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The Startling Array of Hacking Tools In NSA's Armory

Posted by samzenpus on from the pick-your-poison dept.

littlekorea writes "A series of servers produced by Dell, air-gapped Windows XP PCs and switches and routers produced by Cisco, Huawei and Juniper count among the huge list of computing devices compromised by the NSA, according to crypto-expert and digital freedom fighter Jacob Applebaum. Revealing a trove of new NSA documents at his 30c3 address (video), Applebaum spoke about why the NSA's program might lead to broader adoption of open source tools and gave a hot tip on how to know if your machines have been owned."

2 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Open source? by TWiTfan · · Score: -1, Troll

    Are you going to go through every line of code to make sure it's okay, and then compile it yourself?

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    The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
    1. Re:Open source? by mrxak · · Score: -1, Troll

      At least with closed source you can just assume you're compromised, or trust the (known) people who put it out. Open source backdoors, if anybody even notices them (and let's be fair here, the NSA hires way smarter people than your average coder), will appear as accidental bugs, placed there anonymously. Open source is no more secure than closed source, for a host of reasons, but at least with closed source, you know where the code came from and can judge it based on that.

      --
      -mrxak
      Onions Will Kill You