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Internal Kaspersky Investigation Says NSA Worker's Computer Was Infested with Malware (vice.com)
A reader shares a report: The personal computer of an NSA worker who took government hacking tools and classified documents home with him was infected with a backdoor trojan, unrelated to these tools, that could have been used by criminal hackers to steal the US government files, according to a new report being released Thursday by Kaspersky Lab in response to recent allegations against the company. The Moscow-based antivirus firm, which has been accused of using its security software to improperly grab NSA hacking tools and classified documents from the NSA worker's home computer and provide them to the Russian government, says the worker had at least 120 other malicious files on his home computer in addition to the backdoor, and that the latter, which had purportedly been created by a Russian criminal hacker and sold in an underground forum, was trying to actively communicate with a malicious command-and-control server during the time Kaspersky is accused of siphoning the US government files from the worker's computer. Costin Raiu, director of the company's Global Research and Analysis Team, told Motherboard that his company's software detected and prevented that communication but there was a period of time when the worker had disabled his Kaspersky software and left his computer unprotected. Raiu says they found evidence that the NSA worker may have been infected with a second backdoor as well, though they saw no sign of it trying to communicate with an external server so they don't know if it was active on his computer.
In Russia, anti virus scans you
Exactly how did Kapersky Lab determine this?
By siphoning all the files off his computer, DUH
So first they admitted they retrieved the documents and patted themselves on the back for pulling down the documents that were leaked because they obviously involved data related to hacking.
NOW they're claiming there was malware on his system (oh, and that's not Kapersky's fault either because the user allegedly turned Kapersky off for a bit) so the leaks might have come from the malware and not from them?
I dunno... I would've led with the latter story FIRST...
That looks like some NSA worker used a private USB stick to transfer some of the "internal tools" from his computer to another, forgot about it, stuck it into his computer at home that ran Kaspersky, Kaspersky scanned the stick, the AV heuristics determined the stuff looked kinda fishy, did a closer scan, and eventually sent a copy to Russia. Whether that happened after asking "Hey, dude, something's kinda odd about this file, mind if we analyzed it?" or not is kinda moot now.
And since it would be kinda embarrassing to admit such a blunder and that the NSA, of all agencies, handed their valuable zero days to the Russians... let's rather say those damn Russkies in general and Kaspersky in particular are "hacking" us.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm so confused. I thought Russia was bad.
All governments are "bad", they just use different methods.
That said, if any government gets to spy on me, I'd rather it be a foreign one, simply because they don't have as many opportunities to mess up my life, or terminate it.
All governments are "bad"...
... but most of them are so grotesquely incompetent it doesn't matter too much.
As Bertrand Russell once observed, ancient Greece was somewhat redeemed by the fact that the police were so inefficient that most decent people were able to escape their attentions.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I don't know if I'd want a virus scanner that has the ability to automatically remove files without my explicit permission. Imagine if your virus scanner itself were compromised and told to treat regular files as infections.
The contractor's computer was a honeypot. NSA hacking tools are being released on the dark web and they want to find out how they are being leaked. One theory was that Kaspersky was the culprit. So the NSA intentionally had a contractor put some NSA tools on a laptop that has Kaspersky, and had him put some other malware on there so that Kaspersky antivirus would detect it and wake up, then they watched to see if anyone scanned the NSA hacking tools and downloaded them.
What is happening now is the ensuing PR war. The public won't really learn the truth for years, if ever.