Slashdot Mirror
US Mounted 231 Offensive Cyber-operations In 2011, Runs Worldwide Botnet
An anonymous reader sends this news from the Washington Post:
"U.S. intelligence services carried out 231 offensive cyber-operations in 2011, the leading edge of a clandestine campaign that embraces the Internet as a theater of spying, sabotage and war, according to top-secret documents [from Edward Snowden]. Additionally, under an extensive effort code-named GENIE, U.S. computer specialists break into foreign networks so that they can be put under surreptitious U.S. control. Budget documents say the $652 million project has placed 'covert implants,' sophisticated malware transmitted from far away, in computers, routers and firewalls on tens of thousands of machines every year, with plans to expand those numbers into the millions. ... The implants that [an NSA group called Tailored Access Operations (TAO)] creates are intended to persist through software and equipment upgrades, to copy stored data, 'harvest' communications and tunnel into other connected networks. This year TAO is working on implants that “can identify select voice conversations of interest within a target network and exfiltrate select cuts,” or excerpts, according to one budget document. In some cases, a single compromised device opens the door to hundreds or thousands of others."
that is so cool.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Allies, "ALLIES", we don't need no stinkin' Allies. All of it, ALL OF IT, ours, we, want it all, exploit it, burn it, the whole world, it's ours, Ours, OURS.
Seriously out of control. Looks like Chinese hardware is the least of the worlds problems. With the US Stupidity Services trying to purposefully break everyone's networks and insert back doors that only they, and their contractors, and anyone who wants to pay those contractors knows about.
Morons there is no such thing as an exclusive back door. Once you broken the security of other countries networks, you leave access for anyone waiting to exploit, bet anything you like those morons did not at all to monitor and ensure those back doors were not exploited by others. I wonder how many times now the US government has blatantly lied about cyber attacks they launched that have been discovered and then blamed on other countries and pseudo organisation like Anonymous.
How many attacks have they launched they were designed to do nothing else but increase their budget?
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
...but I support the hackers.
It's not like we're paying for killers for profit, right?
Vulgar display of power.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Who believes the US government had something to do with it?
Suddenly after meeting with regulators the price recovers?
Conclusion: Promote regulation of the Bitcoin network as it's correlated with a rise in the price.
Time for me to destroy my webcam and make sure no device on my computer has a microphone.
agreed to stop posting this stuff before putin would let him stay
Budget documents say the $652 million project...
Most big budget "defense" projects go over budget, over time, and don't perform to expectations. How well does this actually work (yeah, I know it's a rhetorical question)? Of course, by comparison, it's quite a bit less than the cost of a single B-2 bomber, so maybe its budget isn't large scale enough to underperform?
Cold warriors haven't got the memo ...
I wonder how they can afford all that bandwidth across the internet (sarcasm)...
If Snowden leaked this at this point he's exposing information on operations, methods, everything.
At what point does it cross the line and become treason? Is there a line which gets crossed where every Snowden supporter would say "this has gone too far"?
But I can't find a single typewriter in any antique shops any more.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
become recognized as conduct unbecoming the beacon of the free world?
What bothers me about this is that it is unconstitutional.
Fourth Amendment states "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."and it just rolls on.
Foreign governments are aware of the spying and have countermeasures
We the people have no countermeasures or oversight and are paying out billions for these people to invade our privacy.
Please consider repealing the Patriot Act
Wouldn't it be cool to display it somehow, not just text descriptions, but to watch it virtually rage across the globe. William Gibson wrote a short story called Burning Chrome that graphically in narrative form described the destruction of a virtual domain. Beyond Gibson's talent it would be cool to see what this stuff does in terms of infiltration and damage in some 3d medium.
Like everyone else on slashdot, I only run Debian and must say I smile when I see reports such as country sponsored malware strikes like this. But it does make me ask an honest question:
How can we be sure that the Linux kernel isn't compromised? I don't really have the time to go through all lines of code and I doubt my security analysis and development skills are up to the task anyway.
At some point the U.S. government is going to snap and deny the internet to everyone until we comply with their master plan of freedom for all.
What is a good system admin to do when presented with information like this?
Companies large and small need to think long and hard about their responsibility
in the presence of secret orders, nationally funded hackers with agenda.
Data and data compromise by hook, by crook, by truck, by cloud collapse are all possible.
Key management, process management and more need to be understood by managers.
Companies have been coasting and relying on credentials to qualify their employees
to the point that managers near and far only have computer science skills if you add
Excel and Powerpoint to the curriculum.
A good one should memo out to management for legal advice BEFORE the secret documents
show up. Small companies should go in as a modest group splitting the legal fees. The number
of legal counsels that would have a clue on this will be too limited but seek them out. Sadly
the involved parties (legal) at big companies are now poisoned by the paper served on their company.
This will get tangled and the best advice with regard to getting hacked or getting served can only
be discussed before the event. Joseph Heller, George Orwell and Franz Kafka rule.....
Time to dust of Gentoo and backups near and far.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
The never-ending struggle to control everything in life, down to the last bit - simply because we can.
I'm in the US, and thanks to the our belligerence, I can now expect to try to defend my networks from the blowback from all this. Lovely.
Tony Jeffries
There are many people that work on the kernel, and even more students that study it. The kernel is of little concern. What is a concern is the thousands and thousands of little executables that are in so many distros. Worse still, how many people look through all the code from an average everyday apt-get?
Doesn't really matter in the end as there is always the Underhanded C Contest to think about.
Could governments to reach an international agreement, a treaty, with verification inspections to stop this network sabotage? I have severe unexplainable problems on my routers periodically.
I could not explain it. I spent years trying to find a reason. Now I have got an idea.
looks like they know a "thing or two" about the conputery things
http://faculty.nps.edu/ncrowe/cyberperfidy.htm
i mean... the wear pattern on the letters is a dead giveaway , tracks any document back to the specific machine that wrote it.
and the shapes themselves correspond to makes and models of typewriters.
every major country a lots of small wannabe0major countries aren't doing this. The question who is being successful.
If they have really developed software which can do that, they should share their techniques with the commercial world. Software that can continue to run even after a system upgrade? Sign me up.
This leak is analogous to reporting "The US recruits spies". Nobody knows whether their networks are compromised or what to look for.
The kind of leak that hurts a country's covert operations is more like "The US pays Kim Jong Un's barber to make him look ridiculous".
Who are these programmers doing this, and where does the government find them?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Since the line for treason gets drawn by the government he is exposing, of course the answer is yes.
The question is, does he care?
I'm asking what line do Snowden supporters draw. Or should Snowden have no limit to what he can leak?
He should be limited by the truth: the U.S. government protecting privacy as a fundamental asset of human interaction, an asset that has become much more important in the age of communication than when privacy was entered into the constitution.
Too bad that the truth does not seem to make a satisfactory threshold here. But it's not Snowden who is to blame for that.
It is all getting so muddied up - who are the terrs now? The NSA and GCHQ are bigger threats to business IT systems than the traditional Romanian hackers. Of course all engineers and computer scientists always suspected as much, but the scope of the problem is rather larger than I ever suspected. I always assumed that these organizations have the capability to do targeted espionage attacks, but never thought that it will grow into blanket surveillance, for the simple reason that more data does not mean more information - it just means more garbage is collected and the NSA must be smothered with garbage data.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I'm asking what line do Snowden supporters draw. Or should Snowden have no limit to what he can leak?
Direct observation of the posts in the Slashdot petri dish reveal that for many of them there is apparently no limit, regardless of the consequences.
What consequences? Has even a single perjurer been prosecuted? I mean, apart from Attorney General Eric Holder investigating himself for lying to congress under oath and finding himself to be an honorable man? Surrounded by honorable men in the government?
Why should Snowden stop the leaks when there are no consequences? There are several dozens of billion dollars invested into projects for undermining the constitution, with money paid for by the public, and accountability kept away from the public. And there are no consequences for that.
It's not like the NSA can work alone: it needs an executive taking equally secret actions. The U.S.A. has not just revived the Stasi with a vengeance, but also the Gestapo. Worldwide.
And there are no consequences. It's pretty paltry what Snowden can actually achieve with his leaks. The most important thing is to tell other secret bearers that they are not entirely powerless. That a small percentage of people with a conscience can make a difference. That there is a point in working in the resistance against a fascist state bypassing constitution, accountability, division of powers and democracy on its mission to subjugate the world under its military and economic reign.
Cheap dual ethernet motherboards see a jump in sales as whitebox testing units are constructed.
A fast new cleanroom OS is loaded and deep packetsniffing code is carefully crafted.
When the boss is home and clerical staff have packed up for the day...
Ex staff and trusted colleagues load up their B2B and B2P machines with exciting new dual use orders from exotic locations.
Will they see a hint of "routers, switches and firewalls from multiple product vendor lines" trying to “harvest” their efforts and phone home?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Pentagon Sets Stage for U.S. to Respond to Computer Sabotage With Military Force
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304563104576355623135782718.html
Don't quote me on this.
that we won't see any more sniveling, whiny, hand-wringing articles about how EVIL RED CHINA is murderously hacking poor innocent USA, and that the USA needs to declare war on them or something because this is an unprecedented and dastardly attack?
Oh wait, oops, nope, that is typical Western sanctimoniousness on display, they will keep tooting the horn with no shame and continue the anti-China hate train, even though they've been revealed now to be total hypocrites.
I'm guessing they have already shared their... samples, with the 'commercial world', the commercial world isn't just yet aware of it.
Welcome to the Botnet!
It's not that hard to do. Remember that this is a mainstream media article, so the technical details are dumbed down.
Malware that stores a re-install copy of itself in a hidden location isn't news. That they speak of "implants" to survive equipment upgrades leads me to believe they mean the whole thing, not an individual installation. This could be as easy as the malware instances monitoring each other and re-infecting remotely if one instance goes away. Again, at least conceptually that is 10+ years old. It's a nice feat if they pulled it off in practice, but it's not magic.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
...as long as humans are involved it will always get cocked up somehow. The NSA isn't nearly as omnipotent or as all knowing as these "press releases" would have you think (just imagine how many other Snowdens are out there right now?) but often it is simply crass incompetence which is to blame. All organizations must deal with this to one degree or another, and the larger the organization, the greater the chance for human error.
And yet Russia can call us up and say "Hey, there are two Chechen refugee brothers in Boston who we think are terrorists" and NOTHING HAPPENS.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
So now I can't trust my keyboard, my router, my USB sticks, GPU, BIOS - vendors really need to start hardware locking flash ROMs.
I have also started noticing "NSA proof" products and services as marketing buzzwords. The heat is being turned up - jump out the pot or boil.
Ok, so US considers attacks on its network 'act of war', but it has no problems conducting acts of war itself, 24/7?
Interesting.
Say again, who are the terrorists we should be afraid of?
It isn't hard to imagine that instead of being sent to jail all those evil hackers, once they're found out, are actually put to good use by the government (good being a very relative term). Puts a whole new dimension to the concept of plea bargain.
As governments become shadier, the impetus for people to uphold honesty goes down too. Slowly it becomes a "anything goes" situation. I mean if a common man does X he's branded a cyber criminal and faces years in prison, while if a government does the same, not only are they above legal consequences, but even above moral consequences it seems. The more fanatical a group/government becomes, the more time and money they start spending on stridently insisting they are for the larger good. Watching this over and over again in all parts of the world. In other words, nothing has actually changed, but just that what promised to be a truly revolutionary thing (the Internet) has had it's full potential crippled and poisoned. Now it's almost just another corrupt institution, but even then, it's good still outweighs the bad. Imagine what could have been...
There is nothing SciFi about the extremely shitty software development procedures, practices and tools. The C language, void* pointers, char* pointers, multithreading tacked onto a single-threaded language and so on.
The military (which NSA is part of) has just discovered a small flight of woodpeckers can destroy entire cities. No SciFi but intellectual laziness and moral corruption on the side of us - the Applied Computer Scientists, who created this fucking mess. We did it for the MONEY and we turned of any concern for MONEY.
The problem with this is human error is a simplistic systematic fact of life and 1 error and the NSA will lose control of its own weapons/system, so when the NSA gets ripped open by a new attack vector through the inevitable human error and owned by another entity being a state and or group.. What happens then?
Its like the atomic/nuclear bomb, created and used against innocent people.. Will happen again with this technology.. Pandora's box v2 = NSA
You could almost call the NSA the Digital Anti Christ...
Many if not most of these "cyber warfare domain" exploits can be traced to the C and C++ languages and the sloppy idioms (such as char* or void* pointers) which are prevalent amongst the users of said languages. Even highly skilled and experienced developers created things like the "ping of death".
Then there is the PHP language, where they try to "make it easier and faster to create software by adding convenience features and removing typing" and the end result is a horrible mess of security-related side effects nobody seems to be able to get a handle onto.
Sometimes I think both C and PHP were invented by people who considered Pascal and Ada as "too secure".
In my opinion as an Applied Computer Scientist and Software Engineer (I do think this is a critical distinction from "programmer"), memory safe/type safe programming languages can significantly reduce the potential for exploitable bugs. So can sandboxing technologies like AppArmor, SE Linux or Sandboxie.
We the computer science community need to do something about it or face the well of our wealth be poisoned by the psychological effects of cyber crime and cyber warfare: "Never store anything critical on a computer, don't you know everything is hackable !".
I created a tailored AppArmor profile for firefox years ago and it cost me about a day. Every software engineer can do that, given determination.
Then I spent serious time on making a memory-safe C++ variant named Sappeur:
http://sourceforge.net/p/sappeurcompiler/code-0/2/tree/trunk/doc/SAPPEUR.pdf?format=raw
http://sourceforge.net/p/sappeurcompiler/code-0/2/tree/trunk/
Always good to see Anglo-Saxon "rule of law" propagandists advocating assassination. Keeps my bottle of cynicism replenished.
Why don't you simply drop your miserable body off a bridge and be done with your worm existence ??
Russia and China both have much better things to do.
You should be much more afraid of your own government, too much money too much time on its hands, its bound to be up to no good.
It almost makes me want to slide the little wireless switch to "off." Almost.
How is Russia an enemy? The cold war is over and yes there will always be Nation/Nation Spy vs. Spy shit going on. That the nature of governments and regimes as far back as recorded history. Even the Romans used spies as well as Hannibal who effectively had spies inside Rome. http://www.historynet.com/espionage-in-ancient-rome.htm
What Snowden has done here is opened a view into a world that our government doesn't want us to see. Although I think the majority of what's been publicly produced has been damaging, deep down I think we knew our government was doing these kinds of things. Hey, those guys with the AFDBs weren't completely nuts, right?
It's naive for us to believe that spying won't go on and that covert operations will stop after all these documents have finally been released. Governments will do what governments will do and I seriously doubt that there is one government on this planet that doesn't have some sort of covert operations going on somewhere. Hell, I'll even bet that Vatican City and Lichtenstein has some spy scandal in the wings. What's unfortunate about this situation is that we all learn how deep this goes and how our Constitution has been subverted. Snowden is just the messenger and while we're troubled with the message, we shouldn't shoot the one who brought us the message.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I would expect that in some cases, the network cards themselves have a rootkit on them. If the goal is to capture traffic, selectively or not, using the mighty network (or even disk IO for fancy scsi requirements) cards/controllers would be nice.
The 10gb network cards designed for optimizing iscsi performance, and even 10gb cards that are just 10gb cards -- often have enough flash space on them to have an alternate OS, the performance to analyze network traffic, and can scale back if the actual needs of the card get swamped. I have never seen a server actually come close to theoretical maximum iscsi performance on a 10gb card (1gb yes, 10gb, no) in a typical setup. It was hard to optimize the 1gb to get such performance -- the 10gb has a lot of idle time on its hands because the IO rarely reaches that kind of speed due to various bottlenecks inherent in the SAN.
In any event, I know there was a rootkit out for a Broadcomm 10gb adapter or two; perhaps one branded by the vendor selling the server. It had a packet sniffer and the ability to phone home the results, using the IP address of the card, or to send it to a centralized device on the network it was on, as a store and forward mechanism, and then that centralized server would process the data however and either allow one to pick up the results from it (to protect against IPS/IDS intervention, or logging details on equipment not yet or not going to be remediated for this purpose), or for later secure transfer to a remote site.
The OS can be as secure as one could hope, and the network card is rarely examined.
It reminds me of how people can make their PCs a lan bridge and proxy printer traffic by assuming the IP or mac address of the printer in question, get the print jobs, and then queue them to the printer via retransmission or a tunnel made to the compromised printer.
Rarely do I see IT staff worrying about either of those things. The firewall, AV, and windows updates seem to be what businesses rely on, and most have little to no concept about what is actually on the network.
In one situation I found a very well designed IPV6 network running alongside the IPV4; the company had no idea. All of their monitoring was based on IPV4. They said they were not running IPV6, but there was more IPV6 traffic than IPV4... tunnels, torrents and more.
One thing I like to show people is how I can use wireless novell IPX. People say it is not even possible. Not true, I use it to play C&C Red Alert sometimes... lots of those old games require IPX, and it works fine wirelessly, even if emulated so long as the network card is accessible. You can even tunnel the traffic over a VPN if you have the right stuff... no one is looking for IPX traffic either.
And how many printers are running IPX and Appletalk because no one disabled them when setting it up? About the same amount of places that do not put password on the telnet interface of the same printers.
Time to break out my 56K modem
Of course, you'd rather not hear about how Snowden is wrong until you see large mushroom clouds in the distance.
You don't understand.
I WANT to see large mushroom clouds in the distance.
And I hope your miserable piece of shit ass is at ground zero under one of them.
We could do the Battlestar thing... No more networks, sneaker net only.
if this has anything to do with the number of tor users doubling and slowing the network to a crawl?
It is a disservice to my country to allow leaked information to end up on the pages of /.
Linux is compromised as well? I hadn't heard anything like that... do you have a source?
We have become such a voyeuristic people. The NSA has been caught upskirting america
looking for bombs everywhere. The risk is real, the probability low, impact high, outcome uncertain.
We are strictly heirarchial, bureaucratic and clinging to law and order to CYA. It does not fit well with
the new now.
I'm engrained as a BSCS student that our industrialization was evolving into a 'knowledge-based' society
that information is knowledge; more is better, faster is best. That we were meant to be mobile, portable.
That our rising tide would trickle down and grow 3rd world economies; create shareholders of us each and all!
Same bullshit on a different day; during 5 decades of a 'get off my lawn' ruling generation raised on
Status quo and certainty, bankers hours and bakers dozens accustomed to getting their own way.
For them, Internetworking opened a pandora's box of surprises; an eternal September. ...
What started out as high hopes for outsourceing and automation to improve market share and drive a the investor classes
only to ignomiously crawl back under rocks with their 2% of our IRAs and socialized bailouts..
It should have come as no surprise at all when forced to wrap their collective heads around quants warning on risky
asymetric outcomes, convex combinations, false-certainty and determimnistic chaos
that its path of least resistance was in one ear and out the other.
Pursuit of scientism and teathered to its tech has left us victims to incomplete information, self-confirmation
bias and latent mind blindness. Our 'leaders' are intoxicated and behind the wheels of what
the DARPA cocoon was always envisioned to become - a skynet, for lack of better words..
Since Our guns don't seem to be effective (recursive COIN/CI failures) data mining and espionage and bots
appears to be our (U.S. gov - any State, generally) only and best defense for long-term survival in a global
economy where the indigenous we've suppressed for so long are now free to want more. Facing foreign competition
lined up to satisfy those needs; the lo-tech and underdogs that seem to always prevail.
Its not about America, its about (mostly) WASPS who, respectfully, believe that family and legacy come first.
That parent has responsibility to provide more for their spawn, generational improvement. Even at the cost of compromises.
That the powerful can cause so much damage when unrestrained and indifferent to the suffering of others is proof
that when all is said and done the American Dream is just that and reality is gated and very private.
Side Rant: all last week long its been MLK this and MLK that and civility being a natural right. Well, even as a dip-shit ,hell, the poor schmucks that ,... would have been worth a mention.
HS'er with 1 black student in the body I knew the right thing and coerced self to D.C. OK, it was big. But
I also did the VN protests on D.C streets and witnessed up close the SNIC/SDS/Panther front-lines of activism.
The makings of an worrysome insurgency. I believe rights got civil just about the time people (starting w/blacks)
came back in pieces and with guns and the will to use them to defend their rights.
Sad (CCA/DEA) story continues to this day, but some mention of MalcomX
are still incarcerated
If MLK represented the wave, X was a surfer who crested the top.
If we (american society) are going to survive we need leaders that surf and can rise to the top of 40' waves.
resist propaganda
How telling.
You'll just have to settle for a mod-bomb caused mushroom cloud from all the Snowden fans who hate this country.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Given Russia's anti-American stance, the Cold War has only gained new actors.
Snowden is simply one of the long line of people who have betrayed the United States, albeit one without a price on his head.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
There is a greater respect for the rule of law and individual freedoms in the United States than Russia. Offend Russia enough, you die; offend the US the same amount, the law dictates your fate(even if anti-terrorism law). In addition, Russian gated communities are legion, representing their desires of an above-the-law oligarchy; gated communities in the United States are far fewer given the deeper respect for the rule of law. Finally, Russia is deeply based on the bribery system (~$25k gets you Chaika-lane style access to the roadway, government interaction elsewhere requires bribery, and the private sector does as well); such activities are regularly discouraged and prosecuted in the US.
Think about the country you're defending in comparison to the US. Any freedom you may claim to exist in Russia is only measured by the size of your bank account and the connections you have. In the United States, even the poorest citizen is well-defended.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Russia and China both have much better things to do.
Which has nothing to do to address the fact that he has not released anything on Russia or China, which would be give valuable insight towards truly unfree countries.
I'm not worried about the United States' government, for it is in much better shape than Russia's, but more about those who would rather side with hostile enemies to attack it. Until Snowden (and those that have aided/abetted him - including those that have leaked information) is spending the rest of his life in a supermax, the primary goal is to neutralize him.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.