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OMG FACTS

jj3

By jj3
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17 Moments of Spring

17 Moments of Spring

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The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.

 

That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyberespionage operations.

 

Kaspersky said it found personal computers in 30 countries infected with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. The targets included government and military institutions, telecommunication companies, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media, and Islamic activists, Kaspersky said.

 

The firm declined to publicly name the country behind the spying campaign, but said it was closely linked to Stuxnet, the NSA-led cyberweapon that was used to attack Iran's uranium enrichment facility. The NSA is the agency responsible for gathering electronic intelligence on behalf of the United States.

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According to Kaspersky, the spies made a technological breakthrough by figuring out how to lodge malicious software in the obscure code called firmware that launches every time a computer is turned on.

Disk drive firmware is viewed by spies and cybersecurity experts as the second-most valuable real estate on a PC for a hacker, second only to the BIOS code invoked automatically as a computer boots up.

 

"The hardware will be able to infect the computer over and over," lead Kaspersky researcher Costin Raiu said in an interview.

Though the leaders of the still-active espionage campaign could have taken control of thousands of PCs, giving them the ability to steal files or eavesdrop on anything they wanted, the spies were selective and only established full remote control over machines belonging to the most desirable foreign targets, according to Raiu. He said Kaspersky found only a few especially high-value computers with the hard-drive infections.

 

Kaspersky's reconstructions of the spying programs show that they could work in disk drives sold by more than a dozen companies, comprising essentially the entire market. They include Western Digital Corp, Seagate Technology Plc, Toshiba Corp, IBM, Micron Technology Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.

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Raiu said the authors of the spying programs must have had access to the proprietary source code that directs the actions of the hard drives. That code can serve as a roadmap to vulnerabilities, allowing those who study it to launch attacks much more easily.

"There is zero chance that someone could rewrite the [hard drive] operating system using public information," Raiu said.

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According to former intelligence operatives, the NSA has multiple ways of obtaining source code from tech companies, including asking directly and posing as a software developer. If a company wants to sell products to the Pentagon or another sensitive U.S. agency, the government can request a security audit to make sure the source code is safe.

"They don't admit it, but they do say, 'We're going to do an evaluation, we need the source code,'" said Vincent Liu, a partner at security consulting firm Bishop Fox and former NSA analyst. "It's usually the NSA doing the evaluation, and it's a pretty small leap to say they're going to keep that source code."

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyberspying-idUSKBN0LK1QV20150216

 

https://www.wired.com/2015/02/kapersky-discovers-equation-group/

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jj3

jj3

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^ If the background was for a space station, it was surely more for Mir ... But i think it's just some scaffolding imo. 

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1 hour ago, jj3 said:

^ If the background was for a space station, it was surely more for Mir ... But i think it's just some scaffolding imo. 

 

Background, as in "backstory".  why were the shuttles abandoned, etc.

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On 7/11/2017 at 0:14 PM, jj3 said:

^ Oh lol, well, 1991 ... Dissolution of the Soviet Union, no more credits for the poor Buran lol 

 

Speaking of the Soviets, a new study from a Russian historian estimates that Soviet war dead was not the 20-30 million as often estimated but 42 million!  The biggest difference is on the civilian death toll, which indicates much higher de-population than before.  This figure is on a population base of around 200 million (according the 1939 Soviet census).  

 

Other Russian historians that I've read have commented how they believe that the death tolls of various battles were heavily underestimated.

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