Matthew Green wrote a fascinating blog post about the NSA’s efforts to increase the amount of random data exposed in the TLS protocol, and how it interacts with the NSA’s backdoor into the DUAL_EC_PRNG random number generator to weaken TLS. Powered by WPeMatico
Category: nsa
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ZDNet is reporting about another data leak, this one from US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), which is also within to the NSA. The disk image, when unpacked and loaded, is a snapshot of a hard drive dating back to May 2013 from a Linux-based server that forms part of a cloud-based intelligence sharing … Read More “NSA “Red Disk” Data Leak” »
The White House has released a new version of the Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP). This is the inter-agency process by which the US government decides whether to inform the software vendor of a vulnerability it finds, or keep it secret and use it to eavesdrop on or attack other systems. You can read the new … Read More “New White House Announcement on the Vulnerability Equities Process” »
The New York Times just published a long article on the Shadow Brokers and their effects on NSA operations. Summary: it’s been an operational disaster, the NSA still doesn’t know who did it or how, and NSA morale has suffered considerably. This is me on the Shadow Brokers from last May. Powered by WPeMatico
Both the New York Times and the Washington Post are reporting that Israel has penetrated Kaspersky’s network and detected the Russian operation. From the New York Times: Israeli intelligence officers informed the NSA that, in the course of their Kaspersky hack, they uncovered evidence that Russian government hackers were using Kaspersky’s access to aggressively scan … Read More “More on Kaspersky and the Stolen NSA Attack Tools” »
The Wall Street Journal has a bombshell of a story. Yet another NSA contractor took classified documents home with him. Yet another Russian intelligence operation stole copies of those documents. The twist this time is that the Russians identified the documents because the contractor had Kaspersky Labs anti-virus installed on his home computer. This is … Read More “Yet Another Russian Hack of the NSA — This Time with Kaspersky’s Help” »
The ISO has decided not to approve two NSA-designed block encryption algorithms: Speck and Simon. It’s because the NSA is not trusted to put security ahead of surveillance: A number of them voiced their distrust in emails to one another, seen by Reuters, and in written comments that are part of the process. The suspicions … Read More “ISO Rejects NSA Encryption Algorithms” »
New York Times reporter Charlie Savage writes about some bad statistics we’re all using: Among surveillance legal policy specialists, it is common to cite a set of statistics from an October 2011 opinion by Judge John Bates, then of the FISA Court, about the volume of internet communications the National Security Agency was collecting under … Read More “What the NSA Collects via 702” »
The ShadowBrokers released the manual for UNITEDRAKE, a sophisticated NSA Trojan that targets Windows machines: Able to compromise Windows PCs running on XP, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Vista, Windows 7 SP 1 and below, as well as Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, the attack tool acts as a service to capture information. UNITEDRAKE, … Read More “ShadowBrokers Releases NSA UNITEDRAKE Manual” »
Interesting post-Snowden reading, just declassified. (U) External Communication will address at least one of “fresh look” narratives: (U) NSA does not access everything. (U) NSA does not collect indiscriminately on U.S. Persons and foreign nationals. (U) NSA does not weaken encryption. (U) NSA has value to the nation. There’s lots more. Powered by WPeMatico