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How "Omnipotent" Hackers Tied To NSA Hid For 14 Years and Were Found At Last
Advocatus Diaboli writes The money and time required to develop the Equation Group malware, the technological breakthroughs the operation accomplished, and the interdictions performed against targets leave little doubt that the operation was sponsored by a nation-state with nearly unlimited resources to dedicate to the project. The countries that were and weren't targeted, the ties to Stuxnet and Flame, and the Grok artifact found inside the Equation Group keylogger strongly support the theory the NSA or a related US agency is the responsible party, but so far Kaspersky has declined to name a culprit. NSA officials didn't respond to an e-mail seeking comment for this story. What is safe to say is that the unearthing of the Equation Group is a seminal finding in the fields of computer and national security, as important, or possibly more so, than the revelations about Stuxnet.
We hack Iran to prevent them from releasing a bomb.
NK hacks us to prevent us from also releasing a bomb, IYKWIMAITYD.
They anus?
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
There is a building near Microsoft labeled "Affiliated Associations of America" which sounds shady as fuck.
Mainly for which countries are not listed. Hmmm.
Often, I'm told.
So a smart country would "target" itself since it recieved all the info anyway. This means that these findings aren't really there; just guesses.
Stephen Hawkings computer cannot be infected by a keylogger
There's no such thing as "omnipotent" hackers, it's all a bunch of *#*$&@%$@!$#@!#{}@{}#@}#${[[
NO CARRIER
Would you like to play a game?
I'm not sure how I see that this is a good thing. I know it's fun to hate on the intelligence community (I've done it too), especially when we feel like our own rights have been infringed, but are we really saying that we are in favor of anything which hampers the West's ability to take clandestine actions against other states? After all the complaining we do about Congress and all the bureaucracy that comes along with anything usually related to government, we are then saying that absolutely every hostile action should be subject to the same oversight that produces exactly that molasses-like barrier to actual results?
It is without question that, at times, the intelligence community must have overstepped its bounds, as any entity with that much power would on occasion. Maybe in their case that happens far more often than it should. But does that really mean they should have no real power at all?
The headlne says different things than the text and the original article.
The headline says that they "were found"... but they weren't.
The headline that they are "tied to NSA"... but TFA says that "researchers stopped short of saying Equation Group was the handiwork of the NSA."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I'm just going to mention that all these hacks are aimed at Windows machines. When you have a monoculture, you get the Irish potato famine.
Ya.. another related post from engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2015/02/16/hard-drive-spyware/). "It's been known for a while that the NSA will intercept and bug equipment to spy on its soon-to-be owners, but the intellgency agency's techniques are apparently more clever than first thought. Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have discovered apparently state-created spyware buried in the firmware of hard drives from big names like Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital. When present, the code lets snoops collect data and map networks that would otherwise be inaccessible -- all they need to retrieve info is for an unwitting user to insert infected storage (such as a CD or USB drive) into an internet-connected PC. The malware also isn't sitting in regular storage, so you can't easily get rid of it or even detect it."
This is the video that might explain the attitude: it's Spielberg vs. Hitchcock in an epic rap battle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Whatever your opinion of the directors, you might find the video hilarious!
I had never seen this acronym before but when I seen it I automatically read it as If You Know What I Mean And I Think You Do. I am shutting down my computer now and taking a break from this internet thing.
going to cut the US off from the Internet for a day (like they did to N. Korea) as punishment for all this?
Read the headline which sounded interesting but the summary sounded like a completely different story.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
What's scary is they aren't just hiding in the hard drives. They are actually rewriting the firmware of those drives, and carving out invisible partitions that that can't get formatted.
Actually, I should modify my comment. The headline does say a different thing from the summary, but the actual article does in fact go on to give some reasonable evidence that connecting the group to the NSA. So, "tied to NSA" is an accurate summary, although with the caveat "tied to" is words that "stop short" of saying that it actually is the NSA.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"infected machines reporting to Equation Group command servers identified themselves as Macs, an indication that the group successfully compromised both iOS and OS X devices."
What vectors did the malware exploit to load-and-excute on the targeted Windows, iOS and OS X devices? Please provide samples of the disassembled code.
Running MD5sum on Unregistered (with no carriage return) produces the hash 84b8026b3f5e6dcfb29e82e0b0b0f386
The article used a lower-case u in unregistered, which produces a different hash.
Still no luck on figuring out e6d290a03b70cfa5d4451da444bdea39
My email address doesn't hash to it, so I guess I'm not being singled out.
is such that certain crimes are so grave that they transcend the realm of due process and require summary execution.
The whole point of due process is to ensure that yes, this is indeed the guilty party to be punished. Historically, the witch hunt was one popular alternative.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I think the intelligence community has done more harm than good more often than not.
I think American foreign policy has done more harm than good to America more often than not.
Throughout history, it has been the use of power which has undermined empires, and the threat of the use of power which makes them most effective. Wars are costly and can be unpredictable; they have almost always much more expensive than planned and almost always much less useful, except at certain very defined tasks. (Giving someone a temporary boost to poll numbers, uniting a country against a perceived threat, acting as a salve to respond to demand for war that leaders are afraid to turn down).
There are also other risks inherent in war. You train a large number of soldiers and give them weapons and training, which means that every day, your nation is fundamentally dependent upon their loyalty to survive--sometimes to defend it, but ALWAYS to not change the government or take over the government or turn on the country.
Stupidity is defined as mere elected officials thinking they have real control of the organs of state security. It wasn't true in the Soviets, it isn't true in the US.
Why would we need to discuss it when we already know how?
Precisely. If you look at all those attacks, they are targeting Windows specifically.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
You can hate the NSA all you want, but I have to tip my cap at their utter genius.
Beyond the technical similarities to the Stuxnet and Flame developers, Equation Group boasted the type of extraordinary engineering skill people have come to expect from a spy organization sponsored by the world's wealthiest nation. One of the Equation Group's malware platforms, for instance, rewrote the hard-drive firmware of infected computersâ"a never-before-seen engineering marvel that worked on 12 drive categories from manufacturers including Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, IBM, Micron, Toshiba, and Seagate.
The malicious firmware created a secret storage vault that survived military-grade disk wiping and reformatting, making sensitive data stolen from victims available even after reformatting the drive and reinstalling the operating system. The firmware also provided programming interfaces that other code in Equation Group's sprawling malware library could access. Once a hard drive was compromised, the infection was impossible to detect or remove.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Thank you, National Security Agency, for doing such a truly brilliant job of damaging future prospects for the American computer hardware industry. Smart move to leave the torture to the CIA, no reason for geeks to get their hands dirty. You, along with the CIA, daily provide the rest of the world with evident of how deeply, incredibly stupid supposedly smart people can be when they don't mix with grown-ups. Congratulations!