Cheering Iran For Taking Down Vicious Warmonger Sheldon Adelson? Or Could They Have Done Better?

Tuesday afternoon we focused on the agent the Israelis use to control Democrats, Haim Saban and how the Israel-First agenda works in the Democratic Party. It's far worse inside the Republican Party, where the agent working for the Israelis is Sheldon Adelson. We've gone over that for years but something happened last February that has been very much kept from the general public until this week.

By now everyone probably knows about North Korea's spectacularly successful cyber-attack on SONY Pictures. It's been all over the news-- often covered as comedic. Why comedic... well this movie trailer has over 7.5 million views on YouTube.



And this one has almost 2.9 million views:



The damages to SONY (a Japanese-owned company)-- including a very serious law suit-- may not be worth all the publicity they got for the movie's opening, which was pulled today and is not opening after all. But what's this got to do with Adelson and Israel. Adelson has been urging Members of Congress-- some of whose careers he has substantially financed-- to get behind the Israeli policy calling for a U.S. nuclear attack on Iran, which Israel sees as an existential enemy. Adelson has been very public about it and his war fever hysteria has been widely reported worldwide. Including in Iran... which, predictably, didn't react well. Remember, this one isn't just a funny movie starring James Franco.

Adelson is the Mob's man in Vegas (or one of them) although he makes most of his money from being the Communist Chinese Party's man in Macau, where he's the gambling and prostitution kingpin. As far as we know-- or think we know-- Iran or Iran sympathizers, chose to go after Adelson in Vegas.

Most gamblers were still asleep, and the gondoliers had yet to pole their way down the ersatz canal in front of the Venetian casino on the Las Vegas Strip. But early on the chilly morning of Feb. 10, just above the casino floor, the offices of the world’s largest gaming company were gripped by chaos. Computers were flatlining, e-mail was down, most phones didn’t work, and several of the technology systems that help run the $14 billion operation had sputtered to a halt.

Computer engineers at Las Vegas Sands Corp. raced to figure out what was happening. Within an hour, they had a diagnosis: Sands was under a withering cyber attack. PCs and servers were shutting down in a cascading IT catastrophe, with many of their hard drives wiped clean. The company’s technical staff had never seen anything like it... Numerous systems were felled, including those that run the loyalty rewards plans for Sands customers; programs that monitor the performance and payout of slot machines and table games at Sands’ U.S. casinos; and a multimillion-dollar storage system.

In an effort to save as many machines as they could, IT staffers scrambled across the casino floors of Sands’ Vegas properties—the Venetian and its sister hotel, the Palazzo—ripping network cords out of every functioning computer they could find, including PCs used by pit bosses to track gamblers and kiosks where slots players cash in their tickets.

This was no Ocean’s Eleven. The hackers were not trying to empty a vault of cash, nor were they after customer credit card data, as in recent attacks on Target, Neiman Marcus, and Home Depot. This was personal. The perpetrators wanted to punish the company, or, more precisely, its chief executive officer and majority owner, the billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Although confirming their conjectures would take some time, executives suspected almost immediately the assault was coming from Iran.

This was new. Other countries have spied on American companies, and they have stolen from them, but this is likely the first time—occurring months before the late November attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment-- that a foreign player simply sought to destroy American corporate infrastructure on such a scale. Both hacks may represent the beginning of a geopolitically confusing, and potentially devastating, phase of digital conflict. Experts worry that America’s rivals may have found the sweet spot of cyberwar-- strikes that are serious enough to wound American companies but below the threshold that would trigger a forceful government response. More remarkable still, Sands has managed to keep the full extent of the hack secret for 10 months.

The Iranians asked the U.S. government to penalize Adelson after the little speech at Yeshiva University last year. Nothing happened-- until the Iranians took matters into their own hands.