{"id":5788,"date":"2015-02-17T06:26:44","date_gmt":"2015-02-17T11:26:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5788"},"modified":"2015-02-26T06:31:49","modified_gmt":"2015-02-26T11:31:49","slug":"moscow-based-security-firm-reveals-what-may-be-the-biggest-nsa-backdoor-exploit-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5788","title":{"rendered":"Moscow-Based Security Firm Reveals What May Be The Biggest NSA “Backdoor Exploit” Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Moscow-Based Security Firm Reveals What May Be The Biggest NSA “Backdoor Exploit” Ever<\/a><\/h3>\n

Since 2001, a group of hackers – dubbed the “Equation Group” by researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab – have infected computers in at least 42 countries (with Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Syria most infected) with what\u00a0Ars Technica calls<\/a>“superhuman technical feats” indicating “extraordinary skill and unlimited resources.”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The exploits – including the\u00a0‘prized technique’ of the creation of a secret storage vault that survives military-grade disk wiping and reformatting – cover every hard-drive manufacturer<\/strong>\u00a0and have many similar characteristics to the infamous NSA-led Stuxnet virus.<\/p>\n

\n
According to Kaspersky,\u00a0the 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.<\/strong><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“The hardware will be able to infect the computer over and over,” lead Kaspersky researcher Costin Raiu said in an interview.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0They include Western Digital Corp, Seagate Technology Plc, Toshiba Corp, IBM, Micron Technology Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The group used a variety of means to spread other spying programs, such as by compromising jihadist websites, infecting USB sticks and CDs, and\u00a0developing a self-spreading computer worm called Fanny<\/strong>, Kasperky said.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moscow-Based Security Firm Reveals What May Be The Biggest NSA “Backdoor Exploit” Ever Since 2001, a group of hackers – dubbed the “Equation Group” by researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab – have infected computers in at least 42 countries (with Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Syria most infected) with what\u00a0Ars Technica calls“superhuman technical feats” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3609,1543,3605,3608,3606,577,712,746,3607],"class_list":["post-5788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-bios","tag-digital-surveillance","tag-equation-group","tag-firmware","tag-hard-drive","tag-nsa","tag-security","tag-spying","tag-stuxnet-virus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5788"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5789,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5788\/revisions\/5789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}