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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. Re:Open source? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What sort of straw man is that? No one has claimed that it is impossible to sabotage open source software. But the fact that the saboteur would at least have to try to hide it, which is not the case with secret source software, puts them at a huge disadvantage.

    Do you leave your front door unlocked because you're not 100% sure that your lock can't be picked?

  2. Re:Open source? by hacker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Write it down. Heck, even the USPS or FedEx seems to be less compromised - they record the address info (metadata) but I haven't seen anything to imply they've been opening the letters.

    They do photograph every single letter and parcel, as well as x-ray scan everything that goes through their facility.

    Is that "safe"? I don't know.

    Can they discern written text inside a letter in an envelope, through x-ray scanning? I don't know.

    Are they photographing every letter under extreme bright lights, making the container effectively transparent?

    Not sure, but it's worth exploring every single one of those questions.