Shopping for Spy Gear: Catalog Advertises N.S.A. Toolbox

http://spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-nsa-has-back-doors-for-numerous-devices-a-940994.html

258 87 13 years ago

fabian2k• 13 years ago

The NSA must have an enormous pile of unkown exploits to facilitate all that. I wonder how they prevent other US agencies and government networks to be vulnerable to the exploits the NSA uses itself, or if they even bother trying to do that.

Leaving pretty much the entire IT infrastructure vulnerable seems like a very dangerous strategy.

salient• 13 years ago

Leaving pretty much the entire IT infrastructure vulnerable seems like a very dangerous strategy.

From NSA's perspective? I'm not so sure. A severe attack on US infrastructure would probably mean just more money and more legal power thrown at NSA to "fix it". Then NSA will continue to do what they've done so far - put most of that "security" money, into offensive capabilities. So the cycle will continue, as the systems remain vulnerable.

louwrentius2• 13 years ago

It is fascinating that if they just would inform vendors on their security vulnerabilities and have them patched, that this would probably make us more secure than the eavesdropping they can do with the exploits.

danielweber6• 13 years ago

It depends on the resources involved.

A big assumption that lots of bug-hunters make, that "this is one of the last bugs, and once fixed, the product will be much more secure." But there are always more bugs. If you assume that are more exploitable bugs beyond the one you are fixing now, it means that the vendors and customers have to spend time and money patching things, and won't really be any more secure afterwards.

Also "if I found it, so can The Bad Guys" is something that applies to individuals and small research teams. It's not necessarily the case that when the NSA finds something that other people are going to find it, too.

Also, unlike most security researchers, the NSA has the resources to monitor if other people are exploiting the vulnerabilities they found.

I'm not saying that the country wouldn't be safer if the NSA disclosed these vulnerabilities to vendors. I'm only saying that many of the common heuristics that researchers assume as true may not be, and especially not when applied to the NSA.

ProAm• 13 years ago

This allows them to also spy on the US government, which can provide them with valuable information as well. They cannot advertise that the hardware is insecure without giving up their position and capabilities.

ihsw2• 13 years ago

That's the idea -- it's OK to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into offensive operations, but defensive operations? Nope, we can't be too quick to put up the walls otherwise our enemies will learn of our 'defensive' techniques and do the same.

Furthermore it's an inevitability that our adversaries learn of these offensive techniques, so attempting to keep them a secret is simply a race against time -- and I don't think that's a race we can win. At this point we're arrogantly exercising recklessness and negligence on the hope that we can stay ahead of the wave.

adamors• 13 years ago

How did this get submitted when the exact same link was posted 2 hours ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979240

bencoder• 13 years ago

www subdomain on the original

sgift• 13 years ago

It seems spiegel.de vs www.spiegel.de wasn't caught by HNs duplicate URL detection.

w1ntermute2• 13 years ago

After all these years of free software proponents advocating for open source BIOSes and getting mocked for their supposed impracticality, we see the truth.

danielweber6• 13 years ago

Why? From the article, they seem to have broken into equipment the same way that "security researchers" would do. They just keep the information for themselves instead of selling it to the vendor, a security company, or the black market.

Any pen-testing company has a big list of tools that it keeps internally for breaking into things. Did anyone think that the NSA wouldn't have as big a list of its own?

w1ntermute2• 13 years ago

The NSA has a lot more resources than independent security researchers, and it takes a lot more resources to find vulnerabilities when the software is closed source. If it had been open source, those vulnerabilities would have been much more likely to have been found by independent security researchers as well, and then patched.

dlgeek• 13 years ago

I think that's true for only a subset of the claimed catalog. The article claims "the catalog even lists the prices for these electronic break-in tools, with costs ranging from free to $250,000". I suspect all of the ones with a cost are with the consent of the manufacturer, as why would there be a charge for an internally developed exploit?

jlgaddis• 13 years ago

And the NSA is {possibly|likely} monitoring the internal communications of those pen testing companies.

Spearchucker• 13 years ago

That doesn't guarantee that a legit reviewer of an open source BIOS missed a vulnerability that the NSA found.

nodata• 13 years ago

Your point?

arbus• 13 years ago

It atleast opens up the possibility of that happening if it was open source

wmt• 13 years ago

NSA is not exploiting or pre-backdooring the BIOS, it's just reflashing it with an malicious payload to keep the system infection alive. No amount of open source anything would make them unable to do this.

sneak4• 13 years ago

They have to gain access to the machine first to do the reflashing. Closed source systems make this a lot easier.

Apple's software update process allows for remote targeting of individual machines by MAC address, for example.

tptacek• 13 years ago

In fact, the things that would make it difficult to do this are routinely criticized by "open source" partisans as tools for suppressing Linux.

gwu78• 13 years ago

But is that the point? Maybe the solution is not to try to prevent someone else from manipulating your computer. Maybe the better approach is to give the user full control of her computer, including the BIOS.

For reasons that fall far short of evading intelligence agencies, the user should be able to flash her own BIOS whenever she wants.

Better and more choices in open source BIOS solutions might help in this regard.

In my opinion, it is precisely the notion that the user need never control her BIOS that was used to try to maintain IBM's monopoly on the PC, and later to maintain Microsoft's monopoly on the PC OS. Whatever the motivation might be, I would welcome a renewed focus on making the BIOS open and something that a user can choose, just as she chooses her own bootloader and OS.

danso• 13 years ago

Mostly OT: besides the technical details, I'm interested in seeing the actual descriptive text for these items. In my mind, the tone would be something similar to this parody http://www.teamfortress.com/sniper_vs_spy/day04_english.htm

K0nserv2• 13 years ago

Anyone have a copy of the suposed catalog? I didn't find a source in the article.

f_salmon2• 13 years ago

If WikiLeaks had gotten a copy from Snowden, you would have had this catalog now.

K0nserv2• 13 years ago

It is pretty ridiculous that the press is somewhat exempt from providing sources for their statements.

Wikileaks would have been much better.

slashdotaccount• 13 years ago

Just some scans for now: http://cryptome.org/2013/12/nsa-tao-ant.pdf

NamTaf• 13 years ago

I do love how even in the most secretive of government organisations, there's still some guy who sits around on company time badly photoshopping the intel inside logo to mockingly promote their goals.

f_salmon2• 13 years ago

This is it.

Literally everything is infected.

Again, either the NSA goes (and you know that won't happen) or information technology goes or democracy as we know it goes.

Everyone, take your pick now.

balozi• 13 years ago

процесс деморализации завершена

colinplamondon• 13 years ago

This is effectively a weapons system, and any country with budget can build the same system or better. To stop the NSA would be unilateral disarmament, without reason to expect others to cut back on their infowar programs.

malandrew5• 13 years ago

Or you know maybe we can demand that this unit actively try to help these companies improve the security of everything in the catalog so that we are all secure. Knowingly allowing vulnerabilities to persist in equipment that a US citizen or US corporation purchases from companies like Juniper Networks or Cisco is akin to leaving them unprotected and defenseless against malicious adversaries.

We're not asking for disarmament. We're asking for de-weaponization by retasking the TAO and the unit that produces these products to work on defensive activities instead of offensive activities. For a long time many, except those considered tin-foil hatters, viewed the NSA as fundamentally providing a useful service to protect Americans and American companies. Now it's clear the tin-foil hatters were right and that the NSA is essentially an offensive organization and that even American citizens and companies are victims of those offensive capabilities.

blhack• 13 years ago

How on earth could this possibly be verified?

If I was the NSA right now, I would be "leaking" tons of fake, and fantastic, stories about myself in order to discredit any legitimate concerns.

I can imagine the talking heads now "well what else were these conspiracy theorists wrong about? Personally I'm glad somebody is out the protecting our freedom."

etc.

14573893• 13 years ago

From the reporting, it looks like they had official documents with an actual price list for various exploits, along with details about what they entailed ("rigged monitor cable", "USB nubs"). What exactly do you consider to be 'verified'? Alexander or Clapper standing up and owning up to it? Good luck with that...

sneak4• 13 years ago

There is little Jake Appelbaum (one of the listed authors of this piece) won't do or say for media attention and public credibility.

Documents would be plausible. "Trust us, we've read them" from someone widely known to lie and steal is another matter entirely.

Entirely unsubstantiated rumors on the internets suggest that Jake got a talk pulled this week from the CCC hacker conference presently underway in Hamburg (which he keynoted last year) that was due to explore his motives and relationship with the US government, as he is the only US citizen publicly affiliated with Wikileaks and has not yet been charged, arrested, or imprisoned (and Wikileaks has not really done anything damaging to the US government since CM/Cablegate).

Don't believe everything you read.

yen223• 13 years ago

A second source would by nice, at least.

This article appears to derive its facts entirely from the mystery catalogue. If, hypothetically, the catalogue was drawn up by a bored NSA intern as an April Fool's joke, this article doesn't provide any solid proof to dispute that notion.

14573893• 13 years ago

With a proper oversight regime and individualized warrants, I can see this being an acceptable use of NSA power. With the absurd degree of intrusive latitude the NSA possesses now, it just makes it easier for them to violate civil liberties on a massive scale. Very few people can avoid being compromised by backdoors in these devices and companies, the same way very few people can avoid the physical threat of government aggression. The difference is that the latter has a far more robust system of controls to ensure it is used judiciously and ethically. Until the former has the same, we need to do everything we can to limit or invalidate the NSA's power.

ihsw2• 13 years ago

Somehow I doubt Al Qaeda is using Juniper, but our allies (read: economic adversaries) are.

I hope the companies listed -- Dell, Cisco, Juniper, IBM, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, et al -- are happy with themselves. The government's mantra has historically been similar to that of Microsoft's: embrace, extend, extinguish. The US Government is no different and they'll happily throw every company under the bus for the smallest advantage over their adversaries.

America's rivalry with China is continually climbing higher and higher, and we're getting dragged along whether we like it or not. The unshakable intertwining of private and public industries, the scorched-earth economic policies where private industry is consumed for the benefit of the public, the unlimited spying powers -- all to stay ahead of China.

The real kicker is that this kind of spying power compounds on itself -- as soon as we get Juniper gear exploited then we can move onto infiltrating Seagate's intranets, and then we can use Seagate exploits to more easily dig into hard-drives accessible by us/in custody by us. We may never be able to make a distinction between which tech companies have been exploited and which are wilfully/maliciously passing vulnerability information to the US Government.

EFruit• 13 years ago

I hope the companies listed -- Dell, Cisco, Juniper, IBM, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, et al -- are happy with themselves.

I'm not going to say that these companies are fantastic. I'm just not, but I will say that perhaps this isn't really their fault.

Let's say that BIND has a critical vulnerability that allows people to snoop on the requests made. Does that make the ISC guilty of giving the NSA access to every BIND DNS server on the internet?

No, it doesn't.

joe_the_user• 13 years ago

The question is whether these exploits are accidents or the result of companies giving in to pressure from the NSA.

If the Snowden revelations are to be believed, at least some of the exploits were the result of giving into NSA pressure.

But the problem with this is that it breaks the chain of trust that a company has with it's customers. Once you know the NSA is applying pressure secretly to force some vulnerabilities to remain open, how can you know they aren't doing that with any given vulnerability.

rdl• 13 years ago

AQ doesn't buy directly from Juniper (I think), but they definitely use networks which are Juniper powered (at least based on the Juniper sales volumes I saw going to Middle Eastern carriers). The point would be to attack a carrier in a foreign country, then use that to attack their users (who may be AQ).

fortepianissimo• 13 years ago

Where did "IBM" appear in the story? I can't find it.

Zaephyr• 13 years ago

This sorts news makes me shake my head. The scammers are trying to get in, the NSA is in, and now every other state security organisation will feel if they don't try to get in they will be falling behind.

All I want is to do is keep clients safe and out of all this cross-fire.

mmaunder• 13 years ago

The damage that this does to US software and hardware manufacturers and service providers like hosting companies is incalculable. The NSA is providing a strong ongoing incentive to buy your hardware offshore and host your servers offshore. As an American entrepreneur I'm horrified by the long term implications of this. It seems for all the mathematicians they employ they're unable to see that the long term cost of these programs far outweighs the short term benefits.

anologwintermut• 13 years ago

The NSA also got Huawei's stuff too. I highly doubt a Chinese company was cooperating with the NSA. Really,it seems like the NSA just went after market leaders and developed exploits against those systems. As far as this article suggests, they had no internal help in doing so.

Not using US equipment probably does little. The solution is to make secure equipment that is harder to exploit. Moreover, the argument can be made that if the NSA can find these issues, so can others that the US government considers a threat to national security.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

You don't think similar conditions apply to overseas manufacturers? That equipment made by companies in, say, France is considered sacrosanct by the French government?

brown9-2• 13 years ago

If you host your stuff offshore, the NSA actually has an easier time as far as bureaucracy goes in attempting to hack into it.

jawerty• 13 years ago

Can't wait to get Google Glass...

CamperBob23• 13 years ago

To which the NSA's answer will be, "Yo, dawg, we heard you like spying..."

malandrew5• 13 years ago

This new information puts American companies at even more risk of lost sales since given two companies, American Company and Foreign Company, the NSA is always going to have a massive advantage in penetrating the American company to get as much information they want to produce these backdoors. Whenever they fail to remotely access the company networks containing the IP for all the equipment they want to target, they have many more options available to physically access the network of these companies, possibly going as far as having a mole working at the companies, exfiltrating the IP they need to produce the tools in the catalog or even deliberately putting in backdoors.

This is probably the most damning information I've seen of NSA activities. This is anti-American activity since it clearly harms US economic interests. This coupled with the policy that spying on foreigners is fair-game is enough reason to give any foreign government or company enough reason never to purchase equipment from US tech companies.

As an engineer in the US, this makes my blood boil. I really hope that this new information generates more interest in open-source network software and hardware.

casca• 13 years ago

Juniper were making good inroads into the corporate firewall market at the expense of Checkpoint. It'll be interesting to see whether this sees a move back to Checkpoint as the firewall product of choice.

malandrew5• 13 years ago

More info on Checkpoint? What about an open-source alternative to both?

Spooky233• 13 years ago

As an Israeli company, I'm sure that they won't be making inroads in the middle eastern markets.

midas007• 13 years ago

Another reason to consider pfSense (which could use a crowdfunded secaudit like TrueCrypt).

superuser22• 13 years ago

Planting moles in foreign organizations is the explicit purpose and core competency of foreign intelligence agencies. It's only inside the US where that activity is (supposed to be) forbidden.

You should assume that the US intelligence community is already doing this to foreign tech corporations and has been forever.

malandrew5• 13 years ago

That's exactly my point. It was supposed to be forbidden domestically and that added trust to US-made technologies. However, now that we've learned that US companies are completely fair game, the level of access the government has to domestic companies via moles, NSLs and other acts of espionage, we should assume that domestic companies are far more compromised than foreign companies. This assumption is not only reasonable but the responsible assumption to hold if you are a foreigner.

Spooky233• 13 years ago

I think that's an issue with services based businesses like SaaS/PaaS/cloud providers. You're also making an assumption that national affiliation matters in a global company.

With hardware companies, I doubt there's much of a difference. Getting a mole placed in a foreign company is totally achievable, just a different set of motivators for the mole. Actually, you don't need to compromise an OEM computer or network manufacturer. Just pay off a contractor in the supply chain who manufactures key parts.

Even in the case of services/cloud, I doubt it matters. If the NSA hacked the chancellor of Germany's personal phone, what makes you think that they haven't compromised German cloud providers as well?

superuser22• 13 years ago

So essentially an internal, military-grade Metasploit.

It's not surprising that NSA would develop and maintain a strong repertoire of exploits for popular infrastructure. What else did you think an organization tasked "to produce foreign signals intelligence information" was doing with all those computer security experts on staff?

Is there evidence that NSA was planting backdoors or that US tech firms were cooperating? Isn't it more likely that NSA was simply discovering (and possibly purchasing) 0-days just like everyone else?

They can do that with foreign equipment just as easily. Switching to non-US hardware is just irrational.

wepple• 13 years ago

This article feels like it may be somewhat misleading around the use of the term "back door".

If the NSA has infact backdoored all of those products, kudos for keeping it quiet for this long!

if however these products have vulnerabilities in them, like all software does, and the NSA have access to these vulnerabilities (like numerous other people do), it's not quite as devious.

In that case they didn't have a super-secret backdoor installed with no-one noticing, but in fact discovered that the window wasn't locked, and kept that a secret.

confluence• 13 years ago

Stallman was right. Again. http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Trust nothing. Everything is a lie.

Shopping for Spy Gear: Catalog Advertises N.S.A. Toolbox

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