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Right, I think this is referring to a technique described in some of the earlier info releases, where the agency intercepts requests and send a fake response be
by ds9 13y ago
Right, I think this is referring to a technique described in some of the earlier info releases, where the agency intercepts requests and send a fake response before the real one arrives, and ditching the real response. I'm not clear on the details - it may rely on spoofing the server's IP, falsifying DNS replies and/or manipulating data in transit.
What interests me more, and what the above poster may be asking about is this part: "By concealing its malware within what looks like an ordinary Facebook page, the NSA is able to hack into the targeted computer".
This implies a true drive-by exploit - one not requiring any user interaction. Most of the Windows malware is actually installed by the user - they're tricked into clicking something, thinking it's anti-virus, funny video, "accelerate your internet" or some other innocuous thing. The no-user-action exploits generally have been workable only for plugins, particularly Flash or Java, which the user has allowed to run without any filters.
- snake_plissken 13y agoYup, your second paragraph nails it. But even then, it boarders on XSS or some hybrid injection attack which would rely on a vulnerability somewhere else up the stack. The way I understood a lot of this article, I'm lead to believe that their able to monitor/intercept a target's requests, imitate the web server and send replies which are so meticulously malformed that they are able to infect the target system. Like I said in my post and which you echo in your third paragraph, it's one thing to trick users into downloading and running binaries or to exploit a plugin, but it's another thing to imagine malformed packets breaking the security of an entire system.