Showing posts with label malware. Show all posts
Showing posts with label malware. Show all posts

Wednesday, 14 May 2014

Meeting NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden (video)


 
Intercepting the National Spying Agency
In part two of Democracy Now's extended interview, Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald tells the inside story of meeting National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras were the journalists who first met Snowden in Hong Kong last June, going on to publish a series of disclosures in The Guardian, a venerable 190-year-old British newspaper, that exposed massive NSA surveillance to the world.

Host Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Greenwald has just come out with a new book on the Snowden leaks and their fallout, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

Recalling his first encounter with Snowden, Greenwald says: "The big question was: 'How are we going to know that it’s you? We know nothing about you. We don’t know how old you are, what you look like, or what your race is, or even your gender.' And [Snowden] said, 'You’ll know me because I’ll be holding in my left hand a Rubik’s cube.' And so he walked in, was holding a Rubik’s cube, came over to us, introduced himself, and that was how we met him." More

More from The Intercept
British Spies Face Legal Action Over Secret Hacking Programs
The United Kingdom’s top spy agency is facing legal action following revelations published by The Intercept about its involvement in secret efforts to hack into computers on a massive scale. Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, has been accused of acting unlawfully by helping to develop National Security Agency surveillance systems capable of covertly breaking into More
British surveillance agency GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA’s vast troves of private communications and sought “unsupervised access” to its data as recently as last year, classified documents provided NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal.
Der Spiegel: NSA Put Merkel on List of 122 Targeted Leaders
Secret documents newly disclosed by the German news magazine Der Spiegel on Saturday shed more light on how aggressively the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have targeted Germany for surveillance.
The NSA Has An Advice Columnist. Seriously.
An NSA official, writing under the pen name “Zelda,” has served as a Dear Abby for spies. One of her most intriguing columns responds to an NSA staffer who complains that his (or her) boss is spying on employees.

Monday, 30 December 2013

The NSA's new TAO of Spying (video)

Wisdom Quarterly; Der Spiegel, Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman (DemocracyNow.org)

Glenn Greenwald and story on the NSA's TAO of Spying starts at Minute 25:30
 
The TAO, in NSA terms, refers to a unit of hackers it hires, trains, and continues to develop, the office of Tailored Access Operations.

NSA can "watch every keystroke [we] make"
The German publication Der Spiegel ("The Mirror") has revealed new details about a secretive hacking unit inside the National Security Agency called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. The unit was created in 1997 to hack into global communications traffic. 

Hackers inside the TAO have developed a way to break into (hack) computers running Microsoft Windows by gaining passive access to machines when users report program crashes to Microsoft [both installing malware and getting the cooperation of Microsoft], according to Glenn Greenwald.

Panel backs major curbs on NSA
In addition, with help from the CIA and FBI, the NSA has the ability to intercept computers and other electronic accessories purchased online in order to secretly insert spyware and components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer and journalist Glenn Greenwald join Democracy Now! to discuss the latest revelations, along with the future of Edward Snowden.
Greenwald is the journalist who first broke the NSA spying document revealed by Edward Snowden. Snowden now lives in Russia for safety. He was previously a columnist at Britain's The Guardian newspaper and is creating a new media venture with Laura Poitras (who is forced to live in abroad because England is redefining journalism that reveals a country's secrets as "terrorism"), Jeremy Scahill (author of Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, which is also a movie), and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

Wednesday, 4 December 2013

NSA infects 50,000 computer networks

 The NSA or National Security Agency spies legally and illegally (Corbis/NRC.nl)
 
The American intelligence service -- NSA -- infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software designed to steal sensitive information. 

Documents provided by former NSA-employee Edward Snowden and seen by this newspaper, prove this. A management presentation dating from 2012 explains how the NSA collects information worldwide.

In addition, the presentation shows that the intelligence service uses "Computer Network Exploitation" (CNE) in more than 50,000 locations. CNE is the secret infiltration of computer systems achieved by installing malware, that is, malicious software.

One example of this type of hacking was discovered in September 2013 at the Belgium telecom provider Belgacom. For a number of years the British intelligence service -- GCHQ -- has been installing this malicious software in the Belgacom network in order to tap their customers’ telephone and data traffic. 
 
The Belgacom network was infiltrated by GCHQ through a process of luring employees to a false Linkedin page.

NSA has 1,000+ hackers
www.democracynow.org
The NSA computer attacks are performed by a special department called TAO (Tailored Access Operations). Public sources show that this department employs more than 1,000 hackers. As recently as August 2013, the Washington Post published articles about these NSA-TAO cyber operations. More