Monthly Archives: February 2015

Tech News Today 873: NSA Eats Your Fiber
The Internet is ruining your sleep, BBM reviews getting astroturfy, YouTube taking on Spotify, and more. Steam drops the third shoe, Microsoft might steal Ford #39;s chief, Evernote #39;s thunder,...

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Tech News Today 873: NSA Eats Your Fiber - Video

NSA Planting Viruses IN COMPUTER HARDRIVES BIGGEST GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY IN 2015
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NSA Planting Viruses IN COMPUTER HARDRIVES BIGGEST GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY IN 2015 - Video

Hypocrite Marco Rubio Supports Funding More NSA Spying
David Knight takes the studio for Alex Jones and breaks down how Marco Rubio has betrayed the American people. http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Marco-Rubio-P...

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Hypocrite Marco Rubio Supports Funding More NSA Spying - Video

"I would say that it has had a material impact in our ability to generate insights as to what counterterrorism, what terrorist groups around the world are doing," Adm. Michael Rogers told a group gathered in Washington for a cybersecurity summit hosted by the New America think tank.

READ: Jeb Bush defends NSA dragnet

"Do you have new blind spots that you didn't have prior to the revelation," moderator and CNN National Security correspondent Jim Sciutto asked.

"Have I lost capability that we had prior to the revelations? Yes," Rogers responded. "Anyone who thinks this has not had an impact I would say doesn't know what they're talking about."

Snowden himself remains free in Russia. A film about him won an Academy Award on Sunday evening.

Rogers says he knew U.S. infrastructure would likely come under cyber-attack on his watch, but the target of Sony Pictures was a surprise.

"I fully expected, sadly in some ways, that in my time as the commander of United States Cyber Command the Department of Defense would be tasked with attempting to defend the nation against those kind of attacks," he said. "I didn't realize that it would be against a motion picture company, to be honest."

North Korea is widely believed to be behind the hack in response to Sony's production of the film "The Interview," which depicts a comedic plot to kill leader Kim Jong-un

Rogers declined to respond to a question if the United States was behind a retaliatory online attack that took down North Korea's Internet access.

When asked which nations had the ability to strike U.S. cyber interests Rogers declined to provide assessments of most countries.

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NSA: Snowden leaks hurt ability to track terrorists - CNN.com

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden didnt mince words during a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Monday when he said the NSA and the British spy agency GCHQ had screwed all of us when it hacked into the Dutch firm Gemalto to steal cryptographic keys used in billions of mobile SIM cards worldwide.

When the NSA and GCHQ compromised the security of potentially billions of phones (3g/4g encryption relies on the shared secret resident on the sim), Snowden wrote in the AMA, they not only screwed the manufacturer, they screwed all of us, because the only way to address the security compromise is to recall and replace every SIM sold by Gemalto.

Gemalto is one of the leading makers of SIM cards used in billions of mobile phones around the world to secure the communications of telecom customers of AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and more than 400 other wireless carriers in 85 countries. Stealing the crypto keys essentially allows the spy agencies to wiretap and decipher encrypted phone communications at will without the assistance of telecom carriers or the oversight of a court or government. The keys also allow the agencies to decrypt previously intercepted messages they hadnt been able to crack.

But in stealing the keys with the aim of targeting the communications of specific customers, the spy agencies undermine the security of billions of other customers.

Our governments should never be weighing the equities in an intelligence gathering operation such that a temporary benefit to surveillance regarding a few key targets is seen as more desireable than protecting the communications of a global system Snowden wrote.

As The Intercept reported last week, the spy agencies targeted employees of the Dutch firm, reading their siphoned emails and scouring their Facebook posts to obtain information that would help the agencies hack the employees. Once on employee systems, the spy agencies planted backdoors and other tools to give them a persistent foothold on the companys network. We believe we have their entire network, the author of a PowerPoint slide, leaked by Snowden to journalist Glenn Greenwald, boasted about the hack.

Snowden commented on the story after being asked what he thought about recent revelations from Kaspersky Lab that it had uncovered a spy module, believed to belong to the NSA, designed for hacking the firmware of hard drives. Snowden said the firmware hacking was significant but even more significant was the theft of the crypto keys.

[A]lthough firmware exploitation is nasty, Snowden responded, its at least theoretically reparable: tools could plausibly be created to detect the bad firmware hashes and re-flash good ones. This isnt the same for SIMs, which are flashed at the factory and never touched again.

Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute shared Snowdens sentiments about the crypto theft.

We hear a great deal lately about the value of information sharing in cybersecurity, he wrote in a blog post about the hack of Gemalto. Well, heres a case where NSA had information that the technology American citizens and companies rely on to protect their communications was not only vulnerable, but had in fact been compromised.[T]his is one more demonstration that proposals to require telecommunications providers and device manufacturers to build law enforcement backdoors in their products are a terrible, terrible idea. As security experts have rightly insisted all along, requiring companies to keep a repository of keys to unlock those backdoors makes the key repository itself a prime target for the most sophisticated attackerslike NSA and GCHQ.

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Snowden: Spy Agencies Screwed All of Us in Hacking Crypto Keys