Combat Studies Group

"Faraday Cage"....... The phrase invokes images of Gene Hackman's rouge NSA character from the film Enemy of the State, hacking away from the safety of his wire copper mesh "office". It also brings up thoughts of nuclear detonations and solar coronal mass ejections frying everything from televisions to the family car. We'll save the intricacies of those scenarios for a later article. What I want to address today is basic RF (radio frequency) shielding in a practical sense. As I see it, there are four basic aspects to how we may use shielding, whether it be an RF blocking pouch for our phone or a grounded, sealed, galvanized trashcan for our spare equipment (post apocalyptic resupply of course). They are: 1. Preventing our device from being exploited  2. Preventing our device from exploiting us 3. Preventing unwanted destruction of our device  4. Protecting our health These should all be pretty self explanatory, but lets touch on each real...

Well, it has been an interesting couple of months in the world of privacy and cyber security. We had the "vault 7" leaks, then we just had the NSA's TAO hacking tools released into the wild for any and all to use. So now we don't have to be concerned only about nation-states wielding those kinds of tools, but potentially every criminal element out there. Many INFOSEC researchers have pointed out that this makes Windows vulnerable to a wide assortment of attacks. Ironically, their "fix" is telling everyone to upgrade to Windows 10!! An operating system that, near as I can tell, was built from the ground up to spy on you.....what a joke! The GroundRod series of courses continues to grow in popularity as people around the country are realizing that no one will save them....they have to save themselves! We have a very full class coming up the end of April in Tennessee as well as a full class in northern Idaho in June. Here are some of the courses that are ...

** UPDATE ** We have changed the class dates on this course to April 1-2.  I have some extra seats available now for the GroundRod 2 class in Midland, TX March 25-26 . If you are interested in attending, let me know as my classes have been filling up quick lately.

Starting in April the base price of the SEPIO Secure Laptop will move to $1200 due to increasing hardware prices and increased demand necessitating the hiring of extra help. ******** Some notes regarding recent upgrades to the SEPIO OS system: - Added protection against "STUXNET" style BadUSB attacks. - Increased encryption strength beyond industry standards. - Hardware drive encryption (AES-256) - Added extra protections against "brute-force" password attacks. - Created separate menu entry for all HAM radio software. - Upgraded Grsecurity kernel to 4.9 series. -Can now make ECC GPG/PGP keys with non-NIST curves. -Virtual machine upgrade. -Option for non-NIST system encryption (Serpent vs AES) -Randomized DNS queries via non-logging OpenNIC servers. -Switched TOR browser from standard to hardened edition w/secure defaults. -Several software upgrades - BitMessage, AirVPN, Safejumper, BitSquare, Exodus wallet, I2P, OnionShare, Cloak ...

The upcoming GroundRod Primer & GroundRod 2 back-to-back courses scheduled for April 27-30 in Clarksville, TN are just about booked full. If you are planning on attending this venue and have not already reserved your seat, you need to get a hold of me as there are only a few seats left. There are some seats left for the GroundRod Primer &  GR2 scheduled for February 24-27 in Columbus, OH due to a couple cancellations. **** We are looking to set up courses in North Carolina, Florida, Wyoming, Nevada and Hawaii in the coming months. If any of those locations interest you, get a hold of us and we will get the class built.

Sam Culper from Forward Observer hosted a GroundRod Primer down in Austin, Texas last week and just released a course review... Forward Observer Review

(Update at the bottom) So, the NSA and IAD just released an advisory memo directed at US government entities and NGOs/Corporations that deal with classified material. In a nutshell, they are raising the minimum required encryption level for top secret data effective immediately. So instead of referring to the NSA's Suite B cryptography, we will now refer to what they are calling the Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite. The changes are as follows: Former Suite B standards - RSA-2048                                       (Key exchange/Digital Sig) - ECDH/ECDSA P-256                    (Key exchange/Digital Sig) - AES-128                                         (Symmetric encryption) - Diffie-Hellman 2048       ...