Tag Archives: nsa

All Your Printers Are Belong To Us!

(…) the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor named “Reality Winner” was published, showing how they tracked her down because she had printed out the documents and sent them to The Intercept. The document posted by the Intercept isn’t the original PDF file, but a PDF containing the pictures of the printed version that was then later scanned in.

As the warrant says, she confessed while interviewed by the FBI. Had she not confessed, the documents still contained enough evidence to convict her: the printed document was digitally watermarked.

The problem is that most new printers print nearly invisibly yellow dots that track down exactly when and where documents, any document, is printed. Because the NSA logs all printing jobs on its printers, it can use this to match up precisely who printed the document. (…)

Source: http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reality-winner.html

List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots
https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots 

Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election

 

Microsoft’s Software is Malware

Microsoft Back Doors

Microsoft Sabotage

The wrongs in this section are not precisely malware, since they do not involve making the program that runs in a way that hurts the user. But they are a lot like malware, since they are technical Microsoft actions that harm to the users of specific Microsoft software.

Microsoft Surveillance

Microsoft DRM

Microsoft Jails

Microsoft Tyrants

As this page shows, if you do want to clean your computer of malware, the first software to delete is Windows.

Identifying Back Doors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices

Upon receipt of a valid search warrant, Apple can extract certain categories of active data from passcode locked iOS devices. Specifically, the user generated active files on an iOS device that are contained in Apple’s native apps and for which the data is not encrypted using the passcode (“user generated active files”), can be extracted and provided to law enforcement on external media.   Apple can perform this data extraction process on iOS devices running iOS 4 or more recent versions of iOS. Please note the only categories of user generated active files that can be provided to law enforcement, pursuant to  a valid search warrant, are: SMS, photos, videos, contacts,  audio recording, and call history. Apple cannot provide: email, calendar entries, or any third-party App data.

http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/iOS_Backdoors_Attack_Points_Surveillance_Mechanisms.pdf

Tails, the OS used by Edward Snowden

When NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden first emailed Glenn Greenwald, he insisted on using email encryption software called PGP for all communications. But this month, we learned that Snowden used another technology to keep his communications out of the NSA’s prying eyes. It’s called Tails. And naturally, nobody knows exactly who created it.

Tails is a kind of computer-in-a-box. You install it on a DVD or USB drive, boot up the computer from the drive and, voila, you’re pretty close to anonymous on the internet. At its heart, Tails is a version of the Linux operating system optimized for anonymity. It comes with several privacy and encryption tools, most notably Tor, an application that anonymizes a user’s internet traffic by routing it through a network of computers run by volunteers around the world.

Read more at: http://www.wired.com/2014/04/tails/

 

 

Tails is a live operating system, that you can start on almost any computer from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card. It aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity, and helps you to:

  • use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship;
    all connections to the Internet are forced to go through the Tor network;
  • leave no trace on the computer you are using unless you ask it explicitly;
  • use state-of-the-art cryptographic tools to encrypt your files, emails and instant messaging.

Continuing Public/Private Surveillance Partnership

The Continuing Public/Private Surveillance Partnership

If you’ve been reading the news recently, you might think that corporate America is doing its best to thwart NSA surveillance.

Google just announced that it is encrypting Gmail when you access it from your computer or phone, and between data centers. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg personally called President Obama to complain about the NSA using Facebook as a means to hack computers, and Facebook’s Chief Security Officer explained to reporters that the attack technique has not worked since last summer. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and others are now regularly publishing “transparency reports,” listing approximately how many government data requests the companies have received and complied with.

Read more at
 
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/the_continuing_.html

 

Snowden and Clouds – will Snowden kill the cloud vipe?

This tension became evident in a recent HipChat interview where HipChat, makers of an AWS based SaaS chat product, were busy creating an on-premises version of their product that could operate behind the firewall in enterprise datacenters. This is consistent with other products from Atlassian in that they do offer hosted services as well as installable services, but it is also an indication of customer concerns over privacy and security.

Read more at: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/1/8/under-snowdens-light-software-architecture-choices-become-mu.html

 

NSA’s ANT Division Catalog of Exploits for Nearly Every Major Software/Hardware/Firmware

After years of speculation that electronics can be accessed by intelligence agencies through a back door, an internal NSA catalog reveals that such methods already exist for numerous end-user devices.

(…)

A document viewed by SPIEGEL resembling a product catalog reveals that an NSA division called ANT has burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industryincluding American global market leader Cisco and its Chinese competitor Huawei, but also producers of mass-market goods, such as US computer-maker Dell and Apple’s iPhoneSee: Cisco / Dell /Apple Comments Re: NSA Backdoors

Read more at http://leaksource.wordpress.com/2013/12/30/nsas-ant-division-catalog-of-exploits-for-nearly-every-major-software-hardware-firmware/