Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Havana syndrome: Report links mystery illness to Russian intelligence unit

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 22 posts

Re: Havana syndrome: Report links mystery illness to Russian intelligence unit

#3

Post by hunglee2 »

Interesting to see how this story is now being propagated throughout the media, accruing credibility along the way.

Prior to the 60 minutes documentary, the latest on this story was that in March 2023, 7 US intelligence agencies reported that "available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents" and that a foreign adversary's involvement was "very unlikely"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome

Re: Havana syndrome: Report links mystery illness to Russian intelligence unit

#4

Post by swores »

hunglee2 wrote: post #3

Interesting to see how this story is now being propagated throughout the media, accruing credibility along the way. Prior to the 60 minutes documentary, the latest on this story was that in March 2023, 7 US intelligence agencies reported that "available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents" and that a foreign adversary's involvement was "very unl…

Hard to guess if that means the reporting is based on propaganda to make Russia look bad vs. US agencies not wanting to admit to the world that Russia has a weapon they can't yet protect against. Both seem equally plausible to me.

Re: Havana syndrome: Report links mystery illness to Russian intelligence unit

#6

Post by ein0p »

swores wrote: post #4
hunglee2 wrote: post #3

Interesting to see how this story is now being propagated throughout the media, accruing credibility along the way. Prior to the 60 minutes documentary, the latest on this story was that in March 2023, 7 US intelligence agencies reported that "available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents" and that a foreign adversary's involvement was "very unl…

Hard to guess if that means the reporting is based on propaganda to make Russia look bad vs. US agencies not wanting to admit to the world that Russia has a weapon they can't yet protect against. Both seem equally plausible to me.

For this to be “equally plausible” you’d first have to offer a plausible hypothesis of how such a weapon could operate. Last time this came up nothing even remotely plausible was offered.

Re: Havana syndrome: Report links mystery illness to Russian intelligence unit

#7

Post by cduzz »

ein0p wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Next I suppose you'll be proposing that all these random crashes and ransomware attacks are because of some stealth RCE in some low-level library that's used by 80% of the opensource ecosystem?

Sheeple!

In case my sarcasm is too subtle...

The root cause of these issues is not known. There's some obvious value to having an undisclosed attack against "enemy agents" that's difficult to detect but that disables a very difficult to replace resource of "the enemy"

There's every reason to believe that, for instance, if polonium vlad had access to such a tool he'd use it as much as possible.

There's no concrete evidence of such a tool besides lots of incapacitated public servants / deep-state-bureaucrats (depending on your perspective?).

Re: Havana syndrome: Report links mystery illness to Russian intelligence unit

#9

Post by ein0p »

cduzz wrote: post #7
ein0p wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Next I suppose you'll be proposing that all these random crashes and ransomware attacks are because of some stealth RCE in some low-level library that's used by 80% of the opensource ecosystem? Sheeple! In case my sarcasm is too subtle... The root cause of these issues is not known. There's some obvious value to having an undisclosed attack against "enemy agents" that's difficult to detect but that disables a very di…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN