NSA Plans To Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware & Using Facebook to Hack Into Your Computer
According to Dustin Volz of National Journal
This just in from the Edward Snowden vault of government secrets: The
National Security Agency is breaking into “potentially millions of
computers worldwide” and infecting them with malware “implants” as part
of an effort that is increasingly relying on automated systems and not
human oversight, according to a by First Look Media report the NSA is pretending to be Facebook to get the job done.
“In some cases the NSA 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,” First Look reported on Glenn Greenwald’s Intercept
channel, citing a classified slide presentation from 2009. “In others,
it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be
tailored to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take
snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA
to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or
denying access to websites.”
According to Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept as
part of the “industrial-scale exploitation,” the agency is leveraging
Facebook’s global appeal to trick targets into logging in to a
doppelganger version of the site, a technique dubbed “Quantumhand.”
The implants being deployed
were once reserved for a few hundred hard-to-reach targets, whose
communications could not be monitored through traditional wiretaps. But
the documents analyzed by The Intercept show how the NSA has
aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives in the past decade by
computerizing some processes previously handled by humans. The automated
system – codenamed TURBINE – 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.”
The classified files – provided
previously by NSA whistleblower 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.
The covert infrastructure that supports
the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort
Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and
Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an
integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.
“Owning the Net”
The NSA began rapidly escalating its hacking efforts a decade ago. In 2004, according to secret internal records,
the agency was managing a small network of only 100 to 150 implants.
But over the next six to eight years, as an elite unit called Tailored
Access Operations (TAO) recruited new hackers and developed new malware
tools, the number of implants soared to tens of thousands.
To penetrate foreign computer networks
and monitor communications that it did not have access to through other
means, the NSA wanted to go beyond the limits of traditional signals
intelligence, or SIGINT, the agency’s term for the interception of
electronic communications. Instead, it sought to broaden “active”
surveillance methods – tactics designed to directly infiltrate a
target’s computers or network devices.
Please refer to The Intercept for detailed article.
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