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Interview With An 'NSA Hacker' Published By The Intercept (theintercept.com)
The Intercept published a 4,000 word article based on a journalist's three-hour interview with an "NSA hacker" who recently left the agency for a career in cybersecurity. Offering a portrait of life within the U.S. intelligence agency, "Lamb" says he worked on "ridiculously cool projects that I'll never forget... Technically challenging things are just inherently interesting to me."
He's the author of some of the memos leaked by Edward Snowden about how the NSA tries to identify Tor users or break into sys-admin accounts. ("One of his memos outlined the ways the NSA reroutes (or "shapes") the internet traffic of entire countries, and another memo was titled "I Hunt Sysadmins.") "If you tell me, 'This can't be done,' I'm going to try and find a way to do it."
It's interesting that he ended one memo with "Current mood: devious" and wrote in another that Tor "generally makes for sad analysts". But in his interview, he warns that "There is no real safe, sacred ground on the internet. Whatever you do on the internet is an attack surface of some sort and is just something that you live with."
He's the author of some of the memos leaked by Edward Snowden about how the NSA tries to identify Tor users or break into sys-admin accounts. ("One of his memos outlined the ways the NSA reroutes (or "shapes") the internet traffic of entire countries, and another memo was titled "I Hunt Sysadmins.") "If you tell me, 'This can't be done,' I'm going to try and find a way to do it."
It's interesting that he ended one memo with "Current mood: devious" and wrote in another that Tor "generally makes for sad analysts". But in his interview, he warns that "There is no real safe, sacred ground on the internet. Whatever you do on the internet is an attack surface of some sort and is just something that you live with."
includes the NSA's lawn.
I was looking forward to the story but when I saw things like smiley faces and the current mood=devious junk, I'm doubting this cat was really a spook. No way would someone put that kind of gibberish in a presentation unless, of course, it was presented to his office buddies who probably got a kick out of it. No way a 4-star would be looking at some hand-scribbled, 2nd grade inspired drawing.
They can't hack for shit.
I suspect you are right. We certainly don't have any evidence they accomplished any major incursion. There is the Iranian centrifuge story, but I have my doubts about it, and we don't really have any reliable details.
I *do* have experience in assessing state governments' level of technological prowess, and it is beyond pitiful. Basically, they pay for everything, and if nobody is offering, there is no internal means to accomplish anything. I should clarify my "assessment" is way old by now, but I would guess this is still valid with the current state of the game.
Are the federal agencies similar to the state ones? Probably. They have the same kind of people.
(||) Nehmo (||)
NSA buys their exploits on the black market just like all the other criminal skiddies do.
They even point and click to deploy their attacks, like skiddies using babby's first pre-packaged metasploit-ready exploit vector.
"Devious" is buying exploits from real black hat hackers? Pretty much, yeah.
With everything having such shit security there's not much incentive to spend a lot of money on "really neat projects" aside from running a fuzzer on new software, or fingerprinting a sysadmin's systems then deploying the existing library of vulns against them. Why crack the safe combination when the bank vault door is standing wide open?
NSA is having problems with recruiting. TFA is propaganda. It's a smidge better than their prior attempts though.
The only story is that the journalist did a three hour interview with a NSA hacker. There's no content in there.
Anyhow, there are other illustrations of NSA's ineptitude.
(||) Nehmo (||)
"If you tell me, 'This can't be done,' I'm going to try and find a way to do it."
How to be rich in 10 seconds:
1) say, "I can't have your bank account. This can't be done."
2)He's 'going to try and find a way to do it'
3)????
4)Profit
Its pretty common when mocking a post to respond in the same style.
For example, one might have responded to yours with:
You must be [insult] ; either that or [insult]; and you [insult].
Anyhow [final insult]....
You might be right and its the same AC; but its just as likely to be using style imitation as part of the mockery.
I think you are comparing apples to oranges. The NSA has a charter that includes expertise in this field. That's very different from having license to engage in computer drama in the course of discharging duties, as state governments would have.
Oh for the old days when no one wondered why >50% of European Internet connections were routed through MAE East.
Being in the information security field myself, I've hung out with some federal government infosec people once or twice. My read is that the feds have a lot of money and other resources. They don't have superheroes on staff. "Garcia" from the TV show CSI doesn't work there. So they're good, but cerrainly not orders of magnitude better than those of of us in the private sector. We can't get billion dollar datacenters, though, to record information about every phone call in the country.
HOWEVER, most of the time it doesn't matter. Spear phishing isn't that difficult, and most people can be spear phished. (Note the qualifier SPEAR, not bulk phishing).
What about hacking high-value targets like major governments? Is it easy to hack the US state department? Well the head of the department, the secretary of state, DOES communicate in CLEAR TEXT via an unpatched server in her basement. It doesn't take genius hackers to read top secret informatiom that isn't encrypted and is sent in the clear over the public internet. The NSA doesn't NEED geniuses. They just need to be patient and persistent to exploit a particular target.
Of course they don't have to attack the primary target directly. Once they have access to the email account of Clinton's good friend Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, they can set a filter that intercepts emails she sends to HRC and add a trojan to an attached file. Then they have a foothold on HRC's computer and phone. None of this is that difficult, they just have to be patient if they want to get a value target.
he's turning in his back hat for a white one?
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Flawed as SELinux is, it's on top of other security measures. It cannot give permissions that aren't already there.
Most of the criticism I see about SELinux is that it's too cumbersome to use correctly, so those without a special interest often turns it off. Often by the same people who don't understand acl either, and think 666 and 777 permissions are practical. Many of them even rely on Windows-like privilege escalation like gratuitous ALL=(ALL) ALL in /etc/sudoers.
Computer Network Exploitation.
CNO = Computer Network Operations, an umbrella term which covers offense and defense. CNE is offensive CNO.
Most of the criticism I see about SELinux is that it's too cumbersome to use correctly, so those without a special interest often turns it off
The criticism is that the tools do not exist to make it convenient to create new SELinux profiles, so those without a special interest rarely turn it on — at least, for anything that some application or distribution doesn't include for their benefit. There have been efforts to create such tools in the past, but last time I looked it wasn't convenient to even build the tools, and they were outdated in other ways as well. If you know better, I'm interested.
Often by the same people who don't understand acl either, and think 666 and 777 permissions are practical.
They are practical for many purposes, when combined with proper use of accounts, and containers are making them decreasingly relevant. But yes, that it's inconvenient to modify ACLs on the command line is an annoyance that does lead to their underuse — much as the tools missing from SELinux do the same in that case.
Many of them even rely on Windows-like privilege escalation like gratuitous ALL=(ALL) ALL in /etc/sudoers.
It's no less secure than su -.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nah they will just upgrade him to Windows 10.
What I got from it was that Lamb wants to be a security consultant. You'd pay him to run Nessus against your network or whatever.