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One more reason to not use any of the giant email providers like Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail.
by frank_boyd 13y ago
One more reason to not use any of the giant email providers like Yahoo, Google, and Hotmail.
- joekrill 13y agoAnd what makes any smaller providers any more safe?
- ArchD 13y agoA smaller provider with fewer clients probably provides a lower ROI for the NSA because of the economy of scale, although if they are specifically targeting you, it may still not make a meaningful difference.
- jacquesm 13y agoThere is a trade-off here, sure there are fewer people that they can listen in on like that but presumably a smaller provider will also be a softer target, possibly much softer.
- peterwwillis 13y agoActually, they can be quite a bit safer. If they're small enough the NSA might not have any existing targets on them, which means they won't have tried to find a way to intercept their traffic yet. They could just do SSL traffic inspection, but it's too costly (and practically impossible) to do that everywhere, so they have to do it on specific target networks, which involves a lot of work to get the thing in the right place on the network. It would be a huge pain in the ass to cover all the smaller providers.
- Nanzikambe 13y agoOne thing the leaks have reveal is that the NSA invested significant effort in compromising/backdooring hardware. Now if I were intent on compromising hardware to increase my reach, my prime targets are going to be the makers of routing & switching hardware. Someone like Cisco perhaps. Do you have any idea how many such hardware blackboxes lie between any two locations on the net? All that would be needed is a single vulnerable/backdoored one in that path, configure it to DNAT & SNAT through your MITM host .. I highly doubt there're very many places out of that reach. Especially not smaller providers. edit: s/setups/providers/g
- peterwwillis 13y agoWhen you start going down that line of reasoning, virtually every chip in every computer in the world "could" be backdoored. Again, the costs and technical challenges of doing this wholesale across a long line of products across many hardware vendors is practically impossible. I'd be more worried using Huawei gear, anyway.
- jlgaddis 13y agoAt this point I might just feel more secure running Huawei gear (as I type this at home on a Lenovo Thinkpad connected to an Aerohive access point plugged into a Cisco ASA firewall).
- frank_boyd 13y agoI don't understand your question. Bigger targets are always more interesting for mass surveillance, because, by definition, they have more users. And that's what the recent revelations are all about: Mass surveillance. Obviously, bitter targets are also more interesting for private/non-NSA/non-state hackers.
- marcosdumay 13y agoThat one piece of news is about corporate spyonage, not mass surveilance. The size of the email provider wouldn't make any difference.
- jcromartie 13y agoYou are the sole person responsible for the security of your communications. You simply cannot trust any third party to keep your communications secure. Public-key crypto goes a long way here.
- superuser2 13y agoYour small email providers (or your datacenter or ISP if you host your own) are still subject to the laws of the country in which they reside and will comply with legally valid court orders. Alternative email providers will not protect you. Only encryption can do that. (Or better legal protections for emails.)