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Researchers Catch Microsoft Zero-Day Used To Install Government Spyware (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Government hackers were using a previously-unknown vulnerability in Microsoft's .NET Framework, a development platform for building apps, to hack targets and infect them with spyware, according to security firm FireEye. The firm revealed the espionage campaign on Tuesday, on the same day Microsoft patched the vulnerability. According to FireEye, the bug, which until today was a zero-day, was being used by a customer of FinFisher, a company that sells surveillance and hacking technologies to governments around the world. The hackers sent a malicious Word RTF document to a "Russian speaker," according to Ben Read, FireEye's manager of cyber espionage research. The document was programmed to take advantage of the recently-patched vulnerability to install FinSpy, spyware designed by FinFisher. The spyware masqueraded as an image file called "left.jpg," according to FireEye.
Who has caused the most damage for American citizens?
NORTH KOREA or THE NSA?
This is pretty much why I can't help but snicker every time someone says "But the Russians...". The harm "the Russians" can do to you are minimal compared to what your very own government can.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Also, if MS put out a patch today then it wasn't a zero day until today.
Zero day = the manufacturer doesn't know about it at all. Not how many days has a patch been available.
If it's a backdoor then it was never a zero day as the manufacturer always knew it was there.
Brian Malacchia was one of the authors of .NET. I had the pleasant experience of hearing him speak at MIT about the upcoming "Trusted Computing" software. What made it fun was that Richard Stallman was in the room, which Brian was *not* expecting, and proceeded to call into question the entire "Microsoft holds the private keys, and revolcation keys for all your hardware and software" security model. Brian pointed out that if Microsoft ever did the pernicious tricks Richard Stallman was worried about, that he and ethical engineers like him would resign.
I managed to rivet the room by pointing out "just like you resigned from the .NET project for their violations of basic security"? The fact that he hopped from security from .NET to Trusted Computing, and .NET *had government backdoors built in*, is precisely why we should trust neither project. He *knew* it was flawed, and instead of resigning he just went to the next security project that has nothing to do with actual user security. It's about digital rights management, at every single level, and about giving Microsoft access to user's private keys in their own private and uncontrolled escrow storage.