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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."
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.
He had already leaked it all to the Guardian. The information is out now. He just can't effectively comment on any of it anymore.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
I bet that if such a backdoor was discovered by China or Russia, that they'd use it as a propaganda weapon and we'd thus know about it.
It would be more realistic to expect them to use the backdoor to their advantage, while it lasts.
Some backdoors are very hard to detect because there is no obvious bug or a backdoor in any one place; with the size of the code base as it is, who would be crawling through the source of some USB driver that works just fine? As a crude example:
static int a[MAX_LENGTH];
void ioctl_handler(int i, int d) {
int *p = &a[0] + GetOffset(i, MAX_LENGTH);
*p = d;
}
There is no bug here. Now, elsewhere:
int GetOffset(int i, int len) { return (i < len?) i : (len-1); }
Welcome to poking any RAM location of your choice (limited only by sizeof(int).)