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Have a Privacy-Invasion Wishlist? Peruse NSA's Top Secret Catalog
An anonymous reader writes with a link to Der Spiegel, which describes a Top-Secret spy-agency catalog which reveals that the NSA "has been secretly back dooring equipment from US companies including Dell, Cisco, Juniper, IBM, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and more, risking enormous damage to US tech sector." Der Spiegel also has a wider ranging article about the agency's Tailored Access Operations unit.
The NSA will achieve the opposite for the USA, not more security but less, with the rest of the world now keen to do their own thing, the NSA are a loose cannon on a rolling ship.
Don't use US service providers. It should be obvious by now, but the reason why the US warn about all kinds of subversion and attacks is that they know what they themselves are doing to the rest of the world.
At earlier convenience we need to tell to IT non-savy senators and congressmen. The backdoor is like an all purpose key. Now all the criminals and agencies will exploit this.
Such a simple explanation and analogy should be adequate to deliver the point.
I'm surprised you couldn't come up with at least some possibilities on your own, K. S. Kyosuke. I always thought that you were a smart cookie.
One obvious one is that the disk's firmware is updated to detect and modify critical Windows executables, DLLs or drivers with some additional code to send out information to remote servers once a network connection is detected, or perhaps to introduce flaws that can be exploited easily. The same could be done for Linux kernel binaries or modules, too, of course.
Another pretty obvious one is that the disk's firmware alters log files to remove any traces of intrusions, making it appear as though no intrusion has occurred.
I'm sure there are many, many other ways that I haven't thought of.
Looks like this is a loud and clear call for more intensive open source BIOS development.
Do you think the NSA is somehow unique in possessing tapping and forensic tools for IT equipment?
Every police agency in the world will have some of this stuff. Heck, when I accidentally repartitioned a hard drive a couple of years ago I used some software to recover files by carving them. One of the items listed in the article was a splitter cable for crying out loud.
Backdoors are seriously different from exploits. One implies collusion between a national security agency and a manufacturer. An exploit is the work of somebody independent of the manufacturer.
The NSA is seriously a problem. However this summary states US equipment manufacturers are in collusion with them. Without presenting any evidence, and filters out information that contradicts that statement from the reference it cites.
This is not journalism. It's a troll.
Didn't say the summary was wrong. What it said was perfectly correct, but leaving out the fact that the article didn't just talk about US companies made it misleading.
Well, if you put it that way... it certainly sounds easier to just let the government keep fucking me up the ass.
By now I'm used to it. And your way sounds like work. Yuck.
How much is it worth to those tech companies to know exactly what their customers are doing?
And to the Chinese? Or Russians?
Snowden may have a guest pass in any one of these countries just to keep information surrounding these capabilities quiet. Russia did say he could stay so long as he quit spilling secrets.
It might be a mistake to think in terms of a 'them vs us' race. If the NSA says, "Backdoor the chips" to US companies and then shares that information with our 'enemies' in return for their backdoor exploits, that is worth more to all then trying to keep the capabilities to ourselves. They know we do it, we know they do it. But its still useful technology for keeping our respective populations under control. And that's what each of these governments fears more than an attack from the outside. The FBI/CIA/NSA might miss the occasional 9/11 or Boston bombing. But get on Twitter and try to amass public support for a "throw the bums out" movement and see how long that lasts.
Have gnu, will travel.
It can do any number of things, but they have to be pre-arranged, as the disk cannot access main memory. It can, for example, inject code into the boot-loader or compromise known executables. The firmware compromise is not really necessary, but it can help disguising things. For example, with a firmware compromise you can do things like boot-code compromise only if the power went up less than a minute ago or if there was a reset shortly before. Then anybody reading the bootloader to verify it will not see the compromise. A BIOS-attack would be doing something similar, but without the possibility to hide so easily. (If these things become widespread, I will start to verify my BIOS regularly with an SPI adapter. No way to hide from that.
Full disk encryption with boot from a non-writable medium (kernel and initrd on CD in a non-burner drive, for example) will neutralize a compromised disk firmware pretty effectively or alternatively protect the boot-loader against manipulation. Of course "they" could then try to compromise the CD drive...
Still, the NSA is not magic. They do not even have the best hackers, just those with the biggest egos ans smallest morals. These tend to be rather mediocre. No, the problem is that PC security sucks badly and that you can break into almost any standard installation if you throw enough money at the problem. My guess would be that even a restrictive firewall configuration on a Linux firewall keeps them out reliably. Of course, if you use Windows, they can just get past that with the update mechanism and with active help from Microsoft...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
SELinux is not under suspicion. Putting backdoors in it would be glaringly obvious to anybody halfway competent doing an analysis, as it is just an access control layer and hence rather simple. Being hard to find is a critical characteristic of any professionally placed backdoor, and hence a backdoor in SELinux is very unlikely. You are barking up the wrong tree.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You sure this isn't an Apple feature called "power nap", the system wakes up and downloads updates, checks for new email etc, then goes back to sleep.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
fortunately I just turn off the wifi when I put the machine to sleep. it still does it, but at least I know it isn't sending anything to anyone.
And you are 'turning off' the wifi exactly how? Disconnecting the antenna, or trusting the software switch? (as opposed to a hardware switch interrupting the power or antenna, wouldn't that be a nice feature...)
"loose cannon"? Bullshit.
Don't you think for one damn minute that the NSA is "off the ranch" with their programs. They were implemented at the behest of our beloved and benevolent leaders.
The "justice" branch (haha) just declared everything is just fine after all. The executive branch and legislative branch has already said time and time again that the NSA is doing useful and important work.
What really chaps my ass, is not that the government tells people these programs are for the so-called "war on terror" or that certainly, the government would never use it against non-terrorist, but the that nearly every poll indicates that most 'mericans fucking believe them!
I know they have done their best over the last 40 years to indoctrinate kids starting in kindergartener, but it is sad that so many folks just close their eyes and refuse to ask hard questions.
Think about it...forcing children to pledge allegiance to a government... It is fucking crazy. We are brainwashed never to question our masters, and it is working. Fuck, look at the shit your facebook friends post! That is a representation of America.
Disclosure, I feel I have the right to bitch. I did my 4 years in the services and about half that was in the shitty hotspots of the world keeping and eye on brown people.
Because US companies are in greater danger of subversion by the NSA than foreign ones.
davecb@spamcop.net
Don't think for a second that these back-doors that companies put in at the behest of the NSA aren't also being used to the benefit of those companies.
Read the article please. The companies didn't do anything (really, you seriously think Huawei or Samsung is providing back doors to the NSA?). The NSA is compromising them the same way other bad guys get in - by finding and exploiting flaws in the OS.
The few mentions of hardware in the article are things like special monitor cables which would have to be added to a targeted computer by an agent.
#DeleteChrome
Don't think for a second that these back-doors that companies put in at the behest of the NSA aren't also being used to the benefit of those companies.
There is no evidence from the article we are talking about intentional backdoors created at the request of NSA. Rather the kind of backdoors created by unintentional programming errors where once exploited allows foothold to be maintained by patching firmware of various hardware subsystems.
So, if the NSA were shuttered tomorrow, what makes you think those back-doors are going to go away? How much is it worth to those tech companies to know exactly what their customers are doing? How much is it worth to their institutional shareholders?
How much is legal trouble, bad publicity and resulting loss of customers worth to shareholders?
A (un)intentional backdoor actively exploited to gain market intelligence is a backdoor with high probability of discovery. Likewise any use of covert capability erodes that capability.