this is the most surreal most 21st century sentence I’ve ever read
The Snowden documents also hint at some extraordinary capabilities: they show that NSA has built extensive infrastructure to intercept and decrypt VPN traffic and suggest that the agency can decrypt at least some HTTPS and SSH connections on demand.
However, the documents do not explain how these breakthroughs work, and speculation about possible backdoors or broken algorithms has been rampant in the technical community. Yesterday at ACM CCS, one of the leading security research venues, we and twelve coauthors presented a paper that we think solves this technical mystery.
The key is, somewhat ironically, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, an algorithm that we and many others have advocated as a defense against mass surveillance. Diffie-Hellman is a cornerstone of modern cryptography used for VPNs, HTTPS websites, email, and many other protocols. Our paper shows that, through a confluence of number theory and bad implementation choices, many real-world users of Diffie-Hellman are likely vulnerable to state-level attackers.
Whoever it might be, based on how long the group has been operating, it would seem that the Dukes have substantial, reliable financial support. And because their campaigns appear to have been well-coordinated over time, with no apparent cases of overlap between attacks or interference between malware, the F-Secure team concluded, “We therefore believe the Dukes to be a single, large, well-coordinated organization with clear separation of responsibilities and targets.”
Such an organization operating in Russia would most likely require state acknowledgement, if not outright support.
this is the real cyberpunk
Ahhahaa
this is not the future we were promised, but probably the one we deserve
*Why, why, why were you “surprised”
http://www.mcafee.com/us/resources/reports/rp-quarterly-threats-aug-2015.pdf
“Cyberattackers have certainly taken advantage of this massive increase in potential targets and expanding attack surface. At first, these threats were a concern mostly for governments, financial institutions, and security vendors, but they are now a major concern for enterprises and consumers, as they can significantly impact the value of businesses and can cause major headaches in our personal lives. Today, we face nation-state cyberwarfare that includes some highly visible, although actively denied, state-sponsored attacks as well as long-term espionage. Again, although we expected and predicted most of this development, the rapid evolution of malware, increase in attack volume, and large scale of nation-state attacks has been surprising.”
Recently, a number of obfuscation systems have been developed to aid in censorship circumvention scenarios where encrypted network traffic is filtered. In this paper, we present Marionette, the first programmable network traffic obfuscation system capable of simultaneously controlling encrypted traffic features at a variety of levels, including ciphertext formats, stateful protocol semantics, and statistical properties. The behavior of the system is directed by a powerful type of probabilistic automata and specified in a user-friendly domain-specific language, which allows the user to easily adjust their obfuscation strategy to meet the unique needs of their network environment.
The debut season of Mr Robot has received a nod from the security focused twitters for its attempts at trying to keep things for the most part realistic. In the episodes so far we have seen hacker types communicating using IRC, there are Linux boxes as far as the eye can see and the main character wears a hoodie.
wearing a hoodie is the height of verisimilitude
Technology has evolved into a Golden Age for Surveillance. Can technology now establish a balance of power between governments and the governed that would guard against social and political oppression? Given that decisions by private companies define individual rights and security, how can we act on that understanding in a way that protects the public interest and doesn’t squelch innovation? Whose responsibility is digital security? What is the future of the Dream of Internet Freedom?
Beginning more than a decade ago, one of the largest security companies in the world, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, tried to damage rivals in the marketplace by tricking their antivirus software programs into classifying benign files as malicious, according to two former employees.
They said the secret campaign targeted Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), AVG Technologies NV (AVG.N), Avast Software and other rivals, fooling some of them into deleting or disabling important files on their customers’ PCs.
Some of the attacks were ordered by Kaspersky Lab’s co-founder, Eugene Kaspersky, in part to retaliate against smaller rivals that he felt were aping his software instead of developing their own technology, they said.
Air-gapped networks are isolated, separated both logically and physically from public networks. Although the feasibility of invading such systems has been demonstrated in recent years, exfiltration of data from air-gapped networks is still a challenging task. In this paper we present GSMem, a malware that can exfiltrate data through an air-gap over cellular frequencies. Rogue software on an infected target computer modulates and transmits electromagnetic signals at cellular frequencies by invoking specific memory-related instructions and utilizing the multi-channel memory architecture to amplify the transmission. Furthermore, we show that the transmitted signals can be received and demodulated by a rootkit placed in the baseband firmware of a nearby cellular phone.
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