman Island quite a bit uh they can mess with uh a few other islands in the Taiwan straight and you know generally cause uh more diplomatic pressure for the United States which is really kind of struggling right now uh fear not all the sort of infighting and you know little civil war going on within the Democratic party right now is absolutely noted by China uh and they know that uh the White House is probably distracted as well so you know it would be a really good time for China to poke you know like I mentioned in the the hot wash that I just dropped a few days ago go uh or yesterday um yeah it it would be a great time for Russia and for China to just just just needle us like they love to do um so so expect some of that over the next couple of weeks uh just a heightened level of that and it's going to slowly increase as time goes on up until the election um. But really I'm not seeing anything major you know granted I'm no East Asia analyst but it seems like uh most of the Chinese military activity in the South China Sea has returned to a somewhat increased Baseline for the time being so let's wrap things up today uh by talking about the intercepted ghost net reports again I mentioned quite a lot about the ghost net this week uh we had a snap drill we had a regular meeting uh I talked a lot about the uh reports that I got during uh the whole Trump sort of shooting incident last Saturday so uh this week was just a normal week uh and it was not good for solar weather so I wasn't able to pick up too much from my local position I saw a lot of you out there. But not a whole lot that I was able to pick up and interestingly enough a couple a couple of the sdrs that I normally use to to uh monitor things Beyond with my own local antenna can hear they were having issues so I wasn't able to kind of get as much traffic as I uh was expecting. But in any case I did get several reports here you can read them yourself uh really just pieces of report but that's okay sometimes you know the ghostnet is not a perfect system and you have to remember that we're using js8 call we're using these HF radio tools these hobbyist tools we're using them in a nonstandard way so our expectations have to be tempered somewhat so in this case I've got enough information here in these reports to Google it you know and just research it right you're not going to get a full-blown uh news report uh through JSA call sometimes you're going to have little lines missing occasionally now there are other there are there's for every problem 's a solution. But the solution for something like this increases the complexity and it reduces the number of people that can receive this sort of thing so again I'm constantly working on this constantly trying to improve things. But uh these are the reports that we got for this week uh that I was able to kind of pick out dozens of heartbeats dozens of check-ins saying hey I'm from this area so on. And so forth I kind of leave these out um just to kind of not clutter things up too much uh and to encourage people to you know share some good information you you don't have to be a professional analyst to to share some local news in your area that might be helpful for others so again awesome to see this kind of stuff hope that we can continue it on for as long as humidly possible um these are the sources for today uh that's pretty much all I've got uh again I'm working on a lot of content this this uh this whole Trump incident has kind of put me back uh sent me back about a couple of weeks at least uh with regards to the other content I'm working on on uh. But um I'm working through it uh and we'll see uh how we can punch through it this week so again lots of things going on very busy world I know that it's really easy to kind of um uh be a little bit pessimistic you know regarding what's kind of going on in the world and and just kind of generally what the way things are going in the US. But you know better days are ahead one way or the other you know so it's not something that uh we should dwell on too much you know we've got too much work to do to be focused on on how negative things are so that's the kind of line of thinking that I'm going forward and and trying to use because you know really this is a great opportunity especially this election cycle where everything's insane every single day is some new crazy wacky story right um it's really a good time to just kind of you know self-reflect and and figure out you know what am I doing today to help other people out you know what am I doing today to to continue to do good work um and just keeping that kind of mindset you know not getting too bogged down and all the the bad stuff is probably a better move in the long run so that's what I'm trying to do um I could talk more about that uh at some point. But for now let's wrap things up and uh call it a day uh and we will be back at it on Monday so thank you all for watching thank you all for all of your support and we will. See you next time and as always find in the shade.