dailydot.com
January 1, 2014
If you’re already hyperventilating over a report published this
weekend offering new details on National Security Administration spying, an
enlightening presentation by the report’s co-author might put you out cold.
Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum elaborated on what he’s learned
about NSA spying tactics and tools during a lecture at the Chaos Communications
Congress in Hamburg.
Appelbaum co-wrote a Der
Spiegel report published Sunday that sheds light on what the NSA can access,
including your
iPhone, your newly
purchased laptop computer, and most
major security architecture.
But in his lecture, Appelbaum dropped this nugget: The NSA can tap
into your wireless signal from up to eight miles away.
As proof, Appelbaum offered up a top secret NSA document detailing
the capabilities of “Nightstand,”
a wireless exploitation and injection tool that can — undetected — deliver
spyware via your wireless card. The document is from 2008, so it’s possible the
capabilities have been expanded since then.
Even creepier, Appelbaum said he’s talked to NSA sources who told him
the devices have been used on drones, but he’s not yet come across documents to
back that up.
“That’s a really interesting thing because it tells us that they
understand that common wireless cards, probably running Microsoft Windows —
which is an American company — that they know about vulnerabilities yet they
keep them a secret to use them,” Appelbaum said. “This is part of a constant
theme of sabotaging and undermining American companies and American ingenuity.
As an American, though generally not a nationalist, I find this disgusting,
especially as someone who writes free software and would like my tax dollars to
be spent on improving these things.”
Though it seems Appelbaum’s chief complaint with NSA spying is that
it’s tyrannical, he said the government’s interest in leaving security
weaknesses open for exploit has “retarded the process by which we would secure
the internet,” making systems and their users vulnerable to attack.
You can watch Appelbaum’s whole presentation here:
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