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Report: NSA intercepting laptops ordered online, installing spyware

forbes.com

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Re: Report: NSA intercepting laptops ordered online, installing spyware

#11

Post by padmanabhan01 »

cleverjake wrote: post #9
padmanabhan01 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? Why on earth should Joe Average be made to clean reinstall OS after buying a new hardware?

no one said 'be made'. He said the average joe should acknowledge that it is a good idea. Previously I have suggested other people reinstall to get rid of bloatware installed by the vendor.

//He said the average joe should acknowledge that it is a good idea

I'd rather have average Joe ignore and boycott vendors that install bloatware and make the vendors realize that's a bad idea..

Re: Report: NSA intercepting laptops ordered online, installing spyware

#12

Post by throwaway_yy2Di »

Oh so that's why my Lenovo was held for "customs". Hope they at least removed the Chinese backdoors while they were installing the American ones.

Look at me, I'm so clever using HTTPS and GnuPG and FOSS linux when my hardware RNG is key escrowed, my USB cable is transmitting, my factory BIOS has at least two nationalities of spyware, and Big Brother is watching me naked in 720p. So glad I'm not a journalist and have an adequate physique.

Re: Report: NSA intercepting laptops ordered online, installing spyware

#13

Post by redthrowaway »

Doesn't this seem a little moustache-twirly, even for the NSA? I imagine the only way they'd actually expend the necessary man-hours on this is if they were intercepting hardware ordered by people who were already targets of interest. Now, that probably means Merkel should buy her laptops in-store, with cash, but this really doesn't seem like the sort of panopticon story we've been reading elsewhere. Unless, of course, they've managed to convince a judge to give them a warrant to compromise the Dell/etc factory image.

Re: Report: NSA intercepting laptops ordered online, installing spyware

#14

Post by geuis »

My suspension of disbelief is getting really close to breaking. Don't get me wrong, I'm fully against the entire NSA spying deal. But these "reports" just keep getting more and more outrageous. The problem is not that I don't think these things have been happening, but rather that the continuous slow leaking by news media is causing the next big reveal to be just more background noise.

We need a big, sudden, destructive reveal that causes a lot of impact. Not the slow drizzle of 'this week in civil liberties violations'. Probably too late for this, sadly.

Re: Report: NSA intercepting laptops ordered online, installing spyware

#16

Post by kapitalx »

geuis wrote: post #14

My suspension of disbelief is getting really close to breaking. Don't get me wrong, I'm fully against the entire NSA spying deal. But these "reports" just keep getting more and more outrageous. The problem is not that I don't think these things have been happening, but rather that the continuous slow leaking by news media is causing the next big reveal to be just more background noise. We need a big, sudden, destruct…

IMHO the only reason the NSA leaks have been so effective in shaping public opinion is that it's a 'slow drizzle'. Otherwise they would have ended up like other wikileak mass dumps which are too overwhelming to absorb and are quickly forgotten.

Re: Report: NSA intercepting laptops ordered online, installing spyware

#18

Post by notastartup »

I am so raging at news regarding NSA's rogue behavior. Why isn't anything being done about this serious breach of privacy, the freedom to be you, the pillars of democracy? It's like NSA is saying "Look at me fuckers we are above the law and you are just going to have to take it up the ass".

Seriously? This is depressing, knowing that some asshole at the top is ordering all of these things and telling us to close your eyes and say nothing while the ass fucking goes on. At least buy everyone dinner before you've decided to fuck them.

Re: Report: NSA intercepting laptops ordered online, installing spyware

#19

Post by harshreality »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #10
mgurlitz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The linked article on Der Spiegel has a section on what they call "persistence:" The specialists at ANT, which presumably stands for Advanced or Access Network Technology, could be described as master carpenters for the NSA's department for Tailored Access Operations (TAO)... The ANT developers have a clear preference for planting their malicious code in so-called BIOS, software located on a computer's motherboard th…

This is probably one of the most important problems of our generation to solve (as hackers, not philanthropists) and it's sort of amazing that it's hardly known, let alone discussed. I've brought it up before and it seems like everyone's reaction is that it's not worth worrying about. But there are adversaries besides the NSA, such as malware. And since userspace programs can upgrade your BIOS, then therefore it's po…

Can the bios chips/eeproms be replaced on a running computer?

Can you remove the bios chip, put it in a different (running) computer, use flashrom to read it, put it back, use flashrom to read it again, and compare the two?

Either the virus doesn't hide itself (on calls to read from the bios nvram), and it will be visible on comparison with a pristine (if you have one) copy of the same bios, or it does hide itself and it will be visible on comparison to itself once put in a running machine that didn't boot from the contaminated code, right?

Re: Report: NSA intercepting laptops ordered online, installing spyware

#20

Post by ketralnis »

notastartup wrote: post #18

I am so raging at news regarding NSA's rogue behavior. Why isn't anything being done about this serious breach of privacy, the freedom to be you, the pillars of democracy? It's like NSA is saying "Look at me fuckers we are above the law and you are just going to have to take it up the ass". Seriously? This is depressing, knowing that some asshole at the top is ordering all of these things and telling us to close your…

> Why isn't anything being done

Because you're not doing it. Nor him, nor her, nor I. Because somebody has to actually do it, not just muse that somebody else should do it.

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