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Cybereason Announces New Plans to “Accelerate” Access to US Govt Networks Ahead of 2020 Election

A cybersecurity firm tied to Israeli intelligence’s Unit 8200 that simulated a series of terrorist attacks occurring on the U.S. 2020 election has announced a new hire with deep ties to the U.S. intelligence and defense communities with the goal of gaining greater access to U.S. government networks.

A cybersecurity company tied to Israeli intelligence and a series of unnerving simulations regarding cyber-terrorist attacks on the upcoming U.S. elections has recently announced a new hire who plans to aid the company in further penetrating the U.S. public sector. Last Wednesday, the company Cybereason announced that it had hired Andrew Borene as its Managing Director for its recently launched U.S. public sector business. Borene, who boasts longstanding ties to the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon, “will accelerate Cybereason’s partner and customer presence in the U.S. public sector,” according to a Cybereason press release.

“My goal is to build a strong business for Cybereason within the U.S. public sector and I am planning to recruit a group of direct support executives, veterans and alumni of the elite [U.S.] military units and agencies that have defended our nation in the information age. I’ll also work to establish a network of the best channel and delivery partners for federal, state and local governments,” Borene said per the press release.

Eric Appel, Cybereason’s General Manager for North American Sales, stated that “We’re excited about Andrew joining Cybereason and the opportunity in the U.S. public sector for Cybereason to make a profound impact on helping the nation’s federal civilian, military, state and local government agencies…”

Borene will likely be successful in his ability to recruit a sales team of prominent alumni from the U.S. intelligence and defense communities to market Cybereason’s products throughout the U.S. government. Prior to joining Cybereason, Borene was a senior advisor to the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the intelligence community’s “DARPA” equivalent that is housed within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). He served in that capacity on behalf of intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Prior to that, Borene served as Associate Deputy General Counsel to the Pentagon and was previously a military intelligence officer for the U.S. Marine Corps.

Borene’s private sector experience is also significant, as he was a senior executive at IBM. Notably, the current Chief Information Officer for the CIA, Juliane Gallina, had served alongside Borene as a top IBM executive prior to taking her current position at the agency. In addition, Borene also boasts ties to Wall Street as a veteran of Wells Fargo’s investment banking division.

In addition, Borene has deep ties to Washington’s foreign policy establishment as a “life member” of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and to the national security-think tank nexus through his senior fellowship at the National Security Institute (NSI). NSI’s board includes former NSA directors, Keith Alexander and Michael Hayden (also a former CIA director); former Deputy Defense Secretary and “architect” of the Iraq War, Paul Wolfowitz; former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, David Shedd; and a variety of other former top intelligence and defense officials as well as Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists.

Notably, Borene is the latest addition to Cybereason with ties to the U.S. intelligence and defense communities as the company’s advisors include Robert Bigman, former Chief Information Security Officer for the CIA as well as Peter Sherlock, the former Chief Operating Officer of MITRE corporation, a major intelligence and defense contractor connected to the Ptech-9/11 controversy.

Cybereason: a front for Israeli Military Intelligence

Cybereason’s announcement of its hire of Andrew Borene coincided with its launch of its new “U.S. public sector business,” meaning that Cybereason now seeks to have its cybersecurity software running on even more of the U.S. government’s most classified networks. Cybereason, for years, has already been running on several sensitive U.S. government networks through its partnerships with IT contractors for intelligence and defense, such as Lockheed Martin (also a Cybereason investor), WWT and Leidos. However, Borene’s hire and this new publicly announced pivot towards the U.S. public sector clearly demonstrates the company’s interest in further deepening its presence on U.S. government networks.

Cybereason’s pivot is concerning for several reasons. First, its co-founders are alumni of Israel’s Unit 8200, an elite unit of the Israeli Intelligence corps that is part of the IDF’s Directorate of Military Intelligence and is involved mainly in signal intelligence, surveillance, cyberwarfare and code decryption. It is also well-known for its surveillance of Palestinian civilians and for using intercepted communications as blackmail in order to procure informants among Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank.

In addition, all three Cybereason co-founders, after leaving Unit 8200, went on to work for two private Israel-based tech/telecom companies with a notorious history of aggressive espionage against the U.S. government: Amdocs and Comverse Infosys (the latter is now known as Verint Systems Inc.). This raises the possibility that Cybereason software could potentially be used as a backdoor by unauthorized actors, given that the company’s co-founders all previously worked for firms that have a history of placing backdoors into U.S. telecommunications and electronic infrastructure as well as aggressively spying on U.S. federal agencies.

Also notable is the fact that the company’s current CEO and co-founder Lior Div was much more than the average Unit 8200 officer during his time in the unit, as he “served as a commander [in Unit 8200] and carried out some of the world’s largest cyber offensive campaigns against nations and cybercrime groups. For his achievements, he received the Medal of Honor, the highest honor bestowed upon Unit 8200 members,” according to his biography. Troublingly, in an interview that Div gave to TechCrunch last year, Div stated that his work at Cybereason is “the continuation of the six years of training and service he spent working with the Israeli army’s 8200 Unit.”

This is particularly noteworthy given that Israel’s government has openly admitted that an on-going intelligence operation, first initiated in 2012 – the year Cybereason was founded, involves Israeli military intelligence and intelligence operations that had previously done “in house” (i.e. as part of Unit 8200, Mossad, etc.) being spun off into private companies, specifically start-ups in the “cyber” realm.

This operation is part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “deliberate policy” to have former members of Israel’s “military and intelligence units … merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners” in order to make it all but impossible for major corporations and foreign governments to boycott Israel and to also to ensure that Israel becomes the world’s dominant “cyber power.”

One notable report on this policy, published by Israeli outlet Calcalist Tech, interviewed dozens of Israeli military, intelligence and government officials and noted that “since 2012, cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms are transferred to companies that in some cases were built for this exact purpose.” The article also states that beginning in 2012, Israel’s intelligence and military intelligence agencies began to outsource “activities that were previously managed in-house, with a focus on software and cyber technologies.”

“Simulating” the Cancellation of the 2020 Election

In light of Cybereason’s background and the “acceleration” of their presence on U.S. government networks, the timing of their redoubled efforts to court the U.S. public sector add additional layers of concern given that it precedes the U.S. 2020 election by a matter of months. Since last year, Cybereason has conducted multiple simulations focused on the 2020 election, which were attended by federal officials from the FBI, DHS and the U.S. Secret Service and all of which ended in disaster. In those simulations, the 2020 election was ultimately canceled and martial law was then declared due to the chaos created by a group of hackers led by Cybereason employees.

Notably, Cybereason stood to gain nothing financially from the simulations given that their software could not have prevented the attacks waged against the U.S.’ electoral infrastructure in the exercise and the company framed their hosting of the simulations as merely “altruistic” because of their professed desire to help “protect” U.S. election infrastructure. The attacks conducted in the simulations by Cybereason employees included creating power grid blackouts, the use of deep fakes to sow confusion, creating havoc with municipal sewage systems and crashing self-driving cars into voters waiting in line to cast their ballots, killing 32 and injuring over a hundred people.

In the months since I first wrote about Cybereason and their 2020 “doomsday” simulations back in January, U.S. government officials and mass media alike have been warning that these same types of attacks that Cybereason simulated are likely to come to pass on this upcoming election day, scheduled for November 3rd of this year. More recently, in less than a week, headlines like “Election Security Experts Expect ‘Chaos’ Unless Action Taken,” “New York’s Pandemic Voting ‘Chaos’ Set to Go Nationwide in November,” and “Foreign adversaries ‘seeking to compromise’ presidential campaigns, intel warns,” among others, have been published in major U.S. media outlets.

While these narratives have asserted that China, Russia and/or Iran will be to blame for such attacks, it is worth noting that a tight-knit web of Israeli state-owned and private companies tied to Israeli military intelligence now run the software controlling key parts of the power grid in New York, California and elsewhere in the U.S.; are the main global producers of deep fakes; and the main providers of “security” software for self-driving and semi-self-driving cars, the quantity of which on U.S. streets has grown dramatically as a result of the coronavirus crisis.

With Cybereason’s newly announced push to run its software on critical U.S. government networks at both the federal and state levels, the company’s history of simulating terror attacks on critical U.S. infrastructure and their openly admitted and on-going ties to Israeli military intelligence deserve more scrutiny than ever as the U.S. election draws closer.

Whitney Webb
Whitney Webb
Whitney Webb is a writer for The Last American Vagabond and founder of Unlimited Hangout. She has previously written for Mintpress News, Ben Swann's Truth In Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.
https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/category/whitney-webb/

8 Replies to “Cybereason Announces New Plans to “Accelerate” Access to US Govt Networks Ahead of 2020 Election

  1. danm! and the pathetic excuse of a left in the US, well certainly the pseudo left and others have the audacity to prop up Anti-Russia conspiracy theories when there is collusion, real acceptable collusion going between the US/Uk/Israeli deep state on this and the human trafficking/sexual blackmail racket of Epstein and where is the left and people power movements on this? silence. Thank you Last American Vagabond and Ms.Webb for all the work you guys are doing, don’t agree with everything but going after sacred cows like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and providing a platform to the finest muckraker of our generation Whitney Webb is gift.

  2. Is there any way to tell if the cyber security companies listed are in Minnesota? The state recently had a massive hack regarding public utilities, substation locations, etc. obviously strategic infrastructure.

  3. Anyone remember the blackouts last summer in NYC, LA and Bay area. This followed on the heels of much more devastating blackouts in Venezuela blamed on cyber attacks. It was followed by blackouts in London-England. Since Israeli companies allegedly have some control over the power grids in NY and CA I was wondering at the time if this was a exercise. Given their proximity in time I was curious about how no MSM article that I saw tried to tie them together and ask WTF? They were each treated as isolated events with plausible explanations, and this Operation Blackout/CyberReason has me wondering again. I saw they just had an exercise in RI, apparently they are doing this at the state level. Love to see a list of states that have participated.

    RI of course is linked with Diagnostic Robotics. We know Boston had participated in the first one. The former Boston Police commissioner is on the board of Cybereason (or an advisor, I forget) . He was commissioner during the Boston Marathon Bombing when for the first time Shelter in Place Orders were issued. At the time of the bombing they were undergoing training for an exercise planned for June simulating just such an event named Urban Shield.

    More bizarre is related to Graham Fuller (Formerly vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council,he also served as Station Chief in Kabul for the CIA) and a network of CIA-backed Caucasus Jihadists . The two accused “bomber” brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had an uncle born in Chechnya named Ruslan Tsarnaev. Ruslan was married in the 1990s until their divorce in 1999 to Samantha A. Fuller, the daughter of Graham E. Fuller. Fuller even admitted that “Uncle Ruslan” had lived in Fuller’s home in the suburban Washington area and that Fuller went several times to the Caucasus and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia just as the CIA was heating up the Chechen Islamic terror against Moscow, allegedly to “visit” his daughter and son-in-law. Ruslan Tsarnaev, who changed his name to Ruslan Tsarni, had worked in the past for companies tied to Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, as well as working as a “consultant” in Kazakhstan on the Caspian Sea in the 1990s with the State Department’s USAID, which has been widely identified as a CIA front.

    So many strange connections

  4. It could be worse, John Hopkins could have run the simulation. Between Event 201/covid outbreak and Dark Winter/2001 Ameritrax, they’ve got a pretty high batting average of having their simulation events happen in real life, lol. I would not be surprised if Cybereason is also gaming out different cyber-attack scenarios and their likely outcomes, why not provide one-stop shopping, lol.

    Cybereason kind of reminds me of the Israel’s/Joel Zamel’s Psy-Group and Wikistrat of the 2016 election. These Israeli companies were loaded with top former Israeli intelligence officials and the evidence shows that Psy-Group “most likely” provided a social media manipulation campaign on Trump’s behalf (Zamel actually gave George Nader a power point presentation of his work after the election which was posted at the WSJ and contained information that showed he probably carried out a social media campaign).

    Unfortunately, this operation was not only not covered by the miserable MSM, but even the alt media dropped the ball on this one. The Daily Beast was the only alt media organization that investigated this Israeli operation in any earnest with 8 investigative reports running from mid-2018 to early-2019 (note: some Israeli media organizations and the Wall Street Journal also provided some decent added coverage).

    Cybereason looks like your typical Israeli intelligence front company with some of their officers’ former employers, like Amdocs and Comverse Infosys, being some of the shadiest and damaging Israeli spy companies of the last several decades. There’s something more going on here than meets the eye and it’s a good thing we have Whitney’s eye watching them, lol.

  5. It’s hard to believe how a small country like Israel could dominate an empire like the USA but you can look at history when for example the Phanariot Greeks and the Orthodox patriarch rose to great power and occupied high political and administrative posts in the Ottoman Empire due to the Greeks’ wealth and higher level of education than the general Ottoman population.

    1. You know its a very long process, not since yesterday, not since the last decade; this domination goes way back to Herzl. Or even before, starting out in a monetary domination with this known family.
      And adding to your statement, not only the US is, but every western country. Just look at the EU with its 27 member countries, same grade of influence in politics and massmedia plus the whole list of other branches. Imho it cant be undone, those who tied up all those influences and connections are smart and there are enough failsafes.
      Thanks Whitney for this amazing article! And thx to the commenters enriching it with additional information.

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