Gmail security warnings for suspected state-sponsored attacks • Hacker News Board

Re: Gmail security warnings for suspected state-sponsored attacks

#121

Post by chives » Thu, Jun 07, 2012, 3:59 AM UTC

zitterbewegung wrote: post #93

chives wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a wired article: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al... "Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Contr…

Try reading critically. To process 1 yottabyte of data assuming you have 128 bit registers you would need 100,000,000 petaflops.(See http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2810%5E24+bytes+%2F+12... ) Therefore, there must be a great deal of preprocessing using classifiers to basically eliminate a great deal of useless information. Just because you store it doesn't mean you will listen to it.

The purpose of the NSA strategy is not to decrypt all collected data. Its to store all data collected and decrypt priority data.

Re: Gmail security warnings for suspected state-sponsored attacks

#122

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 6:53 AM UTC

dfc wrote: post #66

TeMPOraL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State-sponsored attackers also likely choose different targets. I'm not afraid to be a victim of such attack, but if I worked eg. as a diplomat, or as a defence contractor, or any government agency, I might actually be worried. There were some examples of attacks lately that targeted US government officials. So I guess Google shows this warning primarily to people who might be probable targets of state-sponsored atta…

I think human rights activists are probably the juiciest target.

Why the juiciest?

Re: Gmail security warnings for suspected state-sponsored attacks

#123

Post by thetable » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 12:40 PM UTC

Since Google doesn't tell you why they're showing this warning to you, and only tell you to follow standard security guidelines ("don't get phished"), I suspect people will quickly be trained to ignore this message.

My girlfriend received the warning message today. She has already activated 2-factor auth, so I'm really not sure what she's supposed to do with this information.