5 ms·

Just a question, what does the NSA to do protect security with so many USA institutions hacked in recent years?

maehwasu 10y ago
a) It's extremely hard to defend against variants of social engineering, especially given the combinatorial proliferation of attack surfaces b) the NSA doesn't really care about that aspect much
- manquer 10y ago
  Defense will never be perfect, however that is no excuse for not having dedicated organization training, audits and enacting and enforcing regulations strictly. While all of this may happen in bit and pieces, there is no single organization doing this and measuring their success by the number of attacks they prevent or failed to prevent. NSA on the other hand wants backdoors and weakened cryptography tools...
andrewstuart2 10y ago
NSA is just the US Foreign Intelligence and Government protection agency [1][2]. They do nothing, and are expected to do nothing, to protect domestic civilian assets. NIST [3] is possibly the closest agency I'm aware of that exists to disseminate knowledge and standards to civilian organizations, but they're more interested (per their website, anyway) in simply advancing US business to be competitive in the global marketplace. That, and we've seen that they will bend to the NSA over such critical things as which elliptic curve ought to be recommended for use. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency [2] https://www.nsa.gov/what-we-do/ https://www.nsa.gov/what-we-do/ [3] https://www.nist.gov/about-nist https://www.nist.gov/about-nist
- philip142au 10y ago
  If I go to the NSA website it says "How We Protect the Nation" - So I infer that they do some work to protect something, but the US government was hacked "5.6 million fingerprints stolen in U.S. personnel data hack" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/23/us-government-hack-stole-fingerprints https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/23/us-govern... The Democrat and Republican computers recently hacked, you will say they are not specifically government since they are political parties. Many more US government hacks and leaks on a large scale I don't need to list. So I assume from your answer that they are tasked at protecting USA government assets, but it seems they don't do a good job.
  - rebuilder 10y ago
    They probably mean they protect the nation the same way the US military protects the nation by fighting wars abroad.
    - mirimir 10y ago
      For sure. But then, consider national defense efforts during the Cold War. I've never heard that NSA does anything at that level.
      - Godel_unicode 10y ago
        If they were doing their job, would you expect to hear about it? See the comments in this thread about Enigma. It's an interesting thought exercise; how do you tell the difference between peace which is organic and peace created through really effective intelligence?
        mirimir 10y ago
        I'm not arguing that the NSA is ineffective. I'm just saying that I haven't heard of much on the purely defensive side. Or at least, that's what I get from Bamford and the Snowden stuff. Maybe their defense is just unreported.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    Well, the NSA does military signals intelligence. They protect US interests by compromising foreign assets, and by intercepting communications. In recent years, there have been efforts to expand its defensive role. But it's rather like the career transformation from "black-hat hacker" to security professional ;)
  - Uhhrrr 10y ago
    Keep in mind they have to defend against multiple state actors (Russia, China, even some much smaller countries with a lot of investment in SIGINT) who are also very competent and have a ton of attack vectors to work with.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
oh_sigh 10y ago
NSA has no say in private group emails(such as the DNC).
- Godel_unicode 10y ago
  Or in the non-DoD branches of government. That's some combination of the FBI and DHS (specifically NCCIC and US-CERT). https://www.us-cert.gov/about-us https://www.us-cert.gov/about-us

a) It's extremely hard to defend against variants of social engineering, especially given the combinatorial proliferation of attack surfaces b) the NSA doesn't really care about that aspect much

manquer 10y ago
Defense will never be perfect, however that is no excuse for not having dedicated organization training, audits and enacting and enforcing regulations strictly. While all of this may happen in bit and pieces, there is no single organization doing this and measuring their success by the number of attacks they prevent or failed to prevent. NSA on the other hand wants backdoors and weakened cryptography tools...

andrewstuart2 10y ago

NSA is just the US Foreign Intelligence and Government protection agency [1][2]. They do nothing, and are expected to do nothing, to protect domestic civilian assets. NIST [3] is possibly the closest agency I'm aware of that exists to disseminate knowledge and standards to civilian organizations, but they're more interested (per their website, anyway) in simply advancing US business to be competitive in the global marketplace. That, and we've seen that they will bend to the NSA over such critical things as which elliptic curve ought to be recommended for use. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency [2] https://www.nsa.gov/what-we-do/ https://www.nsa.gov/what-we-do/ [3] https://www.nist.gov/about-nist https://www.nist.gov/about-nist

philip142au 10y ago
If I go to the NSA website it says "How We Protect the Nation" - So I infer that they do some work to protect something, but the US government was hacked "5.6 million fingerprints stolen in U.S. personnel data hack" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/23/us-government-hack-stole-fingerprints https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/23/us-govern... The Democrat and Republican computers recently hacked, you will say they are not specifically government since they are political parties. Many more US government hacks and leaks on a large scale I don't need to list. So I assume from your answer that they are tasked at protecting USA government assets, but it seems they don't do a good job.
- rebuilder 10y ago
  They probably mean they protect the nation the same way the US military protects the nation by fighting wars abroad.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    For sure. But then, consider national defense efforts during the Cold War. I've never heard that NSA does anything at that level.
    - Godel_unicode 10y ago
      If they were doing their job, would you expect to hear about it? See the comments in this thread about Enigma. It's an interesting thought exercise; how do you tell the difference between peace which is organic and peace created through really effective intelligence?
      - mirimir 10y ago
        I'm not arguing that the NSA is ineffective. I'm just saying that I haven't heard of much on the purely defensive side. Or at least, that's what I get from Bamford and the Snowden stuff. Maybe their defense is just unreported.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Well, the NSA does military signals intelligence. They protect US interests by compromising foreign assets, and by intercepting communications. In recent years, there have been efforts to expand its defensive role. But it's rather like the career transformation from "black-hat hacker" to security professional ;)
- Uhhrrr 10y ago
  Keep in mind they have to defend against multiple state actors (Russia, China, even some much smaller countries with a lot of investment in SIGINT) who are also very competent and have a ton of attack vectors to work with.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

oh_sigh 10y ago

NSA has no say in private group emails(such as the DNC).

Godel_unicode 10y ago
Or in the non-DoD branches of government. That's some combination of the FBI and DHS (specifically NCCIC and US-CERT). https://www.us-cert.gov/about-us https://www.us-cert.gov/about-us