A Look at the NSA's Most Powerful Internet Attack Tool

realized writes in with a closer look at the NSA's QUANTUM system. "Today QUANTUM packs a suite of attack tools, including both DNS injection (upgrading the man-on-the-side to a man-in-the-middle, allowing bogus certificates and similar routines to break SSL) and HTTP injection. That reasonable enough. But it also includes gadgets like a plug-in to inject into MySQL connections, allowing the NSA to quietly mess with the contents of a third-party's database. (This also surprisingly suggests that unencrypted MySQL on the internet is common enough to attract NSA attention.) And it allows the NSA to hijack both IRC and HTTP-based criminal botnets, and also includes routines which use packet-injection to create phantom servers, and even attempting (poorly) to use this for defense."

Comments

I fully support this

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm American and I fully support this. This is exactly what intelligence agencies are for. Nothing in any of these leaks in the linked article suggests these capabilities are being abused. I want my government to be able to pursue foreign intelligence targets with capabilities like these and--in a time where people complain relentlessly about government agencies being ineffective--I'm glad they are able to do this.

Posting anonymously because I've lost too much karma expressing a contrarian opinion on all these Snowden articles. Frankly, I'm more scared of moderators than our government...