‘NOTHING MORE FASCINATING’ THAN A GOOD MUTINY: CIA Director Bill Burns gave a rare public interview this week, saying that he’s seen nothing more fascinating than Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny last month as he marched troops toward Moscow. Burns, a career diplomat before taking over the Agency, said he believes Prigozhin was ‘making it up as he went along’, and that he predicts that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next move will be to separate his mutinous former caterer from the shadow army he still seems to control. Burns did have some rather candid advice for Prigozhin though. After referring to Putin as the ‘ultimate apostle of payback’ he suggested that Prigozhin ‘not fire his food taster’. Cipher Brief Expert and former Acting Director of CIA also wrote a great piece for The Cipher Brief about just how damaged Putin is from the whole ordeal that everyone seems to agree, isn’t over yet.
RUSSIAN HACKERS KNOW WHAT DRIVES DIPLOMATS IN UKRAINE: Well, to be exact, they know what the diplomats want to drive. Reuters says hackers believed to be working for Russian intelligence services, sent the same notice to diplomats working at least 22 foreign embassies in Kyiv. It contained a modified real advertisement placed by a Polish diplomat selling his used BMW. “Cozy Bear” hackers are believed to have copied the ad, lowered the price to attract interest and then tempted diplomats to click on the link, which of course, had embedded malicious software in the ad.
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