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shared by John Lemke on 30 Mar 14 - No Cached

The documents, leaked to the publications by Edward Snowden, contain a list of 11 world leaders that have been targeted by a system known as Nymrod — however the document implies the actual number targeted was 122. Nymrod is reportedly a system designed to automatically extract citations ("cites") out of a multiplicity of sources, including voice and computer communications. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is listed by name, as are more obvious targets like Syrian president Bashar Asad and former Ukranian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Various leaders apparently have "cites" automatically added to to a "Target Knowledge Database."
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shared by John Lemke on 12 Mar 14 - No Cached

A program known as TURBINE, first revealed last year, is meant to dramatically speed the process: one document says it will "allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually."
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The scaling process, according to Greenwald, started in 2004, when the NSA operated only 100 to 150 software implants. The number of implants used in the years between 2010 to 2012, by contrast, is described as numbering in the tens of thousands.
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shared by John Lemke on 10 Mar 14 - No Cached

Snowden wrote that he reported policy or legal issues related to spying programs to more than 10 officials, but as a contractor he had no legal avenue to pursue further whistleblowing.
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Yes. I had reported these clearly problematic programs to more than ten distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them. As an employee of a private company rather than a direct employee of the US government, I was not protected by US whistleblower laws, and I would not have been protected from retaliation and legal sanction for revealing classified information about lawbreaking in accordance with the recommended process.
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lsewhere in his testimony, Snowden described the reaction he received when relating his concer
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shared by John Lemke on 06 Mar 14 - No Cached

Scientists have successfully modified the white blood cells of 12 patients living with HIV, making their cells resistant to the retrovirus and improving the study participants' overall ability to fight off infection. The researchers achieved this result through a gene editing technique, described today in
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Unlike the child who went into HIV remission a year ago, the patients in this study continue to test positive for HIV. But the results of this Phase I clinical trial still represent a promising debut for HIV treatments involving tailored gene therapy, as the white blood cells persisted for nearly a year after transfusion.
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shared by John Lemke on 05 Mar 14 - No Cached

Android threats are primarily a non-US problem
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F-Secure believes it would be incorrect to say that “Google hasn’t been actively making efforts to increase the security of the Android platform.”
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At the very bottom of the list was Google Play itself, with the lowest percentage of malware in the gathered samples: 0.1 percent. F-Secure also noted that “the Play Store is most likely to promptly remove nefarious applications, so malware encountered there tends to have a short shelf life.”
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shared by John Lemke on 05 Mar 14 - No Cached

The researchers claimed that the malware may have been active for as long as three years before being discovered and appears to have been created by Russian developers.
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The two main components of Uroburos are - a driver and an encrypted virtual file system, used to disguise its nasty activities and to try to avoid detection. Its driver part is extremely complex and is designed to be very discrete and very difficult to identify.
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The virtual file system can’t be decrypted without the presence of drivers, according to the Gdata’s analysis explained in the PDF.
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we assume that the group behind Uroburos is the same group that performed a cyberattack against the United States of America in 2008 with a malware called Agent.BTZ
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The attacks carried out with Uroburos are targeting government institutions, research institutions, intelligence agencies, nation states, research institutions or companies dealing with sensitive information as well as similar high-profile targets. The oldest drivers identified by the researchers was compiled in 2011 is the evidence that the malware was created around three years ago and was undetected.
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