Posted on 12/30/2013 3:21:36 AM PST by SoFloFreeper
A special hacking unit of the U.S. National Security Agency intercepts deliveries of new computer equipment en route to plant spyware, according to a report on Sunday from Der Spiegel, a German publication.
The method, called “interdiction,” is one of the most successful operations conducted by the NSA’s Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), which specializes in infiltrating computers, wrote the publication, citing a top-secret document.
”If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops,” Der Spiegel wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
Muslim extremists, predators, liberals are to be left alone.
I’m afraid you are right....sadly.
This just validates my standard practice of building my own computers.
Do you perform a LLF on the hard drive from a perfectly clean known good PC? Are you really sure? I could see them infiltrating large suppliers so as to trawl this industry too. Lord knows they have arseloads of money to throw at resources to do this.
This stuff is most likely on the BIOS - Look up Lo-jack for PC’s to get an idea of what can be done.
Next up...infiltrating local computer fix stores.
How about your own routers, access points and NICs? That’s where the most successful hacking occurs.
Many of the main OSes have back doors written into them, which has been all but directly admitted to by the manufacturers.
I wouldn’t doubt that all of the routers and cable modems also have them.
Sort of. I always repartition a new hard drive and LLF the partition where the OS is loaded...not for paranoia reasons, but to make sure that I don't have any bad sectors from the get-go. And that from a live distro on an optical disk.
Having said that, there are any number of things that could happen...they could hack the firmware on any board with a processor, and so on...but I was talking about the subject of this article (specific PCs being targeted with specific software).
I would bet there are back doors in Windows/Mac software.
Or even back doors in the BIOS chips.
The NSA just needs to activate the ones they want access to.
Intercepting the computer delivery sounds like way too much work, and it would involve too many other people.
If its on a computer it is most likely not 100% secure. Not from criminals or the NSA.
“If they do, how do they analyze all the data? How do they even get the data? The whole Internet would be saturated if they were monitoring everyone.”
It used to seem impossible for phone calls, yet the capture it all.
All the NSA has succeeded in doing is to destroy the US high-tech industry.
I wouldn’t do business with a US company if I had something confidential or trade secrets.
The US is completely compromised in every way.
How do they get the data? They have direct links to the major internet providers.
How do they analyze the data? They are have built and are building huge data centers to house the thousands of servers needed to store and analyze the data.
True that. You can't do a low-level format outside of the manufacturer's facility. Anything could be hidden in a modern hard drive, there is a whole other computer there busy running the drive and whatever else...
And no one at Microsoft or Apple has ever spilled the beans. Riight.
It used to seem impossible for phone calls, yet the capture it all.
They don't "capture it all." The capture - at most - all the metadata. Time of call, number called from, number called to, maybe GPS coordinates if that feature happens to be enabled on the caller's phone.
I'm not saying that's innocuous, by the way. I think it's part of a creeping police state. But they are not capturing voice data, at least not according to their court testimony.
How do they get the data? They have direct links to the major internet providers.
How do they analyze the data? They are have built and are building huge data centers to house the thousands of servers needed to store and analyze the data.
And no one has talked about the installation and maintenance of these direct links? Wired, CNET, BuzzFeed, Slashdot, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, The Register, any of the hacking sites, all are clueless or have dummied up, no one has blabbed to any of them.
Ed Snowden walked out of his NSA job site with gigabytes of classified information, but nothing about ubiquitous chip-level, bios-level infiltration has made it into the tech blog world?
Doubtful.
I'm not saying they won't try it, but how do they keep it secret? And if it's not secret, how effective is it?
I would bet there are back doors in Windows/Mac software.Beans have been plenty spilled on this for the past 15 years. See _NSAKEY for a comprehensive treatment.
And no one at Microsoft or Apple has ever spilled the beans. Riight.
I was working at a major CS research lab in the '90s and was asked if I wanted to work on something called "Carnivore". This was a project to suck up all the data at the big switches for the internet and forward it to No Such Agency. Serious business.
I remember Carnivore.
I’m not saying they haven’t tried anything, and I’m not even saying they haven’t done some of it.
But keeping it all a secret? I find that hard to believe.
Encryption software is inexpensive and widely available. It takes a lot of CPU cycles to decrypt a 1024-bit encrypted message. Yes, I know NSA has a lot of bandwidth, but decrypting anything more than a tiny sliver of all the traffic on the internet? Again, hard to believe.
Here’s another angle. If everyone’s computers are hacked, there must be millions of computers owned by the banking, securities, and retailing industries. Where’s the widespread hacking of the financial system? I doubt that the NSA can keep it’s own house when it comes to weeding out employees that would take advantage of that kind of access if they had it.
It only takes one penetration incident to blow their cover.
And I know about the Target case. There’s a few of those every year, often around the Christmas holidays. I’m talking about penetration of Morgan Stanley or Solomon Brothers, Citibank, or Chase Manhattan. Hundreds of billions missing.
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