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Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware

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Re: Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware

#201

Post by stjohnswarts »

lostlogin wrote: post #110
willcipriano wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I dont focus on them because I don't believe that Mossad or MI5 are the reason why my country has been at war my entire adult life, but I have witnessed the NSA and CIA justify those wars-that-arent-really-wars time and time again. How much blood was spilled over the 'yellow cake' line alone? Remember when they lost that ten thousand page report on torture right before it was to be delivered? Or the time they d…

> my country has been at war my entire adult life The US has been at war for most it’s existence. Someone made a search tool to see how many years the US had been at war for, and then ran it on Wikipedia. Interestingly, France performed worse (assuming one doesn’t like war), though being involved in things like ‘The 100 years war’ skews things a little. https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/50473

That's kind of nuts. If you want to compare it to the USA you would have to have some reasonable date like starting in 1900, the modern era of history. Things are so very different now than the 1800s but not terribly different than 1900s (as far as interaction and possibility of interaction between countries)

Re: Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware

#202

Post by stjohnswarts »

willcipriano wrote: post #116
lostlogin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my country has been at war my entire adult life The US has been at war for most it’s existence. Someone made a search tool to see how many years the US had been at war for, and then ran it on Wikipedia. Interestingly, France performed worse (assuming one doesn’t like war), though being involved in things like ‘The 100 years war’ skews things a little. https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/50473

I probably wouldn't be complaining if I was born in the 1930's, WW1 and 2 were fairly well justified. However what are the current wars even still about? WMD? No, that was a fabrication. Bin Laden? He's long dead. Oil? With fracking, the US has the largest oil reserves on the planet. ISIS? Essentially gone, not much of a threat to US citizens in any case. There was no reason for these wars, there is certainly no reas…

Almost nothing after WW2 was a reasonable war to be in. Not vietnam, probably not Korea, not Afghans, not Iraq, although I think the limited war in Gulf War 1 was fairly well reasoned.

Re: Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware

#203

Post by kossTKR »

squarefoot wrote: post #147

We're lucky that we can still catch some of them now. The current status of closed CPUs running proprietary firmware talking with closed chipsets running proprietary firmware blobs would make trivially easy to move the malware injection to the iron level for agencies funded by governments. Once they accomplish it, detecting their spyware using software, at any privilege level, will become impossible. I fear the scena…

Why is this impossible today?

Isn't this exactly what Intel's "Management Engine" and AMD's "Platform Security" is?

Bonus question, does apples new MX chips have an equivalent backdoor?

Re: Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware

#204

Post by stjohnswarts »

wait_a_minute wrote: post #54
mc32 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall how when we had North Korean hacking activities and official attributions people would say, but how do we know it was them and how do we know the government isn’t making things up? But when someone accuses the US we never add any salt. Not that I don’t think it’s false, it’s just that the lack of consistent skepticism is interesting.

Because the entire goal is to promote skepticism about the USA while remaining as mum as possible on Russia and China. In the case of Russia, it’s not a secret that they try to disrupt and divide the states via internal conflicts so they can take over if we decline because of it. Here is just one example: https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-backed-facebook-account... We also know that hundreds of thousands of foreig…

It's pretty easy to spot Russian/Chinese trolls on facebook. I've seen tons of it on conservative news feeds. Just find a ridiculous statement and trace back to the source. Usually they have public facing feeds to maximize propaganda and it's so blatantly obvious it usually makes me giggle.

Re: Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware

#205

Post by nyolfen »

narwally wrote: post #143
willcipriano wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably wouldn't be complaining if I was born in the 1930's, WW1 and 2 were fairly well justified. However what are the current wars even still about? WMD? No, that was a fabrication. Bin Laden? He's long dead. Oil? With fracking, the US has the largest oil reserves on the planet. ISIS? Essentially gone, not much of a threat to US citizens in any case. There was no reason for these wars, there is certainly no reas…

It's nearly always about natural resources, just because the US has the largest oil reserves doesn't mean it's going to stop there. And the wars you mentioned are just the boots on the ground (or drones in the air) conflicts. Were still backing coups in Latin America (Honduras, Venezuela, Bolivia) so US friendly governments are put into place that will allow American companies to extract their resources.

which natural resources were we getting out of afghanistan

Re: Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware

#206

Post by [deleted] »

londons_explore wrote: post #100
cyberlab wrote: post #64

> the malware samples appear to have been compiled seven years ago, in 2014 So it was possible then to analyze the metadata of the files and determine when the malware was made/compiled? That seems like bad OPSEC. If I was CIA I would be rigorous in modifying and faking when certain files were last modified or created, and possibly stripping other damaging metadata (if it's incriminating enough). This is basic metada…

Don't overestimate government coders skills... Often it's a massive team with people of very varied programming skills. The core exploit might be some super high tech, hand coded in assembly rootkit, but then the remote control stuff might ends up being some badly written powershell script or multi-megabyte dot-net, java or python binary pulling in every library under the sun.

[deleted]

Re: Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware

#207

Post by techrat »

cyberlab wrote: post #72
asimpletune wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was based more on when the samples were found

Yet the samples retain their original creation date?

The year was given. Suppose it was found as early as 2014 on a device that had since been retired. That's one way to ballpark its creation year.

Re: Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware

#208

Post by smolder »

sturza wrote: post #144
dilyevsky wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say it’s likely they were instructed to sit on it until the time is right

Did you take occam’s razor into account? Why is this likely?

Occam's razor hardly ever applies to stuff like this (news in the intelligence space) because deception is the whole game. A tendency to believe simpler explanations is something they exploit.

I think Occam's razor is often misapplied in this way. It's for explaining natural phenomena, not for surmising the intent of an intelligent entity with an incentive to deceive.

Re: Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware

#209

Post by lostlogin »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #202
willcipriano wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably wouldn't be complaining if I was born in the 1930's, WW1 and 2 were fairly well justified. However what are the current wars even still about? WMD? No, that was a fabrication. Bin Laden? He's long dead. Oil? With fracking, the US has the largest oil reserves on the planet. ISIS? Essentially gone, not much of a threat to US citizens in any case. There was no reason for these wars, there is certainly no reas…

Almost nothing after WW2 was a reasonable war to be in. Not vietnam, probably not Korea, not Afghans, not Iraq, although I think the limited war in Gulf War 1 was fairly well reasoned.

It’s striking just how short those two wars were when you compare them to others, before and after.

Re: Kaspersky believes it found new CIA malware

#210

Post by anothernewdude »

willcipriano wrote: post #24
mc32 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall how when we had North Korean hacking activities and official attributions people would say, but how do we know it was them and how do we know the government isn’t making things up? But when someone accuses the US we never add any salt. Not that I don’t think it’s false, it’s just that the lack of consistent skepticism is interesting.

If I had to wager I'd always bet on the CIA lying, I don't see how anyone could come to another conclusion given their history.

Kaspersky are a branch of Russian intelligence.
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