Archive for the 'Covert Operations' Category
NSA Can Access Data on All Smartphones
September 8th, 2013Via: Spiegel: The United States’ National Security Agency intelligence-gathering operation is capable of accessing user data from smart phones from all leading manufacturers. Top secret NSA documents that SPIEGEL has seen explicitly note that the NSA can tap into such information on Apple iPhones, BlackBerry devices and Google’s Android mobile operating system. The documents state […]
Is NSA Dropping Its Own Versions of Open Source Encryption Software Onto the Wire As We Download Them?
September 7th, 2013Hijacking the stream and substituting the content? Trivial. I used to do this for fun on wi-fi networks last decade. Definitely trivial. But what I don’t get is how the downloads would pass hash checks? For example, you can check GPG’s SHA-1 values here. What’s SHA-1, you ask? In cryptography, SHA-1 is a cryptographic hash […]
John Gilmore on NSA Meddling in Cryptography Standards
September 7th, 2013Via: Cryptography Mailing List: To this day, no mobile telephone standards committee has considered or adopted any end-to-end (phone-to-phone) privacy protocols. This is because the big companies involved, huge telcos, are all in bed with NSA to make damn sure that working end-to-end encryption never becomes the default on mobile phones. Wikipedia: John Gilmore
Is British Government Decrypting Data Encrypted with TrueCrypt from Hard Drive David Miranda Was Carrying?
September 7th, 2013I did a double take while reading this Reuters article about the Snowden material: Miranda was held and questioned for nine hours before being allowed to resume his trip from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro, where he and Greenwald live. Greenwald has said that Miranda had carried Snowden related material from him in Brazil to […]
Bullrun: The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack, Undermine Internet Security
September 6th, 2013If anything is still safe, it’s PGP-type stuff, that is to say, GPG. But who knows… For those of us who never believed in things like SSL/TLS or PPTP vs. NSA… *meh* But clueless Americans are definitely waking up to a weirder reality with this sort of information now entering mainstream awareness. Via: ProPublica: The […]
Amazon Hiring 100 IT Personnel for Positions Requiring Top Secret Security Clearances
September 5th, 2013Via: ComputerWorld: Amazon has more than 100 job openings for people who can get a top secret clearance, which includes a U.S. government administered polygraph examination. It needs software developers, operations managers and cloud support engineers, among others. Amazon’s hiring effort includes an invitation-only recruiting event for systems support engineers at its Herndon, Va., facility […]
Oregon State University: Research Create Diodes That Use Quantum Mechanical Tunneling
September 5th, 2013Via: OSU: Researchers in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University have made a significant advance in the function of metal-insulator-metal, or MIM diodes, a technology premised on the assumption that the speed of electrons moving through silicon is simply too slow. For the extraordinary speed envisioned in some future electronics applications, these innovative […]
Think Of Tor As A Honeypot
September 4th, 2013This is .mil laughing out loud at Tor heads. “Tor is known to be insecure against an adversary that can observe a user’s traffic entering and exiting the anonymity network.” Gee, I wonder who might be capable of doing something like that: NSA Laughs at PCs, Prefers Hacking Routers and Switches Via: ohmygodel .PDF: Tor […]
NSA Laughs at PCs, Prefers Hacking Routers and Switches
September 4th, 2013“No one updates their routers” ??? I always updated the routers, switches and firewalls that I was responsible for. Ah well, these kids today… Via: Wired: The NSA’s focus on routers highlights an often-overlooked attack vector with huge advantages for the intruder, says Marc Maiffret, chief technology officer at security firm Beyond Trust. Hacking routers […]
Snowden Reportedly Used High-Ranking Official’s Profiles to Troll NSA’s Intranet
September 3rd, 2013Something had to be very wrong on that network. Snowden must have pretty much had top level access to pull this off. Even so, it boggles the mind that something like disabling multi factor authentication didn’t generate some sort of notification at the next level up the pyramid. I’ve been out of the sysadmin game […]
