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Enhanced Carnivore To Crack Encryption Via Virus
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."
Does this mean it will now be illegal to use a secure system? Having any type of security/virus protection will be circumvention of law-enforcing software.
And what happens if this "happens" to get installed on a foreign government's computer? Can we say "espionage"?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
What are the odds that antivirus software could be updated to find this virus? It obviously couldn't be cross-platform either. And if the gov't somehow manages to pressure a/v companies into not including it in virus defs, what would happen if some malicious kiddie got hold of the code, and unleashed a much more destructive version, knowing full well that most machines were not protected? Who would be liable in that case?
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
Remember Ken Thompson's hack! You only get the bonus points if you compiled the OS (and CD-ROM burning software) from source on a compiler you wrote yourself ;-)
The bad news is sooner or later some idiot is going to lable Open Source a terrorist movement....
Idea: Come up with an app that sits on the SMB port (139, is it?) and acts like a Windows box... I believe the word is "honey pot"? One could port-redirect one's firewall to an old 486 running this thing, so as not to overload the firewall itself, and use QoS to keep the bandwidth down... sort of a LaBrea... well, not sort of, I consider ANYBODY trying to sniff around my computers a criminal, badge or no.
--
Keep your laws off my Internet
No matter what they do they can't get at a non-networked box unless they physicaly break in and hack it and then again to retrieve the data (or transmit via radio waves). As for the networked box it never sees anything but cyphertext, no passphrases are used, and anything it puts on the floppy doesn't matter cause even if it gets on the sandbox it can't get anywhere.
Oh sure they could get tricky, do things with floppy boot sector virii that will run in the sandbox, log and save to the floppy, then re-run once it detects a network connection, but to this non-programmer that seems 1) problematic and 2) pretty easy to avoid. maybe even use CD-R or CD-RW.
Comments?
If you can't be good, be good at it!
At first I thought that this was just stupid, because no one running a reasonably secure system, keeping up to date with the latest patches, etc, would be caught by it. But then I thought: why rely on already known (and fixed) and other yet undiscovered holes, when you can roll your own?
recently seen in #anti-trust:
*** BillG is now known as GMoney ***
<GMoney> How can we get out of this DOJ crap?
<FBI> I have this "security patch" I'd like you to distributed through Windows Update. Say it fixes some hole using malformed URLs in IE5 and IE6. No one will blink twice. I'm not even sure most XP users can read.
<GMoney> Will you put in a good word for me with the DOJ?
<FBI> Sure.
<FBI> DOJ: Let Microsoft go scott-free, or I post incriminating pictures of John Ahscroft and Hilary Rosen to usenet.
<DOJ> Rokie dokie, baws.
GMoney laughs maniacally.
FBI laughs maniacally.
DOJ tries to laugh maniacally, but chokes on the pencil eraser he was chewing.
*poof*. Insta-hole. Security patches are worthless if you can't trust the source. And yes, this wouldn't work with non-MS OSes, especially decentralized open source ones. I hope.
-Puk
Surely they couldn't be planning on replicating it like a virus. Striking out a random and invading the computers of people they don't have authorization isn't just ethically suspect, it's a federal crime under current and highly visible law.
C//
How many straws will it take before the people of the United States, the people who take pride in living in the "best nation on Earth", the "land of the free," stand up and say ENOUGH?
Is a sense of security worth allowing Stalinist Russia to be reborn in America?
How many straws, America? How many?
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Problem is, as government-funded tools filter out into public networks it will spark a discussion of these tools in a public forum, which once they are decompiled and attack modes are diagnosed, will give tons of people the ability to launch more sophisiticated attacks. Either it's someone who reengineers it and hands it to script kiddies, or it's other organizations or nations which will feel an imperative to grab the next escalated technology level.
Consider: the article says "levels the playing field with criminals" or something to that effect. It also means the FBI will use tools criminals use. It is easy to see this becoming espionage when used against a foreign firm by the FBI or by someone else who has appropriated their technology.
Few firms have virus-busting firewalls or antivirus packages which can handle new attacks before they cause damage or hide in archived material. Perhaps the scariest thing is that if a new variant is created for a specific "sting", it could quickly take over many computers over a large geographical area (consider Code Red graphs) before antivirus manufacturers or the public at large come up with a patch. In the past there has been a chance at getting a patch before infection.
But with the public funding a combination of email hole, pc based server, network scanner, key logger, and encryption program defeater, it seems that we are *very* quickly going to enter a much more dangerous situation than ever before.
It is not possible that this technology will never be misused by the government.
It is not possible that this technology will remain in the hands of the FBI.
It is not possible that this will not accelerate worldwide efforts to provide more and more dangerous security-breaking software/services.
Because it is so cheap to develop this kind of a weapon, it is my opinion that it is 100% likely that terrorists, multinationals, and national security organizations around the world *will* coopt this technology or will develop something identical to it (or more powerful) on their own. This is the part that scares me. No more Net! Who will ever install a binary from a public server? Who will ever trust interactive content and the plugins which it requires? Who will be trusted to hold the keys?
The FBI is moving a physical wiretap capability highly limited by timing and resources, into a software wiretap regime of high speed, exponential viral growth, widespread destablization of security prior to a court order, and extremely low cost of deployment.
This attempt to coopt the entire networked computing base as a wiretap infrastructure is the most dangerous force I can identify to the world economy and spread of the Internet in all facets of life. It is very hard to have reasonable security for most people at broadband speeds, but one could be forgiven for hoping that problems would be solved in time. Not when the crackers' growth metric takes off exponentially and leaves pro-security forces behind.
I don't think I'd mind if this was used against the people who have attacked the U.S. In fact I'd be surprised if something more powerful wasn't used already. But now we are going to start getting a trickle-down of progressively military weaponry operating silently in our homes.
The cat is out of the bag.. and the technology obviously already exists. The only choice we have is to promote some kind of open source, open science project which could have some hope of markedly improving security in general, could dampen the effects of for example thousands of concurrent Magic Lantern - style attacks from every part of the world. To me, an open, international project is the only way to protect computing in the future.
The FBI already has plenty of tools, and there is no reason it can't improve its cyber attack capability without building such a dangerous system. I certainly don't want to protect the mafia. But unless proven otherwise I think we have to assume that things will get worse all around before they get better.
If you want to see a simulation of the "gray goo" doomsday of nanotechnolgy, simply wait a few months for the next wave of network pathogens.
We will not be safe until we have the U.S. and other governments on the side of the public, with a law against cyber-germ warfare and a well-funded infrastructure to combat cyber-pathogens which do appear with some kind of human and computer based immune system before we enter the age of the network-borne pandemic.