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John Lemke

Snowden hints at new revelations of industrial espionage by the NSA | The Verge - 0 views

www.theverge.com/...ndustrial-espionage-by-the-nsa

law legal 2014 espionage nsa indienationnews spying yourrights IN-Pub

shared by John Lemke on 27 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • "I don't want to pre-empt the work of journalists," he said, "but there's no question the US is engaged in economic spying. If there's information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests (not the national security) of the United States, they'll go after that information."
  • While evidence shows the NSA has spied on Brazil's Petrobras oil company, the US government has never been conclusively linked to the surveillance or theft of trade secrets on an international stage. If true, the revelations would have a grave diplomatic impact, particularly the government attempts to regain the trust of allied nations.
  • John Lemke on 27 Jan 14
     
    Honestly, should we be shocked?
John Lemke

Uroburos Rootkit: Most sophisticated 3-year-old Russian Cyber Espionage Campaign - The ... - 0 views

thehackernews.com/...tkit-most-sophisticated-3.html

rootkit russian espionage 2014 indienationnews hacker technology tech security malware

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.
  • 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.
  • The virtual file system can’t be decrypted without the presence of drivers, according to the Gdata’s analysis explained in the PDF.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • 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
  • 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.
John Lemke

Snowden Leak: NSA Flagged Israel as Leading Espionage Threat - 0 views

www.ethicsintech.com/srael-leading-espionage-threat

2014 nsa israel indienationnews government surveillance spying

shared by John Lemke on 02 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The National Security Agency listed Israel among a handful of nations considered to pose the “greatest threat” to American government, military and industrial secrets, classified documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal.
John Lemke

The NSA Uses Powerful Toolbox in Effort to Spy on Global Networks - SPIEGEL ONLINE - 0 views

www.spiegel.de/...-global-networks-a-940969.html

2013 nsa spy yourrights surveillance spying IN-Pub

shared by John Lemke on 30 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • According to internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies. TAO's area of operations ranges from counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage. The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO's disposal have become -- and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks. The unit is "akin to the wunderkind of the US intelligence community," says Matthew Aid, a historian who specializes in the history of the NSA. "Getting the ungettable" is the NSA's own description of its duties. "It is not about the quantity produced but the quality of intelligence that is important," one former TAO chief wrote, describing her work in a document. The paper seen by SPIEGEL quotes the former unit head stating that TAO has contributed "some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen." The unit, it goes on, has "access to our very hardest targets."
  • John Lemke on 30 Dec 13
     
    Page One of a good three page read on just how extensive the government's illegal spying operations actually are... the worst part is it is just how extensive the portions of it we know about are!
John Lemke

Active malware operation let attackers sabotage US energy industry | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...rs-sabotage-us-energy-industry

2014 indienationnews malware energy industry cuberattack hacking security

shared by John Lemke on 30 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Researchers have uncovered a malware campaign that gave attackers the ability to sabotage the operations of energy grid owners, electricity generation firms, petroleum pipelines, and industrial equipment providers.
  • the hacking group managed to install one of two remote access trojans (RATs) on computers belonging to energy companies located in the US and at least six European countries, according to a
  • Called Dragonfly
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "This campaign follows in the footsteps of Stuxnet, which was the first known major malware campaign to target ICS systems," the Symantec report stated. "While Stuxnet was narrowly targeted at the Iranian nuclear program and had sabotage as its primary goal, Dragonfly appears to have a much broader focus with espionage and persistent access as its current objective with sabotage as an optional capability if required."
  • been in operation since at least 2011
  • "The Dragonfly group is technically adept and able to think strategically," the Symantec report stated. "Given the size of some of its targets, the group found a 'soft underbelly' by compromising their suppliers, which are invariably smaller, less protected companies."
John Lemke

Stepson of Stuxnet stalked Kaspersky for months, tapped Iran nuke talks | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...-months-tapped-iran-nuke-talks

2015 kaspersky iran ars stuxnet malware cyber warfare espionage blackhat attack virus zero-day

shared by John Lemke on 10 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Since some time in the second half of 2014, a different state-sponsored group had been casing their corporate network using malware derived from Stuxnet, the highly sophisticated computer worm reportedly created by the US and Israel to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
  • the malware was more advanced than the malicious programs developed by the NSA-tied Equation Group that Kaspersky just exposed. More intriguing still, Kaspersky antivirus products showed the same malware has infected one or more venues that hosted recent diplomatic negotiations the US and five other countries have convened with Iran over its nuclear program.
  • We see this battle or arms race emerging and now it involves some kind of confrontation between the security industry and nation-state sponsored spies
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Kaspersky officials first became suspicious their network might be infected in the weeks following February's Security Analyst Summit, where company researchers exposed a state-sponsored hacking operation that had ties to some of the developers of Stuxnet. Kaspersky dubbed the highly sophisticated group behind the 14-year campaign Equation Group. Now back in Moscow, a company engineer was testing a software prototype for detecting so-called advanced persistent threats (APTs), the type of well-organized and highly sophisticated attack campaigns launched by well-funded hacking groups. Strangely enough, the developer's computer itself was having unusual interactions with the Kaspersky network. The new APT technology under development, it seemed, was one of several things of interest to the Duqu attackers penetrating the Kaspersky fortress. "For the developer it was important to find out why" his PC was acting oddly, Kamluk said. "Of course, he did not consider that machine could be infected by real malware. We eventually found an alien module that should not be there that tried to mask behind legitimate looking modules from Microsoft. That was the point of discovery."
  • What they found was a vastly overhauled malware operation that made huge leaps in stealth, operational security, and software design. The Duqu actors also grew much more ambitious, infecting an estimated 100 or so targets, about twice as many as were hit by the 2011 version.
  • So the Duqu 2.0 attackers pulled an audacious feat that Kaspersky researchers had never seen before. Virtually all of the malware resided solely in the memory of the compromised computers or servers. When one of them was restarted, the infection would be purged, but as the rebooted machine reconnected to the network, it would be infected all over again by another compromised computer in the corporate network. The secret lynchpin making this untraceable reinfection scheme possible was the Windows vulnerability Microsoft patched only Tuesday, which has been designated
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