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US Navy Solicits Zero Days
msm1267 writes: The US Navy posted a RFP, which has since removed from FedBizOpps.gov, soliciting contractors to share vulnerability intelligence and develop zero day exploits for most of the leading commercial IT software vendors. The Navy said it was looking for vulnerabilities, exploit reports and operational exploit binaries for commercial software, including but not limited to Microsoft, Adobe, [Oracle] Java, EMC, Novell, IBM, Android, Apple, Cisco IOS, Linksys WRT and Linux, among others. The RFP seemed to indicate that the Navy was not only looking for offensive capabilities, but also wanted use the exploits to test internal defenses.The request, however, does require the contractor to develop exploits for future released CVEs. "Binaries must support configurable, custom, and/or government owned/provided payloads and suppress known network signatures from proof of concept code that may be found in the wild," the RFP said.
So much for post-911 interagency cooperation. While one agency is inserting weaknesses, another is having to buy then on the open market. Though the Navy approach is probably cheaper.
Little is more Orwellian among our government's many exploits than its attempts to break into our computer systems.
The ever-present security camera? That's bad, but it's still out in public. It's on the street, maybe in the stores. They're not in your home, not yet. Rubber stamp warrants? That's worse: It allows targeted invasions of privacy. But at least it requires a the resources of a human with a paycheck and his own sense of morals. But breaking into computer systems? They're in our pockets, in our homes, and have access to every bit of our modern lives. From shopping lists to love letters to medicine prescriptions they contain whole lives. Snippets from every trip you've taken are encoded there.
And a program doesn't have a sense of right and wrong. It will never refuse to spy on ethical grounds. It won't bring things up to the attention of oversight committees. It won't make anonymous calls to the ethics line. It won't refuse to work, leak information, or demand orders in writing. A program will quietly do as its told, wherever it can. Above all prying surveillance I believe ubiquitous IT access by the government needs to be contained.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
How many years it officially took the hackers to stumble across the existence of the embedded NSA backdoor inside MS Windows??
Way before the news of that 'discovery' was told to the world, a friend of mine found it, but was told to 'shut up or else' by his then boss
Apparently they (and many other people) already knew about it for quite a while, but none of them bother to tell the world about it
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
You cant disadvantage foreign companies/intelligence agencies by creating new rules, without them suing you under the new proposed trade treaties.
I would have made $x but you changed the rules, pay up!!