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Enhanced Carnivore To Crack Encryption Via Virus

Posted by timothy on from the trust-us-once-again-ma'am dept.

suqur writes: "MSNBC has a story about a new Carnivore feature, dubbed 'Magic Lantern,' which arrives on a victim's computer in the form of a virus through email or well-known vulnerabilities. Magic Lantern uses keylogging to extract keys typed in, and sends them off to the FBI. This is similar to a story reported on previously, but taken one step further, allowing computers to be compromised remotely."

1 of 522 comments (clear)

  1. Encryption program name by Violet+Null · · Score: 4, Informative

    It watches for a suspect to start a popular encryption program called Pretty Good Privacy. It then logs the passphrase used to start the program, essentially given agents access to keys needed to decrypt files.

    If this is true, then it would seem all you need to do to foil this latest slightly-hare-brained-scheme would be to rename pgp to something else, such as goawayfbi.