The New Frontier of IT Espionage

All info below is nothing new, every person with a minimum common sense and some basic IT knowledge has always had doubts it was happening, nonetheless the general  public does not seem to have come to terms with the severity of this issue. 

Even after Snowden leaks ; the general public is still naively posting their full lives on line regardless of any privacy consideration.

Social media does not seem affected or under scrutiny, no major drop in internet traffic is recorded, no sign of confidence loss on behalf of their users and no investigations at all on behalf of the authorities (no surprise there though!).

So if NSA and GCHQ eavesdropping on your life does not scare you what about the following:

If you are near your smart phone – the NSA or private parties could remotely activate your microphone and camera and spy on you.


The New York Times reported in 2011 that German police were using spyware to turn on the webcam and microphone on peoples’ computers:

A group that calls itself the Chaos Computer Club prompted a public outcry here recently when it discovered that German state investigators were using spying software capable of turning a computer’s webcam and microphone into a sophisticated surveillance device.

The club …announced last Saturday it had analyzed the hard drives of people who had been investigated and discovered that they were infected with a Trojan horse program that gave the police the ability to log keystrokes, capture screenshots and activate cameras and microphones.

Reuters documented last year that the U.S. and Israeli governments can remotely turn on a computer’s microphone:

Evidence suggest that the virus, dubbed Flame, may have been built on behalf of the same nation or nations that commissioned the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iran’s nuclear program in 2010 [i.e. the U.S. and Israel], according to Kaspersky Lab, the Russian cyber security software maker that took credit for discovering the infections.

Flame can gather data files, remotely change settings on computers, turn on PC microphones to record conversations, take screen shots and log instant messaging chats.

Kaspersky Lab said Flame and Stuxnet appear to infect machines by exploiting the same flaw in the Windows operating system and that both viruses employ a similar way of spreading. 

PC Magazine tech columnist John Dvorak writes:

From what we know the NSA has back door access into Apple, Microsoft, and Google. What kind of access we don’t know, but let us assume it is similar to what they did about 7 years ago to AT&T. They had a secret room at Fulsom St. in San Francisco and the AT&T engineers had no control and no access to a room full of NSA equipment that had direct access to everything AT&T could do.

Microsoft is the source of the operating system for Windows and Windows cell phones. Apple controls the OS for Macs, iPhones, and iPads. Google controls the Chrome OS, Chrome Browser, and Android cell phones. The companies regularly push operating system upgrades and security updates to users on a regular basis.

Imagine however that the NSA has access to these updates at the source and has the ability to alter these update in order to install some sort of spyware on your phone, tablet, or computer. The software could turn on your camera or microphone remotely, read all your private data, or erase everything and brick your phone or computer.

 

The hidden world of private security contractors in USA

The hidden world of of the Security and Surveillance Industrial complex has attracted the attention of big media in US.

The most complete and updated source of information on this is the Washington Post special investigation website Top Secret America where maps , interactive features and and updated articles explore the hidden business of Security in America.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

The investigation's other findings include:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.
* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

The Department of Defence is the authority in charge to oversee those companies but it has declared recently that is overwhelmed by the amount of private companies to control and is unable to keep an eye on all their activities.
According to Democracy Now over 1/3 of USA surveillance and enforcement operations are conducted by private contractors, the surveillance grid established by the National Security Agency intercepts every 24 hours over 1.7 billion personal communications in US only.
E-mails, phone calls, SMS, internet postings all are recorded and disseminated to a wide range of private and public agencies for analysis.
Data is not provided only to big names as Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, L-3 Communications, Csc, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Blackwater, Saic, but also to a myriad of small and medium businesses which represents 70% of the industry, most of them employ less than 100 employee and are in charge of background checks, fiscal checks, phone and internet wiretapping and data analysis.
It is not only the National Security Agency or police and other governmental agencies contracting their services, more and more private companies such as corporation, banks are contracting their services for employee checks and other intelligence purposes.
Ho safe we are that public data is not being used for private interests? We are unable to say it at this stage given the lack of supervision and tracking of the information.

Obama escalate Security Preparedness

Quietly, and with little fanfare, President Obama signed a “National Defense Resources Preparedness” Executive Order on Friday. As the name suggests, the order intends to shore up the country’s national defense resources in advance of a national emergency.

To be fair, this is not the first time that such an order has been written. Presidents Bush (II), Clinton, Reagan, and even Eisenhower provided directives in the same spirit as President Obama’s order– providing some level of government commandeering in times of national emergency.

In the past, these orders have related to things like production capacity for defense contractors, or giving FEMA authority to resolve disputes between other departments in federally designated emergency areas.

President Obama’s order, however, takes things much, much further.

The order vastly expands the role of Homeland Security.
DHS now has authority to direct the emergency preparedness of every other government department. The Secretary of Homeland Security has effectively become the Emergency Czar.
He will have oversight of “all other national defense programs, including civil defense and continuity of Government.”

The order further provides for an effective nationalization of the entire US economy in the event of an emergency.
The Secretary of Labor, for example, will “collect and maintain data necessary to make a continuing appraisal of the Nation’s workforce needs for purposes of national defense” and then “formulate plans, programs, and policies for meeting the labor requirements of actions to be taken for national defense purposes.”
The purpose of this order, for example, is to “take actions necessary to ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability, including services and critical technology, for national defense requirements;”
It goes on to list ‘adequate resources’:
(i) “all forms of energy including petroleum, gas (both natural and manufactured), electricity, solid fuels… solar, wind, other types of renewable energy, atomic energy”, etc.
(ii) “all usable water, from all sources, within the jurisdiction of the United States, that can be managed, controlled, and allocated to meet emergency requirements…”
(iii) “all commodities and products… that are capable of being ingested by either human beings or animals…”
(iv) “drugs, biological products, medical devices, materials, facilities, health supplies, services and equipment required to diagnose, mitigate or prevent the impairment of, improve, treat, cure, or restore the physical or mental health conditions of the population.”
Obama’s executive order puts all of these resources under control of the government and allocates them exclusively to meet the needs of government.

Furthermore, NSA’s new Utah spy center will collect and archive the complete contents of every email, tweet, Facebook post, Google search, phone call, and text message.

Is the US Government getting ready for something nasty coming?

Best of TED: Misha Glenny: Hire the hackers!

Despite multibillion-dollar investments in cybersecurity, one of its root problems has been largely ignored: who are the people who write malicious code? Underworld investigator Misha Glenny profiles several convicted coders from around the world and reaches a startling conclusion.

Blackberry Encryption and Security

Research in Motion’s Blackberry and its semi-encrypted messaging system was used heavily in Britain to coordinate looting and to incite violence. Below an illustrated flow diagram explaining the security features used by the Blackberry smart phone.