SPIEGEL published two pieces this morning about the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division, aka premier hacking ninja squad. According to Snowden documents, TAO has a catalog of all the commercial equipment that carries NSA backdoors. And it’s a who’s who of a list. Storage products from Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung have backdoors in their firmware, firewalls from Juniper Networks have been compromised, plus networking equipment from Cisco and Huawei, and even unspecified products from Dell. TAO actually intercepts online orders of these and other electronics to bug them.
W.T.F.!?
If you think you have anonymity on the internet you probably believe nobody gossips at AA…
One measure which can afford a fair measure of security is to compose and read
documents on a computer not connected to the Internet, and encrypt and decrypt
computers on that computer. Then transport them by sneakernet to an Internet-
connected computer for transmission.
If a security agency is seriously interested in you, of course, they can remotely
read the keystrokes on your computer and the material on its screen.
Tempest-level security is not available to ordinary civilians, but a
metal-screened room should take one a long way. Best is fine copper-mesh
screening. Of course purchase of such screening would make you a person
of interest. Old slow computers (286s, say) are easier to screen than modern
computers because of the longer wavelengths of their emissions.
Over the last 13 years deaths in the US due to terrorism have fallen 98%. Meanwhile FBI’s budget has increased by 140%.
Don’t be afraid of terrorism, be very afraid. Keep paying taxes. The Military-Industrial-Spying complex needs more money.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHINH YOU!
My thoughts go back to that story “Surrounding the Wrong Building”.
Otherwise they can do all the spying they want on terrorists and their supporters.
But bureaucracies always tend to be self sustaining.
Toldja.
These guys can watch you type if they want. They can turn on the front facing camera of your iPad and watch, or just watch the letters appear. If it went by Internet, they have a copy.
And yes, your computer has back doors built in to the hard drive, the BIOS, and the CPU. Oh, and so does your printer and you phone. And your GPS. And your Smart TV. Maybe your monitor too, I’m not 100% sure about monitors.
You want to be secure? Ditch the phone and the wireless internet, maintain an air gap between the outside world and your computer system, and assume anything you allow on the web is being read by your ex-wife’s lawyer.
That’s if you’re nobody and you’ve never done anything interesting. If they’re interested in you, assume anything you say out loud is recorded. Because most likely it was. The NSA very likely knows what Julian Assange had for lunch today, and what colour underwear he’s got on.
We are really not paranoid enough to know what these clowns can do.
Friend of mine was charged with movie download piracy.
3 movies= $15,000 dollar lawsuit, fancy lawyers letter and address for his return check.
Is it a real suit, or a scam?
He asked for my advice.
First, go buy the movie, dvd, in question.
Do not remove it from the original package, still has license agreement.
Then make them prove in court how they hacked into your codes, and who/whom authorized it?
–
Two years later- Crickets, silence..
You have to assume everything you have on a computer is being read by others.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/meet-badbios-the-mysterious-mac-and-pc-malware-that-jumps-airgaps/
Or you can just go old school.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23282308
– but just a few years ago those who said producers have under pressure from Fed agencies) designed hardware that will spy on you were tinfoil hat nutters – according to Glen Beck.
The America I used to be proud to call a friend and neighbor is long gone. So much bloody sacrifice to preserve their freedoms just to witness following self-entitled generations piss it all away.
The “War on Terror” has caused as much harm to western freedoms and budgets as their never-ending “War on Drugs”, and that is a truly incredible feat.
“- but just a few years ago those who said producers have under pressure from Fed agencies) designed hardware that will spy on you were tinfoil hat nutters – according to Glen Beck.”
Because they were.
And still are.
There’s a tremendous amount of noise about what it is NSA, CSEC and others have been doing, but very little real light.
We’ve all been tootling around the web how long now? Twenty years or more? Our names and addresses and a lot of our personal details are “out there”, often as not of our own volition. None of us seems particularly bothered that a plethora of private companies routinely collects data on our surfing activities in order to bombard us with tailored marketing or sell lists of metadata on to each other.
And now, suddenly we’re upset about our privacy?
Your government doesn’t need a SIGINT agency to gather information on you; it does that quite openly and legally every day. Its various ministries and departments are already filled with files all about you.
What’s an air gap?
That’s jargon meaning you don’t have your computer network (or you home computer) attached directly to the internet. You have one that is attached, then you transfer files from the internet to your network and back again using removable media. Like DVDs, thumb drives, external hard drives or what have you.
We used to call it Sneakernet back in the day, networking by walking from one PC to another with a floppy disk.
As noted above this isn’t absolutely foolproof, because viruses can hide and infect your secure machines when you do a file transfer. But the nice thing is that an air gapped network can be infested with all manner of viruses, but they can’t phone home. A key logger ‘bot is no use if it can’t get its info back to the spy
Lawyers often have this type of setup. They can’t afford to have client info escape into the wild, as it were.
Give you head a shake tyro. I’ve witnessed the Feds pressure engineering at a telecom to build super user back doors into their network equipment – that was over 10 yrs ago. When I worked in the lab at a major cell manufacturer, we had service menus on all phones and we used to remotely turn on the phones of the sales-geeks on Fri. PM just for laughs, and used RF telem from their handshake signals to locate them in bars or peeler joints. That technology existed decades ago. The same technology allows a super user to remotely turn on your lap top/Tablet Camera and mic and monitor the output. NO consumer networked device is private.
You don’t know half of what you think you do duffer.
John Lewis: “One measure which can afford a fair measure of security is to compose and read documents on a computer not connected to the Internet, and encrypt and decrypt computers on that computer”
If only it was that simple anymore:
http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/security-it/nsa-can-turn-your-iphone-into-a-spy-says-privacy-advocate-jacob-appelbaum-20131231-hv77r.html
“The independent journalist and security expert said on Monday that the NSA could turn iPhones into eavesdropping tools and use radar wave devices to harvest electronic information from computers, even if they weren’t online…Another slide showcased a futuristic-sounding device described as a “portable continuous wave generator”, a remote-controlled device which – when paired with tiny electronic implants – can bounce invisible waves of energy off keyboards and monitors to see what is being typed, even if the target device isn’t connected to the internet.”
Nothing to see here.