E-Detective Spy Tool Used By Police and Governments Has Major Security Holes

DavidGilbert99 writes: A controversial intercept tool called E-Detective from Taiwanese based company Decision Group has a major security hole which could allow a hacker to remotely execute code and read all the data captured by the software. Considering over 100 law enforcement agencies and governments around the world use E-Detective, this could be a big problem. According to the International Business Times story: "E-Detective works by 'sniffing the network' it is monitoring and captures data packets before sending them to be reassembled and decoded. Unlike other products E-Detective promises to 'reconstruct the data to its original format' for the end users so that it will be seen the same way that it was seen on the network. E-Detective also advertises as a network forensic tool for private enterprises to "protect sensitive data from data leakage".

Comments

All products of this type of shit

[Karmashock]

You secure a network by locking down its capabilities to what you need to do and NOTHING else. Hacking then becomes basically impossible... right there.

Re:All products of this type of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Not even remotely impossible, but a lot harder. False sense of security is dangerous, you should also remember that.

Re:All products of this type of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you really that clueless about security? You were talking about how it's "impossible to get hacked" if you implement "perfect security".

In that heartbleed example if your server conects to a thrid party server to fetch some data over TLS and that third party server initiates a heartbleed based attack to read your server's RAM, security has been breached. It's totally irrelevant whether that RAM holds any meaningful data (which it usually absolutely does: disk encryption keys, VPN keys etc.), what matters is that an attacker breached your "perfect security".

Security CAN be perfect

I sincerely hope you don't work in that area. I would never do business with someone who posesses that arrogant attitude towards computer security.

No surprise

[gweihir]

This just demonstrates that states attacking computers and placing backdoors does massively more damage than could ever be compensated by any possible benefits. Hence it is one of the most stupid things to do and only desired and done bu people that really have no clue or do not care how much damage they do. Usually the latter type of person is called "evil", and with good justification.

Re:E-Detective can reconstruct net traffic ..

[gweihir]

Compromised certificates and man-in-the middle attacks based on them. Any second-rate "spy" agency (like the FBI or CIA) has them. (If they were actually good at their jobs, they would not need to break the systems they are targeting. This way, they are basically attacking critical infrastructure, and people that do this are commonly called "terrorists".)