Posted on 06/22/2015 12:20:58 PM PDT by aMorePerfectUnion
The NSA and its British counterpart the GCHQ have put extensive effort into hacking popular security software products to “track users and infiltrate networks,” according to the latest round of Snowden docs unearthed today by The Intercept.
Cybersecurity companies, including the Moscow-headquartered Kaspersky Lab, were targeted by government agencies to gain intelligence of the latest exploits. Details of the security software’s inner workings were deciphered by agencies through a process called software reverse engineering (SRE), which allowed them to analyze and exploit the software suites.
A top-secret warrant renewal request issued by the GCHQ details the motivations behind infiltrating the products of such anti-virus companies.
“Personal security products such as the Russian anti-virus software Kaspersky continue to pose a challenge to GCHQ’s CNE [Computer Network Exploitation] capability,” the warrant stated, “and SRE is essential in order to be able to exploit such software and to prevent detection of our activities.”
A leaked 2010 presentation called “Project CAMBERDADA” also suggested that the government agencies may be searching through and flagging the emails of employees from cybersecurity firms in order to identify more of these threats.
Documents also disclosed efforts by the NSA of intercepting “leaky” data being sent from users’ computers to the Kaspersky Lab servers. Such data, including sensitive user information, was embedded in “User-Agent” strings in the HTTP requests and could be used to assess and track users’ activity.
In a statement to The Intercept, Kaspersky Lab said:
”It is extremely worrying that government organizations would be targeting us instead of focusing resources against legitimate adversaries, and working to subvert security software that is designed to keep us all safe. However, this doesn’t come as a surprise. We have worked hard to protect our end users from all types of adversaries. This includes both common cyber-criminals or nation state-sponsored cyber-espionage operations.”
In a testament of just how far-reaching the tracking capabilities of these government agencies has become, an interesting tidbit from today’s leak, a top-secret “Five Eyes” presentation, disclosed that the GCHQ was regularly collecting intel on 100 million malware events per day.
My anti-virus software started acting funny - which ones did NSA hack?
This has been posted once today, I think, but the narrative is still on.
Bottom Line: notwithstanding the rhetoric coming out of CONgress, the NSA vacuuming of your digital lives is still an ongoing effort.
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Funny strange...
Or, funny ha-ha?
Cybersecurity companies, including the Moscow-headquartered Kaspersky Lab, were targeted by government agencies to gain intelligence of the latest exploits.
Since Kaspersky is a Russian company, who can say that they are not used by Russian intelligence agencies to "track users and infiltrate networks"?
Published at techcrunch at 3:05 pm. Posted here at 3:10 pm.
“Yep, son, we have met the enemy and he is us.”
“NSA vacuuming of your digital lives is still an ongoing effort.”
I think you are toast because you know me, and I’m toast because a fairly close family member works at the NSA looking for bad guys like terrorists, so I figure the NSA has bugged this house :o) and my computer and my phone :o), and all my FRIENDS, of which you are one.
Now, Lazamataz already knows he is screwed and he tells us that over and over. But he is a friend of mine, too, so the NSA is probably on his case, too - that makes him not only screwed, but toast, too.
So, which “popular security software products” are they?
They'd tell ya, but then they'd hafta kill ya.
They have no right to do that.
The Chinese build your laptop, the Russians provide your “anti virus”, the NSA electronically spies on everyone and FBI surveillance planes circle you neighborhood I about ready to go back to using paper and pencil.
All of them, every search engine, every update for Windows or Java or whatever, your IPS, every everything.
Yeah, probably right.
Thanks, NSA. Glad to know you've joined the other side.
And we’re all one bureaucratic screw up from the Chinese, the Russians, and the Nigerians having all of it.
Massive amounts of fiber optic cable were put in during the dot-com boom. Unlike other communication technologies (cell phone towers, copper cable), this stuff is going to be in great shape for years.
We need to take all that dark cable, connect new hubs, and build a new internet that is separate from the hubs the NSA is monitoring.
All of them???
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