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Hmm... if only there was some sort of National Security Agency that employed cryptographers so we'd know about these things first and could protect us from thes
by fleitz 14y ago
Hmm... if only there was some sort of National Security Agency that employed cryptographers so we'd know about these things first and could protect us from these attacks.
- pjscott 14y agoWho says they didn't know? The attack was non-destructive and primarily targeted at Iran, which is something the NSA is probably not too upset about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_(malware) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_(malware)
- huhtenberg 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm ;)
- TeMPOraL 14y agoAnd once again, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poes_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poes_law ;).
- dfc 14y agoWere you targeted?
- DrJ 14y agois he Iran ;)?
- joejohnson 14y agoMaybe the NSA is the "wealthy nation-state." It's not a stretch to imagine this attack was the NSA.
- ajross 14y agoClearly posters aren't getting the sarcasm, so I'll spell it out: the NSA is clearly suspect number one. What's more interesting to me, though, isn't that they had this technique, it's that they let it out for ... what? It seems like this is a garden variety public worm. One would think that if the NSA had the ability to forge windows code signatures like this, they would have used it more selectively. Some spook is in deep trouble about this.
- iuguy 14y agoThe NSA is not suspect number one. The Russians have had superb cryptographers for decades, heck GCHQ invented public key cryptography years before Diffie Helmann and denied it's very existence within for decades. Attribution is a bitch. It's not a slam dunk to suggest that a particular agency is at fault without supporting evidence.
- peterwwillis 14y agoHell, the people I know who don't work for the government scare me with the kind of advanced research they do. And if it was government funding they might farm out to the private sector if there was more advanced research there with this kind of attack vector in mind.
- christoph 14y agoIndeed. It's easy to pin it on a nation state or intelligence agency, but it's worth considering the possibility that it was rogue elements in one (or both worlds) that exploited this (and various people) for purely financial gain.
- at-fates-hands 14y agoThe Russians have far more of an economic risk to set something like this off in the middle east. Their huge investments in oil infrastructure could go up in flames if this was traced back to them. And this is just the stuff that's somewhat above the table.
- ajross 14y agoThe NSA is the largest such organization, surely there are others. But just to correct: the GCHQ beat DH by three years and RSA by four, not decades.
- snowwrestler 14y agoOne of the provisions in CISPA is that the NSA will have to set up a way to share classified threat data with network operators. Now, would the NSA have shared this particular attack? I'm guessing no, since they probably wrote it to begin with.
- jostmey 14y agoThe NSA employs more mathematicians than any other organization. Source: http://www.nsa.gov/research/tech_transfer/advanced_math/index.shtml http://www.nsa.gov/research/tech_transfer/advanced_math/inde...
- xyzzyz 14y agoDoes anyone have any idea what kind of salary a mathematician in NSA can expect? Unfortunately I'm not a US citizen, so I cannot apply, but I'd like to compare it to what they would pay me in my home country.