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Swiss to Use Spyware to Listen to VoIP
An anonymous reader writes "Heise Security is reporting that the Swiss Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications is entertaining the idea of utilizing the 'Superintendant Trojan', a spyware program designed to allow eavesdropping on VoIP conversations. According to ERA IT Solutions, the creator of the software, it will only be distributed to investigation agencies in the hopes of keeping it out of the hands of malicious hackers since firewalls apparently 'do not present a problem' for the software."
Create it and they will get it.
If the trojan can be installed it can be sniffed out and discovered. I give it at tops a week of deployment before someone figures out what it is how it works and backwards engineers it into instant maymem for all the black hats.
I can't believe I just read that. They think they can use it and it won't get in the wild? This sounds as smart as the judge in the Spamhaus case, as in, totally clueless about "that there interweb spying softywear".
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
If that isn't a destruction of your privacy, I don't know what is. Although it'll probably be flagged by scanning software soon.
Do they really think so?
I mean, that completely ignores human nature. Come on.
All these things have one thing in common: they are not supposed to be accessible to the general public (or at least initially were not supposed to be) and yet they are. Legality does not stop criminals.
I write all my secrets onto yellow stickies... Then make the person that reads it shred and eat...
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Bad Idea.
If there's a backdoor, crackers will find it and they will exploit it.
Stop the idiotic Police/Spyware.
Two things stand out right away. Point one:
the 'Superintendant Trojan', a spyware program designed to allow eavesdropping on VoIP conversations
Ok, so it's spyware. It sneaks onto a system and installs itself. Gotcha. That moves us to point two:
it will only be distributed to investigation agencies in the hopes of keeping it out of the hands of malicious hackers
Ok. Got it. So to sum up, what they're saying is that they don't want anyone to get it, but they need to install it on a target's system in order for it to work. And a target would be someone the law was interested in who was computer literate. Like, say....hackers, for instance.
I love things that are broken by design.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I wonder how they plan to install these things onto the target computers?
Well, the thing about Trojans, is that the victim installs them.
This article is complete and utter bullshit.
"VoIP" is not a single computing platform or implementation.
And the better question is why not? Provided that there is sufficient judicial oversight, why shouldn't VOIP coversations of suspected criminals be monitored?
Well, I haven't argued anywhere that they shouldn't be monitored. It's not the judicial oversight that worries me. It's the technical oversight.
Let me clarify my objections a bit. In order for this hack to work, some authorized person has to sneak something onto your system. And as soon as it's on your system....it's on your system. You have it. If you find it and can figure out what it is, nothing is stopping you from using it on other people. In short, it's only a matter of time until the hackers DO get it. And then they'll be listening in on VOIP.
To summarize the summary, this is wildly irresponsible. I can't believe people smart enough to write this software are dumb enough to think they can contain it. Absolute morons, I'd call them.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
There are dozens of commercial keyloggers and remote admin type apps out there. "Firewalls do not present a problem" to any of these, nor most of the other tools. I'm assuming here that they mean incoming firewalls, not restrictive bidirectional firewalls which block unknown outbound connections. The fact that this makes use of webcams and microphones is nothing new, Back Orifice did this a decade or so ago. None of the antispyware or antivirus vendors mark the commercial tools as malicious, because they assume (wrongly) that whoever put the tool there had a right to do so. I guess the only thing that is new here is that the company is distributing only to law enforcement. That might not even be new, since I'm sure the espionage community has some exclusively licensed tools at its disposal. If you want to get paranoid about something, be worried that your credit card info is in the hands of somebody in former Soviet countries or that some ransomware has taken over your PC. Trust me, the Swiss are not your biggest problem out there.
Thankfully I have nothing to hide. But if I did: .EXE? .DLL's.
:). This virus, at that time, was not known my Norton, McAfee, or Clam-AV. Thankfully my Windows workstation _is_ a work-hourse and I do have heuristic type scanning turned on for everything it ever touches.
:). Sure -- you could capture the OTHER END of the call probably much easier.
:)
Thankfully my main GUI is a Mac. I wonder how LittleSnitch would handle a
Thankfully my networks are Linux and BSD based. They don't like
Thankfully my VoIP is handled by a Sipure non-PC based box. It doesn't allow / nor has needed updates.
Thankfully the one place I do use Windows for now (work) will be replaced with a Mac in short time.
I do have to wonder if and how heuristic type scans and/or zonealarm tweaked all the way up would react to this type of software. Recently there was a "new" virus that showed up (one week ago today) on the email (Linux) server which my workstation immediately flagged as suspicious before even reading the body of the message (which was supposedly from the email admin [myself]
As for the firewall, well, trust me, you have no idea HOW I configure it and what I do (or don't) allow out under normal circumstances. VoIP? Only from authorized IP's and MAC address' -- and only to specific OpenVMS servers (which REALLY hate to run Windows software and are even harder to infect
Thankfully, I have nothing to hide.
The only possible means by which a trojan can get around anti-virus tools, operating systems and firewalls is if the tools themselves have been modified to allow this trojan to work.
I suspect that the software vendors / designers of these tools will be contacted, asked to participate and sign a ND agreement.
All people running software by these vendors will then be susceptible to attacks from this trojan - a trojan which will undoubtedly be in the hands of black hat hackers by then.
Additionally, if this sort of thing becomes common practice, it will result in anti-virus software becoming practically useless, as the virus writers will take advantage of these 'back doors' to create new malware that can mimick the behaviour of the trojans.
"The ISPs of the persons under investigation will then slip the program onto their computers."
How do they plan on doing that, exactly?
Me with my TA behind my router I think I have less to worry about.
Me with my terminal adapter which happens to be integrated with my router,
I think I have plenty to worry about. Who says its firmware is not rigged?
Who says they can't upload a patch to it or otherwise tamper with it??
On the other hand, why do these shitheads need to tamper with someones
machine if they can just pick off the conversation directly from the wires
at the provider (unless they're using encryption)??!
He can atleast argue that installing a spyware in his system made it insecure in some way which led to the theft or something to this tune. I don't know the technicalities of the software in question but I am sure the judges won't exactly be experts in this domain either.
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
Welcome to the USA!!!
Well, the ISP basically controls how you view the Internet. The next .exe you download via HTTP could be modified.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
1.intrusion of privacy
2.administration of law outside legal jurisdiction
3.stealing computing time
4.stealing bandwidth from us who need it.
5.intellectual property compromise
wrong.fuckers.misguided.immoral.
lets reverse engineer this and use it on them! see how they fucking like it.
another bunch of politicians that decide our everyday freedoms.
Fun facts about Switzerland: 1. Our army needs seven years and 40 billion Swiss Francs (about 30 billion US Dollars) to be ready for war. 2. It's illegal to flush the toilet after 10 pm. (Nobody seems to know, however) 3. My government believes they can bug the VOIP of the country the most Macs per capita.
Firewalls dont present a problem...........i read this as.....the software connects back to home by connecting to TCP port 80.
You done with that strawman yet? I'd like a whack at it...
If you use VoIP, you must have firewall rules allowing VoIP traffic out (and probably back in, but not neccessary for spying on the user).
Thus, this trojan would only need to connect the same way as your legitimate VoIP client. It could even act more-or-less like real VoIP traffic, since it basically needs to duplicate a legitimate call into a 3-way call with one hidden party (the police).
So yes, even a crappy software-only firewall could block the traffic from this trojan - But in doing so, it would also effectively disable VoIP, making the trojan unnecessary.
Now, you could certainly set up an out-of-channel means to tell an external firewall to allow a single VoIP session to a single designated IP address (ie, log into your gateway machine and manually enter the rule). But how many people will actually do that each time they want to make a phone call?