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Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

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Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#281

Post by mozey »

hnaparst wrote: post #236
spydum wrote: post #191

Why is everybody posting/curious about the language of the blog post and not the contents of the file? I've looked through some of the contents.. Some look incredibly old, but others target odd things.. lots of cPanel. My only guess is take the low hanging fruit to build "jump box" type systems? Some odd examples: ElegantEagle/toffeehammer.. focuses on cgiecho for RCE. The thing is, a CVE was just released for this c…

Many people may not be technically savvy enough to understand the contents of the file, but everyone is interested in who the author is. In fact, these exploits are rather old, but the identity of ShadowBrokers is fresh. And the idea that you can figure out where someone is from by analyzing their written text is as fascinating as doing the same to their code.

> the idea that you can figure out where someone is from by analyzing their written text

That idea is quite well known, so it's likely that the post was written like that deliberately. I was just wondering if you could create a similar sounding post with a chain of people rewriting the original in their own words.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#282

Post by pdkl95 »

Veratyr wrote: post #277
jorblumesea wrote: post #147

Is there any doubt the Shadow Brokers are Russian and working for Russian interests? The timing of releases, international events concerning both countries and pointed measures are far too suspicious to be considered circumstantial.

Yes. We're in the middle of an information war between America and Russia. I highly recommend doubting everything that involves either of these countries. I'm yet to find a single source of information that doesn't contain bias one way or the other. Even HN seems to have a "of course it's Russia" bias these days.

> America and Russia

Remember that even naming these two countries is a bias unless there is specific evidence. America and Russia are obvious suspects, but other countries (and even non-state actors).

There is very little actual evidence and far too much time spent on useless - and distracting - speculation.

> Even HN seems to have a "of course it's Russia" bias these days.

I suspect a lot of people are still using cold war era standards for how propaganda works. The modern methods[1] are a lot more subtle. A potential example might be this very thread where a lot of people seem to be wasting time speculating about the leak's origins instead of looking at the actual evidence that is available: the software itself.

[1] e.g. Russia's "non-linear warfare" methods that introduce as much confusing/distracting chaos as possible, or the psychological wedges JTRIG (GCHQ) uses to split communities before they grow into larger "problems".

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#283

Post by Sacho »

mistermann wrote: post #259
gbuk2013 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't own a TV. :) I do watch some movies now and again though, especially when flying long haul but I never had one that mentioned those. Off the top of my head I can only think of 24 as a candidate but I never watched that.

Anyone who's spent any significant amount of time in political threads in reddit (just for example) would know those acronyms.

I think it's not a matter of knowing the acronyms but rather using them in your writing. Even though I'm aware of POTUS, I would simply write "The President" or "The US President" - it comes much more natural, from all the times its been used in local media to refer to our own/foreign presidents. Same reasoning for the US Supreme Court.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#284

Post by vidarh »

strictnein wrote: post #257
wyldfire wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nomenclature of pirated "zero day" cracked (or usually just copied) software releases is at least twenty five years old, but likely older.

Wish "1day" would somehow make a comeback. "0day" sounds cooler, of course, but it was a lot easier to find 1day FTP warez sites in the wild than 0day sites.

Around the time of the end of my swapping of floppies back in the day, it was getting frustrating as none of the "cool" swappers accepted anything but 0day, and most would be annoyed if you couldn't regularly supply -7 to -14 day releases so they had a week or two to spread things to their downstream contacts before it'd be too stale. In other words a lot of them depended to a large extent on internal leaks... I remember receiving the occasional C64 game that was not even finished by the time it was spread.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#285

Post by quinndupont »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #119
hl5 wrote: post #39

Obviously, Perl is the NSA top language choice due to it's built in support for obfuscation and job security.

Although you're joking, Perl was invented to make an NSA project easier to develop. That project was first, high-assurance VPN: BLACKER. It was also NSA's attempt to do something secure for once since they lost the argument to INFOSEC co-founder, Roger Schell, where they thought only communications security, not computer security, mattered. They contracted it to TRW who made a lot of secure stuff & government systems…

Neither article makes any mention of Perl, which isn't terribly surprising, since BLACKER is still highly classified, with very little is publicly known about its design and operation. You'll find some discussion of BLACKER in my recent article: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7763734/ (Open access/free pre-print version: http://iqdupont.com/assets/documents/DUPONT_FIDLER-2016-Prep...)

A few points of note: it's rather weird to call BLACKER a "VPN"; it's likely much broader than this (it's a network, crypto suite, secure kernel, system architecture, etc), and yet encompasses a very different goal. In fact, the degree to which it originates out of secure kernel research is, we argue in our paper, somewhat unclear, and perhaps this is only a small part of the equation.

If anyone has any additional information about these early architectures, I would love to speak with you, contact me at http://iqdupont.com.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#286

Post by crimsoneer »

microtonal wrote: post #270
throwaway71958 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Russian myself, I can tell you with certainty that there are mistakes in that text that a Russian ESL speaker would never make, and verb tenses are a bit too good for an unskilled speaker. Due to the combination of these two factors, I bet this was written by a native English speaker who thinks he/she knows the mistakes a Russian would make. They're wrong.

Due to the combination of these two factors, I bet this was written by a native English speaker who thinks he/she knows the mistakes a Russian would make. Or it is Russian and they intentionally formulated this as cartoonesque Russian, so that everyone says "this can't possibly be Russian, it's someone who tries to put the blame on Russia". The problem is that if this comes from a government power, it is likely that…

Quite. If this was actually designed by a state actor, they have access to professional linguists who specialise in this sort of stuff. You're not going to figure out who it is unless they want you to, and it certainly won't be obvious enough for a cursory browse to identify provenance.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#287

Post by vidarh »

coldtea wrote: post #201
1337biz wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full circle irony: I find the argument of the dubious throwaway more beliveable than OP.

Count us both. The BS one hears today (against Russia, etc) are the "WMD"s of 2017. There's a single superpower the last 2+ decades (Russia is no USSR) and it has a long history of pushing for its "interests" all over the world, starting wars, grabbing resources, overthrowing governments, supporting all kinds of lunatics and dictators. And covering the whole damage they do with holier than though finger pointing, mad…

Russia is no USSR, but Putin is ex-KGB. On one hand I agree with you that it's overdramatised to some extent, and that it's likely that a lot of the claims about Russia are made up. On the other hand, Putin seems like exactly the type who would see intelligence and manipulation as a way for Russia to punch above its weight and is likely to be engaging in it.

The problem with trying to unravel the truth about Russian hacking is that both sides have similar incentives to play up the drama: For the West to paint Russia as a threat plays straight into an agenda of making Russia seem relevant and powerful. Because of that, there's no reason for Putin to try particularly hard to squash allegations whether they're true or false.

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#288

Post by Sacho »

hnaparst wrote: post #233
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #26

It's pretty fascinating to read the Shadow Broker's posts. They have to write something, since they can't just say "I work for Russia and we're reminding America that they're not invulnerable." So they have to come up with all sorts of contrived reasons about why they're doing this, complete with broken english to fool stylometry detection that walks the fine line between being believable and preposterous. Someone sp…

Shlomo Argamon has reposted his linguistic analysis http://multaverba.blogspot.com/2017/04/initial-linguistic-an...

After reading the analysis, I think the author focused too much on "native speaker". It seems entirely plausible to me that the text was written by a fluent non-native English speaker, who was trying to make the post look like the more common broken English proclamations from Russian hacking groups for whatever reason(blending in and throwing off investigations maybe).

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#289

Post by M_Grey »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #280
M_Grey wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you reply to the correct person? I never said anything about discrimination, nor did the person I was replying to.

Prejudice and discrimination are close enough to synonyms. You shouldn't be confused by the word swap.

...But neither of us said Prejudice either!

Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons

#290

Post by FeepingCreature »

noobermin wrote: post #175
Pyxl101 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like cars red Interestingly, that word order is also valid English, though it has a slightly different meaning than "I like red cars". Example: "I like [my] soup warm". "I like soup warm, but you can eat it cold and left over if you want." "I like having soup warm" "I like my cookies freshly baked" "I like men muscular and toned" "I like my women blonde, so you can go for the brunette" "I like cars red" doesn't q…

I think it is a short hand slang for "I like cars painted red." or "I like cars colored red."

I think it's short for "I like for cars to be red."
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