Malware intentionally created by the U.S. National Security Agency to infect personal computer hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs) cannot be detected by antivirus programs.
The spyware, which infects a drive's firmware, can also produce a treasure trove of data for any government agency controlling the drives, according to Russian security software maker Kaspersky Lab.
Kaspersky released a report this week saying that it had discovered the spyware on hard drives in personal computers from 30 countries, including the U.S. The company said the malware, known as Fanny, likely predated other NSA spyware, such as Stuxnet, and has likely been in use for nearly two decades.
Kaspersky does not name the NSA in its report. Instead, it refers to those in charge of the spyware program as "the Equation group," noting that the same group was closely linked to Stuxnet.
Stuxnet, which came to light in 2010, was a computer worm developed by the NSA to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.
According to a report by Reuters, a former NSA employee "confirmed that the NSA had developed the prized technique of concealing spyware in hard drives, but said he did not know which spy efforts relied on it."
Kaspersky said the latest spyware was discovered on hard drives from more than a dozen major manufacturers, including Seagate, Maxtor (now a subsidiary of Seagate), Western Digital (WD), Toshiba, IBM and even SSD makers such as Micron and Samsung.
"There is no way to understand whether your HDD is infected," Igor Soumenkov, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, said in an email reply to Computerworld. "Once the hard drive gets infected with this malicious payload, it's impossible to scan its firmware."
tldr, the NSA has a foolproof way of bypassing every possible security measure on your computer and it can't be disabled or detected because of how your hard drive is built.
Petrol posted:on the one hand, its true that its terribly unwise for revolutionaries to do sensitive communications online. its just good practice to presume that someone is listening. on the other hand, all this talk about NSA capabilities i think has the effect of discouraging people from even entertaining revolutionary thoughts. im sure the NSA has wicked sick 0days that can infect your brain stem or whatever, but theyre not going to waste them on a kid who googled "marx was right". nah mean? anyway, i still think the best reaction to any of this stuff is to simply say, fuck it, im going to the real world, to join an organisation, and talk about things off line.
the thing is, they have sick brain stem 0days already on everything, so everything goes to the big nsa terrorgoogle, because they've realized that yes, no one cares about the marx kids, until later on in 2023 you find out that marxkid is doing something, and then you type his name into google and every transaction, email, forum post, and scat porn fanfic you've ever made from the age of 13 on pops up.
on the other hand, i have no idea what of this is real and what of this is just insane psyops. i don't know what the NSA knows, but (obviously) they definitely want everyone who pays attention to be completely convinced that they could know everything. unfortunately it is in fact logistically possible that they could. i don't know.
what i like to imagine is that everyone is just becoming subtly more anticapitalist all the time in a very diffuse way and eventually it will start having effects. but that only seems to be true in my head. i will probably just have to start living there
either way it's the worst shit ever
Crow posted:So what do u want me to do about it.
nuke it from orbit, but at the same time make sure you use fire
Petrol posted:on the one hand, its true that its terribly unwise for revolutionaries to do sensitive communications online. its just good practice to presume that someone is listening. on the other hand, all this talk about NSA capabilities i think has the effect of discouraging people from even entertaining revolutionary thoughts. im sure the NSA has wicked sick 0days that can infect your brain stem or whatever, but theyre not going to waste them on a kid who googled "marx was right". nah mean? anyway, i still think the best reaction to any of this stuff is to simply say, fuck it, im going to the real world, to join an organisation, and talk about things off line.
The real question is whether or not theyll use it on a kid who googled "kim jong un was right" Just now
tpaine posted:*drone furiously snaps pics of mr. crow drinking Hitler Did Nothing Wrong*
Theyd probably give me ap romotion on whatever it is that i do
drwhat posted:sometimes though it seems suspect to me that the reports of The NSA Knows Everything You Do are getting more and more unbelievably far-reaching. do they really or are they just that desperate
either way it's the worst shit ever
well, a lot of this shit is overhyped. it's the nature of journalism. greenwald is a particularly bad example but most journalists working on a story like this suffer from a combination of (1) lack of technical knowledge, and (2) strong motivation to make things sound as bad as possible.
like the story in the OP for example. it doesn't reveal anything significant. there have been examples of malware that infects disk drive firmware for years. and those kinds of infections will of course evade antivirus software which is only operating system level. naturally the NSA is going to use similar techniques. they're going to use whatever attack vectors they can. the question is, when are they likely to do this sort of thing, and to what end?
here's a decent article about the 'equation group' which gives some context for the kind of thing mentioned in the OP. i draw your attention to the 'victims map':
it's best not to conflate the stories about NSA/GCHQ etc hoovering up worldwide communications with these sorts of active attacks. despite the mythology, NSA resources are not limitless, and they will focus their active attacks on what they consider to be 'high value' targets, where they can't just passively suck up the data they want. to infect HDD firmware is technically difficult, you'd need a way of sniffing out the make/model of the drive first, then delivering a payload that can infect it successfully. it's not the sort of ability you waste on teen marxists to steal their tumblr passwords.
im rambling but i hope my point is clear - the NSA has some pretty serious capabilities when it comes to 31337 h4xx0ring but it mostly is irrelevant to us plebs
Petrol posted:to infect HDD firmware is technically difficult, you'd need a way of sniffing out the make/model of the drive first, then delivering a payload that can infect it successfully
well yeah, and there is actually a significant part of that article, which is that according to Kaspersky they have managed to do exactly that very difficult thing across a great many makes and models including SSDs by those manufacturers, which is pretty much everything that's getting deployed anywhere in the world this year, probably using the code that their contractors are required to turn over to them.
daddyholes posted:also, there is a bottomless trough of money for using these sorts of things to collude with local law enforcement to wreck local political movements that haven't even become serious threats yet which allows everyone involved to demand raises and trips to conferences in vegas. i don't think this shit is reserved for the big dogs because every time they use it they justify it and themselves. i had this argument with tom earlier iirc and i won, and since then all of you have convinced me that the government does not just use cool passive whatever tools on leftists since they think we suck.
don't get me wrong. this is Petrol, your friendly rhizzone conspiracy theorist who sees nazis everywhere and is generally pretty glum about things. i'm just saying that since the leaks of Edouard Snowden PBUH there has been a hysteria about NSA that is probably counterproductive. when i say NSA don't have infinite resources, i don't refer only to money, i refer to the limits of current technology, and the fact that there can logically be only a limited number of people who are both talented enough to push the limits of that technology and who also work for NSA. add to that the stratified nature of a secret bureaucracy and the need to keep their cards close to their chest in terms of capability and you have a situation where the best attacks are used only when absolutely necessary.
none of that means that individual marxists or small groups thereof won't be subject to active hacking by the state, but most of the time it simply isn't necessary to do more than look at someone's social media and email accounts to know everything about an activist or organiser that the state would need to know. this doesn't make the situation much better so what is my point? simply that the secret cyber nazi weapons of the NSA are interesting but musn't become like a boogeyman.
daddyholes posted:also, there is a bottomless trough of money for using these sorts of things to collude with local law enforcement to wreck local political movements that haven't even become serious threats yet which allows everyone involved to demand raises and trips to conferences in vegas. i don't think this shit is reserved for the big dogs because every time they use it they justify it and themselves. i had this argument with tom earlier iirc and i won, and since then all of you have convinced me that the government does not just use cool passive whatever tools on leftists since they think we suck.
yes, there shouldn't even be a question about "is there enough money for (US state action)". this is literally the raison d'etre of the us dollar and there will always be enough of them created for any purpose deemed necessary for the continuation of empire. literally the only question is are you on the radar or not and can you be made into a pr object for furthering the current program.
recently watched The Newburgh Four hbo doc, which was surprisingly pretty ok. all about a manufactured case to force four poor black guys into becoming pr pawns. it's all bullshit and budgets and theatre
Petrol posted:on the one hand, its true that its terribly unwise for revolutionaries to do sensitive communications online.
that's why i only do insensitive communications
Petrol posted:i refer to the limits of current technology, and the fact that there can logically be only a limited number of people who are both talented enough to push the limits of that technology and who also work for NSA.
i bet however it goes down on their end is stupid easy if it's 20 years old. it's probably run by grover and sean "is anyone going to blow my weird racist shit next year" smith in a hut that they leave in hologram camo suits to buy world of warcraft expansion packs from the store like neanderthals
my beef is with secondary reports that pick out an element of it and blow it up like its a more shocking revelation than it actually is, and have an overtone of THERE IS NO ESCAPE FROM US GOVT. thats what the OP reads like to me, especially with the quote from the anonymous spook confirming they can do this kind of thing and oh, who knows how widespread it is??? nah mean? that kind of reporting is clearly spin designed to take a bad situation for the NSA (revelation of scope and detail of a secret program) and turn it into something that not only distracts and confuses people about the thrust of the oriignal research, but is also yet another boogeyman tale to bum people out and rile the reddit/infowars crowd.