Recently I’ve heard Edward Snowden talk about his working at the NSA in Hawaii as being “under a pineapple field.” CBS News recently ran a segment on that NSA listening post on Oahu.
Not a whole lot of actual information. “We’re in office building, in a pineapple field, on Oahu….” And part of it is underground — we see a tunnel. We didn’t get to see any pineapples, though.
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May 24, 2019 edwardsnowden, intelligence, nsa, Security technology Read more >
Yesterday, I visited the NSA. It was Cyber Command’s birthday, but that’s not why I was there. I visited as part of the Berklett Cybersecurity Project, run out of the Berkman Klein Center and funded by the Hewlett Foundation. (BERKman hewLETT — get it? We have a web page, but it’s badly out of date.)
It was a full day of meetings, all unclassified but under the Chatham House Rule. Gen. Nakasone welcomed us and took questions at the start. Various senior officials spoke with us on a variety of topics, but mostly focused on three areas:
It was all interesting. Those first two topics are ones that I am thinking and writing about, and it was good to hear their perspective. I find that I am much more closely aligned with the NSA about cybersecurity than I am about privacy, which made the meeting much less fraught than it would have been if we were discussing Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, Section 215 the USA Freedom Act (up for renewal next year), or any 4th Amendment violations. I don’t think we’re past those issues by any means, but they make up less of what I am working on.
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May 22, 2019 china, cybersecurity, fisa, infrastructure, machinelearning, nationalsecuritypolicy, nsa, privacy, russia, Security technology Read more >
In 2015, the Intercept started publishing “The Drone Papers,” based on classified documents leaked by an unknown whistleblower. Today, someone who worked at the NSA, and then at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, was charged with the crime. It is unclear how he was initially identified. It might have been this: “At the agency, prosecutors said, Mr. Hale printed 36 documents from his Top Secret computer.”
The article talks about evidence collected after he was identified and searched:
According to the indictment, in August 2014, Mr. Hale’s cellphone contact list included information for the reporter, and he possessed two thumb drives. One thumb drive contained a page marked “secret” from a classified document that Mr. Hale had printed in February 2014. Prosecutors said Mr. Hale had tried to delete the document from the thumb drive.
The other thumb drive contained Tor software and the Tails operating system, which were recommended by the reporter’s online news outlet in an article published on its website regarding how to anonymously leak documents.
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May 9, 2019 espionage, leaks, nsa, Security technology, whistleblowers Read more >
In 2016, a hacker group calling itself the Shadow Brokers released a trove of 2013 NSA hacking tools and related documents. Most people believe it is a front for the Russian government. Since, then the vulnerabilities and tools have been used by both government and criminals, and put the NSA’s ability to secure its own cyberweapons seriously into question.
Now we have learned that the Chinese used the tools fourteen months before the Shadow Brokers released them.
Does this mean that both the Chinese and the Russians stole the same set of NSA tools? Did the Russians steal them from the Chinese, who stole them from us? Did it work the other way? I don’t think anyone has any idea. But this certainly illustrates how dangerous it is for the NSA — or US Cyber Command — to hoard zero-day vulnerabilities.
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May 8, 2019 china, disclosure, hacking, nsa, russia, Security technology, vulnerabilities, zeroday Read more >
Flame was discovered in 2012, linked to Stuxnet, and believed to be American in origin. It has recently been linked to more modern malware through new analysis tools that find linkages between different software.
Seems that Flame did not disappear after it was discovered, as was previously thought. (Its controllers used a kill switch to disable and erase it.) It was rewritten and reintroduced.
Note that the article claims that Flame was believed to be Israeli in origin. That’s wrong; most people who have an opinion believe it is from the NSA.
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April 12, 2019 espionage, kaspersky, malware, nsa, Security technology, stuxnet Read more >
Last month, the NSA released Ghidra, a software reverse-engineering tool. Early reactions are uniformly positive.
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April 8, 2019 cybersecurity, nsa, opensource, reverseengineering, Security technology Read more >
This is an interesting story of a serious vulnerability in a Huawei driver that Microsoft found. The vulnerability is similar in style to the NSA’s DOUBLEPULSAR that was leaked by the Shadow Brokers — believed to be the Russian government — and it’s obvious that this attack copied that technique.
What is less clear is whether the vulnerability — which has been fixed — was put into the Huwei driver accidentally or on purpose.
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March 29, 2019 backdoors, malware, nsa, Security technology, vulnerabilities Read more >
The Daily Beast is reporting that First Look Media — home of The Intercept and Glenn Greenwald — is shutting down access to the Snowden archives.
The Intercept was the home for Greenwald’s subset of Snowden’s NSA documents since 2014, after he parted ways with the Guardian the year before. I don’t know the details of how the archive was stored, but it was offline and well secured — and it was available to journalists for research purposes. Many stories were published based on those archives over the years, albeit fewer in recent years.
The article doesn’t say what “shutting down access” means, but my guess is that it means that First Look Media will no longer make the archive available to outside journalists, and probably not to staff journalists, either. Reading between the lines, I think they will delete what they have.
This doesn’t mean that we’re done with the documents. Glenn Greenwald tweeted:
Both Laura & I have full copies of the archives, as do others. The Intercept has given full access to multiple media orgs, reporters & researchers. I’ve been looking for the right partner — an academic institution or research facility — that has the funds to robustly publish.
I’m sure there are still stories in those NSA documents, but with many of them a decade or more old, they are increasingly history and decreasingly current events. Every capability discussed in the documents needs to be read with a “and then they had ten years to improve this” mentality.
Eventually it’ll all become public, but not before it is 100% history and 0% current events.
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March 21, 2019 edwardsnowden, historyofsecurity, nsa, Security technology Read more >
Wired has an excellent article on China’s APT10 hacking group. Specifically, on how they hacked managed service providers in order to get to their customers’ networks.
I am reminded of the NSA’s “I Hunt Sysadmins” presentation, published by the Intercept.
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December 31, 2018 china, hacking, nsa, Security technology Read more >
This is a really interesting story of an ad fraud scheme that relied on hijacking the Border Gateway Protocol:
Members of 3ve (pronounced “eve”) used their large reservoir of trusted IP addresses to conceal a fraud that otherwise would have been easy for advertisers to detect. The scheme employed a thousand servers hosted inside data centers to impersonate real human beings who purportedly “viewed” ads that were hosted on bogus pages run by the scammers themselves — who then received a check from ad networks for these billions of fake ad impressions. Normally, a scam of this magnitude coming from such a small pool of server-hosted bots would have stuck out to defrauded advertisers. To camouflage the scam, 3ve operators funneled the servers’ fraudulent page requests through millions of compromised IP addresses.
About one million of those IP addresses belonged to computers, primarily based in the US and the UK, that attackers had infected with botnet software strains known as Boaxxe and Kovter. But at the scale employed by 3ve, not even that number of IP addresses was enough. And that’s where the BGP hijacking came in. The hijacking gave 3ve a nearly limitless supply of high-value IP addresses. Combined with the botnets, the ruse made it seem like millions of real people from some of the most affluent parts of the world were viewing the ads.
Lots of details in the article.
An aphorism I often use in my talks is “expertise flows downhill: today’s top-secret NSA programs become tomorrow’s PhD theses and the next day’s hacking tools.” This is an example of that. BGP hacking — known as “traffic shaping” inside the NSA — has long been a tool of national intelligence agencies. Now it is being used by cybercriminals.
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December 28, 2018 adware, bgp, fraud, nsa, Security technology Read more >