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Leaked Docs Offer Win 8 Tip: FinFisher Spyware Can't Tap Skype's Metro App
mask.of.sanity (1228908) writes "A string of documents detailing the operations and effectiveness of the FinFisher suite of surveillance platforms appears to have been leaked. The documents, some dated 4 April this year, detail the anti-virus detection rates of the FinFisher spyware which German based Gamma Group sold to governments and law enforcement agencies. The dump also reveals Windows 8 users should opt for the Metro version of Skype rather than the desktop client because it cannot be tapped by FinFisher."
Skype belongs to Microsoft, Microsoft is in the US, the US records your calls.
That would be a good idea if Metro Skype wasn't so utterly useless. It's almost as if they didn't even try. It is missing such basic features as marking yourself as "Busy" and is even missing the screen sharing feature.
Kriston
"People are aware that Windows has bad security but they are underestimating the problem because they are thinking about third parties.
What about security against Microsoft? Every non-free program is a 'just trust me program'. 'Trust me, we're a big corporation. Big corporations would never mistreat anybody, would we?' Of course they would! They do all the time, that's what they are known for. So basically you mustn't trust a non free programme."
"There are three kinds: those that spy on the user, those that restrict the user, and back doors. Windows has all three. Microsoft can install software changes without asking permission. Flash Player has malicious features, as do most mobile phones."
"Digital handcuffs are the most common malicious features. They restrict what you can do with the data in your own computer. Apple certainly has the digital handcuffs that are the tightest in history. The i-things, well, people found two spy features and Apple says it removed them and there might be more""
From:
Richard Stallman: 'Apple has tightest digital handcuffs in history'
www.newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2012/12/05/richard-stallman-interview/
"The dump also reveals Windows 8 users should opt for the Metro version of Skype rather than the desktop client because it cannot be tapped by FinFisher."
That's what they want you to think!
...the docs were leaked by spy agencies, because the Metro version is *easier* to spy on?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This of course is very old news, but relevant.
Memorable quotes for
Looker (1981)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
"John Reston: Television can control public opinion more effectively than armies of secret police, because television is entirely voluntary. The American government forces our children to attend school, but nobody forces them to watch T.V. Americans of all ages *submit* to television. Television is the American ideal. Persuasion without coercion. Nobody makes us watch. Who could have predicted that a *free* people would voluntarily spend one fifth of their lives sitting in front of a *box* with pictures? Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment. And the average American now spends more than one and a half years of his life just watching television commercials. Fifty minutes, every day of his life, watching commercials. Now, that's power."
##
"The United States has it's own propaganda, but it's very effective because people don't realize that it's propaganda. And it's subtle, but it's actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it's funded in a different way. With the Nazis it was funded by the government, but in the United States, it's funded by corporations and corporations they only want things to happen that will make people want to buy stuff. So whatever that is, then that is considered okay and good, but that doesn't necessarily mean it really serves people's thinking - it can stupify and make not very good things happen."
- Crispin Glover: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm000...
##
"It's only logical to assume that conspiracies are everywhere, because that's what people do. They conspire. If you can't get the message, get the man." - Mel Gibson (from an interview)
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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William Casey, CIA Director
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"The real reason for the official secrecy, in most instances, is not to keep the opposition (the CIA's euphemistic term for the enemy) from knowing what is going on; the enemy usually does know. The basic reason for governmental secrecy is to keep you, the American public, from knowing - for you, too, are considered the opposition, or enemy - so that you cannot interfere. When the public does not know what the government or the CIA is doing, it cannot voice its approval or disapproval of their actions. In fact, they can even lie to your about what they are doing or have done, and you will not know it. As for the second advantage, despite frequent suggestion that the CIA is a rogue elephant, the truth is that the agency functions at the direction of and in response to the office of the president. All of its major clandestine operations are carried out with the direct approval of or on direct orders from the White House. The CIA is a secret tool of the president - every president. And every president since Truman has lied to the American people in order to protect the agency. When lies have failed, it has been the duty of the CIA to take the blame for the president, thus protecting him. This is known in the business as "plausible denial." The CIA, functioning as a secret instrument of the U.S. government and the presidency, has long misused and abused history and continues to do so."
- Victor Marchetti, Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History
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George Carlin:
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city h
Ha. For those old enough to remember, it's kind of like 'new coke' vs 'coke classic'. When W9 comes out it will be like coke classic and everyone will come flocking back and buying new PCs. Then MS will claim that W8 was a marketing ploy to get more sales of W9 as a way to save face with all the losses from W8.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
No one cares, Ballmer.
Move along.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
This is just another one of the recent MS gimmicks to get you to switch to the Metro version.
I just received a very official Skype Team email stating my desktop version would be automatically removed. That's exactly what it said: YOUR SKYPE VERSION WILL BE REMOVED. If a company would add such a trigger on an application (even one that highly depends on a single external cloud service to do anything at all), I would call that heavy persuasion.
And it doesn't end there. To really get a high-security setup, boot chain, you need to do a lot of start-up work.
To start, you need a pre-boot scan. The occasional scan from a USB image would provide an integrity check: EFI settings (boot order), bootloader, kernel image, and initrd. You'd need to validate the boot loader against the installed package, validate the installed ClamAV database signature, pull ClamAV updates if the signature doesn't validate, validate kernels against installed packages, and validate the bootloader and kernel and initrd contents via ClamAV.
At boot time, the initrd should do similar: it should run clamscan against ClamAV itself, init, the basic libraries and services, and so on. This takes about 9 seconds--it takes 7 seconds to start ClamAV, so a running, resident service to execute scans is desirable for continuous scanning.
During boot, a service loads which hooks into LSM or otherwise to catch all execve(), mmap(), and open() calls, as well as any writes.Any such call first checks if the access is to a file; if so, it checks if the file is known safe; if not, it validates the file. If the file does not validate, it taints the process or blocks access. If the process is tainted and is allowed to write to a file, it un-validates that file. Upon load, the daemon immediately scans all running processes, checking their open files (including the main binary, mmap()ed segments, etc.) for validation.
To validate, the scanner daemon scans the file. If the file contains no malware, it's entered into a patricia trie and marked as clean. If it contains malware, it's entered as malware. Whenever the file enters an unknown state, it's removed from the trie. Patricia tries are compact structures which branch away from common prefixes: "/usr/lib/libc.so.6" and "/usr/lib/libclobber.so.2" are entered as "/usr/lib/libc" pointing to ".so.6" and "lobber.so.2"; likewise, more entries will create breaks after "/usr/" and "lib/lib" and whatever else. 100MB of RAM should suffice to track almost 300,000 files.
Any already-validated files are skipped: a fast trie look-up is performed, and the state is returned. If the file is not found in the trie, it is validated. If the file is written to by a tainted process, it's marked as tainted. If a process opens a malware file, it is marked as tainted.
For further protection, processes should not be allowed to transition any memory area from non-executable to executable, or to a state of both writability and executability. This prevents direct code injection, as you cannot write to executable code, and you cannot execute writable code. Further, tracking of processes which have communicated with tainted processes (IPC, pipes, sockets, network connections, etc.) should be done.
Now you can see that a tainted malware app has connected to your Skype process!
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For those still wondering if there was anything "wrong" with TrueCrypt a quote from the document:
The FinFly USB dongle and the Infection ISO
Images can infect the MBR of the system in
one of the following situations:
- The installed OS is unencrypted
- The installed OS is encrypted with TrueCrypt
- The installed OS is encrypted with BitLocker
Keep in mind just what exactly Microsoft handed the keys to the NSA for:
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Microsoft wasn't called out as an "enthusiastic" partner in the NSA's documents for nothing. Definitely consider all versions of Skype to be damaged goods - along with all other Microsoft products - can't imagine how excited the NSA was for the Xbox One and its always on audio monitoring and (originally) required connected video camera.
I drink Mt Dew (pr Mello Yello) anyway.
IIRC, "Windows Classic" was the Win9x theme on Windows XP-7
I'll take spyware over metro any day.
The queen she doth protest too much.
They will, after their third tablet has broken because the batteries died.
I have been having endless Skype video calls with my gf while I'm spending the summer in Europe. Sometimes we are discussing technical stuff related to stuff our academic research, but usually it's a bunch of inane crap, and sometimes it's 6 hours of one of us sleeping. So if the NSA wants to commit resources to make sure that secret codes are not being passed across the Atlantic in our Skype calls, I feel fine about that. By raising the cost of spying, don't we reduce the incentive to do it?
The logic that people would continue using Skype is what baffles me.
Just don't use the PoS that is Skype, which STILL hasn't fixed the IP exploit.
Very funny... Pull the other other one...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I might use it then. It's not a please take over my pc, no really, program.