Glen Greenwald At It Again; “How NSA Plans To ‘Infect’ Millions of Computers With Malware.”
Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald have an article in “The Intercept”, (Mar. 12, 2014) with the title above. I will not provide a link to the article as they purport to show classified information. The authors claim that NSA plans to “dramatically expand their ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process.” The authors claim that documents previously provided by leaker Edward Snowden, “contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with “malware” implants. The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers, and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.”
Gallagher and Greenwald claim that NSA — “in some cases, — has masqueraded as a fake FaceBook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots via a webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled NSA to launch cyber attacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites.”
The authors also claim that “the implants being deployed were once reserved for a few hundred hard-to-reach targets, whose communications could not be monitored through traditional wiretaps.” In “analysis” the authors claim they did of the purloined documents, they claim “NSA aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives in the past decade by computerizing some processes previously handled by humans. The automated system — codenamed “TRIBUNE” — “is designed to allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups, instead of individually.”
There are quite a few other revelations in the document; but beware, if you go to their link — they post what they claim are classified NSA documents. V/R, RCP
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