221–230 of 298 posts
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That is not the same thing. The fact that they've exploited AV does not mean that they coerced an AV company into installing 0day for them. Those are very very different things.
Ok, four questions: 1. Is hacking into a foreign AV company by a state an OK thing to do? 2. How do we know the anonymous source is being truthful? 3. If yes to the first two, are we certain that it wasn't exploited but was coerced? 4. If all of these things are true and they were coerced, what is the practical difference for the party being monitored?
In China it is not even theoretically possible because the gov't mandates backdoors and can easily shut down your company if you don't comply. You have way less recourse on rule of law.
In fine, that NSA is not that super agency filed with very talented n math/crypto/cs people like the majority depict in their mind. They are employing average folks who use average tools and get caught by average issues. The only difference might be that they are educated and trained to be very efficient at doing one very specific job and that's all.
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/23/22401812-...
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Of those, all but Finland are NATO members.
NATO is a military alliance, not a intelligence sharing agreement. We know that five-eyes intel doesn't go to NATO, and it is pretty doubtful that eg Turkey and Germany share their intel.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/28/germany-curb-s...
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Europeans had a few. There was StudiVZ in Germany and tuenti in Spain. Once Facebook arrived with localised versions on the European market it destroyed all of the clones. Talk about network effects.
But search engines and email services? Operating systems? Europe is really not on top of this game.
Or perhaps you meant mobile operating systems, in which case I would note that the most promising and well-known mobile OS after Android, iOS, and Windows phone (all American) is SailfishOS, which is... Finnish.
So the US is definitely on top, what with all the software tech giants being based there, but Europe seems pretty relevant.
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Where did you read "letting the FSB know about this contractor so they could target and breach his machine." I somehow missed to see that anybody but you claims that, so please give some link. I also, like the parent poster, only read that the antvirus program, as it should, collected the virus to the company servers.
I read that in the WSJ article that first revealed the security breach. https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-hackers-stole-nsa-data-... >The hackers appear to have targeted the contractor after identifying the files through the contractor’s use of a popular antivirus software made by Russia-based Kaspersky Lab, these people said.
I guess Kaspersky is rumoured to be to the Russian government what Apple / Google / Microsoft / Facebook are proven to be to the US government. Secret FISA courts rule away all of your basic privacy rights? Fear not. Russia is the enemy.
Correct. Russia IS the enemy. Secret warrants by a secret court is also the enemy. One is just more important and dangerous than the other (look out of the window). Perfect example of whataboutism BTW.
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In a very direct sense. It's a de facto totalitarian dictatorship. Its proliferation harms human rights, poses real danger to Ukraine, claims lives. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Ukrainian_cr... , corruption also claims lives https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eO8ZHfV4fk )
But you could say much of the same about the US.
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Use Linux :) there is no other option
I think a Mac would work too, but that relies on trusting individuals.
Plus if you assemble the RAM and processor by yourself, you never know how much viruses are there in our bootloader!
Kaspersky has been known to collaborate with the Russian government and promote Russian interest. They've actively pursued state actors that are hostile to Russian interest, for example The Equation Group ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_Group ), which wouldn't be an organic part of the function or activities of a normal civilian cyber-security company. Such an "innocent" company would have no reason to get i…
Way down this thread, so time to ask the question: Do American anti-virus, social media, and search companies do exactly the same, but for the US military? I've always found it suspicious that Russia and China created their own social networks, email providers, and search engines. Almost like they know the power of a capable search engine or social network for intelligence gathering purposes. Google and US anti-virus…
Yandex search predates Google.
Not to mention that the quality of it's search in Russian had been much better than Google's until at least 2010, as a Russian when I needed to search for something in Russian I didn't bother with Google because their search results were visibly much worse.