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Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit

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Re: Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit

#13
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We got a National Security Letter. End of explanation."

That has not worked too well for the Internet companies. These guys are just as guilty in this.

Not worked too well how? No revenue loss. No government penalties. Allowed to freak out at government spying with righteous anger on behalf of the customer.

I dunno, looks like as a business everyone has made it through a-ok.

Re: Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit

#15
This information now justifies having shipments sealed in a way that shows that they have been tampered with. Any foreign entity ordering goods from these companies now has an incentive to visit the shipping location and place their own identifying tape (that is frequently changed) on the packaged equipment and possibly GPS tracking devices on the shipment as well to be able to determine if they are diverted away from a reasonable shipping path to make unscheduled stops.

I would love to see someone start performing a large scale analysis of shipping paths using GPS tracking devices to create algorithms that flag certain shipping paths as anomalous. Offering services and creating products that guarantee shipping security is now a legitimate market to create a startup for.

Re: Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit

#16
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has not worked too well for the Internet companies. These guys are just as guilty in this.

Not worked too well how? No revenue loss. No government penalties. Allowed to freak out at government spying with righteous anger on behalf of the customer. I dunno, looks like as a business everyone has made it through a-ok.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-10/nsa-spying-seen-ris...

Clearly your unfamiliar with the rest of the world. They have all pretty much said your screwing up our business.

Re: Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit

#17
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not worked too well how? No revenue loss. No government penalties. Allowed to freak out at government spying with righteous anger on behalf of the customer. I dunno, looks like as a business everyone has made it through a-ok.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-10/nsa-spying-seen-ris... Clearly your unfamiliar with the rest of the world. They have all pretty much said your screwing up our business.

And you expected them to say...?

Re: Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit

#19
post #2

They actually use the their sniffing capabilities to capture error reports sent by windows... Then use that info to target the machine. What an advantage.

Yes, I think this must be the most interesting part of the report:

  In one internal graphic, they replaced the text of 
  Microsoft's original error message with one of their own 
  reading, "This information may be intercepted by a 
  foreign sigint system to gather detailed information and 
  better exploit your machine."
Does Microsoft's error reporting mechanism even use SSL?

Re: Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit

#20

  The technique can literally be a race between servers, one
  that is described in internal intelligence agency jargon
  with phrases like: "Wait for client to initiate new
  connection," "Shoot!" and "Hope to beat server-to-client 
  response."
It would be interesting to build a tool that watches out for duplicate-but-different SYN/ACK and DNS answers.
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