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NSA/GCHQ: The HACIENDA Program for Internet Colonization

• Zigurd 12y ago
  And Anne Neuberger blathers about reaching some new "social contract:" http://blog.longnow.org/02014/08/11/the-nsa-reaches-out/ http://blog.longnow.org/02014/08/11/the-nsa-reaches-out/ It would be like a social contract with a venomous snake.
  • Zigurd 12y ago
    If you honestly want to defend Anne Neuberger's "Intelligent America" scenario, go right ahead. It is in fact a grossly dishonest chunk of wishful thinking wrapped in Soccer Mom-friendly platitudes.
  • sitkack 12y ago
    I like how the interview writeup leads with a Godwin (or reverse Godwin, even more skilled). The NSA could save face by not actively making itself look bad.
• ibisum 12y ago
  I still find it hard to believe that there are people who justify these heinous tools as 'necessary' or 'vital' to the survival of the Western "democracies" who deploy them. Its a terrible state of affairs that we justify such intrusions - and yet fail to see, when 'the other side' lashes out in anger, the reasons why it is so. We are stuck in a feedback loop here, and it seems the only thing to do is turn off the microphone. But oh, the stage lights - how they draw us in! Quickly people. Build a better Internet.
  • revscat 12y ago
    Yes, the surface justifications for the surveillance programs of the NSA/GCHQ/etc. are one of public safety and national security, but I think the evidence increasingly points to strategies whose primary intent is to protect the political and capitalist classes against an uprising. These intrusive efforts by the intelligence agencies are necessary simply to better shape public opinion and, if things truly go from bad to worse, to protect themselves. Improving the internet so that it is less susceptible to surveillance is an important effort, but one that does not address the underlying problems of current income inequality or future climate change, both which can (and more than likely will) become vessels for disorder.
  • opendais 12y ago
    Its the same people that want to cut benefits for "those people", etc. The simple fact of the matter is, the people making these decisions are members of a privileged class of people that see any other class of people as "those people". Building a better technical solution is only a partial solution. All technical solutions will have flaws that can be exploited given sufficient financial resources being expended at the task. We need to replace our government.
    • osivertsson 12y ago
      Replace our government with what and how? What is the timeframe? Technical solutions can be implemented now. Formal methods can be used to prove correctness. The number of flaws could be cut by a factor 1000 I'd imagine when thinking of the current state of code running on devices connected to the internet.
    • dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Building a better technical solution is only a partial solution. All technical solutions will have flaws that can be exploited given sufficient financial resources being expended at the task. History has demonstrated that this is true of social/political solutions, as well (unsurprising, as these are really "technical" solutions in a different domain of technology.) > We need to replace our government. This is occasionally a good solution for existing problems, but quite often -- even when the government in question is far worse than our current one -- the cure ends up at least as bad as the disease. So, with any such call, one must demand a detailed accounting of "with what do you wish to replace it" that stands up to scrutiny not just of its theoretical attractiveness but its ability to be established and operate as intended in the world that actually exists and the people that are actually in it.
      • opendais 12y ago
        I mean vote against the sort of politicians that empower these people and contribute to lobbies that are pro-privacy/civil rights.
        • 12y ago
  • tptacek 12y ago
    "Heinous tools"? They're literally running nmap.
    • jafaku 12y ago
      "They are using a tool I know, therefore it's ok"
      • tptacek 12y ago
        The only way a reasonable person could write this comment is if they didn't know what nmap did.
        • coldtea 12y ago
          The only way a reasonable person would correct his comment is if he though mislabelling nmap as heinous is of any importance with regards to the heinous nature of the whole operation.
          • tptacek 12y ago
            Yes, that's about right.
        • ibisum 12y ago
          I know what nmap is, and its not the tool I was referring to .. the entire program (a 'tool for governments') is the object of my ire.
      • tzakrajs 12y ago
        One need not use nmap to understand that their reconnaissance is of information already considered public information.
    • Yver 12y ago
      I'll quote the slides: 1. (R)econaissance 2. (I)nfection 3. (C)ommand And Control 4. (E)xfiltration They're litterally running nmap for the reconnaissance part but I believe the "heinous" qualifier apply to the rest of the plan, which according to figure 18 consists in acquiring "as many new ORBs as possible in as many non 5-Eyes countries as possible". Unless I'm reading it wrong, they describe how they try to pwn as many machines as possible outside of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
• atmosx 12y ago
  The entire internet apparently has a common enemy. The more we learn the more I realize how broken todays internet is. It's insane the such operations are going forward without the victim-states raising extremely serious concerns. I wonder how the future's internet will become if this insanity doesn't stop.
  • doctorshady 12y ago
    The more I think about it, the less I want it to be an internet I'm on.
  • osivertsson 12y ago
    At least some victim states might very well be aware of what is going on but may feel that silently monitoring these attacks is in their best interest. Or that they can spread misinformation through these channels when deemed necessary.
  • happyscrappy 12y ago
    Well luckily everyone will soon start boycotting the US and the UK, and Canada and Australia etc. Any day now.
    • Zigurd 12y ago
      Yeah the Cisco layoffs have nothing to do with loss of trust.
• unfamiliar 12y ago
  None of this looks particularly new or shocking to me. Seems like automation of standard techniques, which I would be more surprised to find out they weren't using. And hacking foreign networks... isn't that exactly their job as signals intelligence?
  • opendais 12y ago
    The problem is they do things like take out the internet in all of Syria. http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/13/5998237/nsa-responsible-for-2012-syrian-internet-outage-snowden-says http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/13/5998237/nsa-responsible-fo... They are targeting civilian networks, not military ones. That is a huge problem. Its one thing if they were trying to break into foreign, legitimate targets of interest [military, defense industry, foreign intelligence, foreign governments]. That isn't what they are doing. They are just trying to get access to everything they can get their hands on. Civilian and military alike.
    • tptacek 12y ago
      The problem with your comment is that it has nothing to do with this story. It involves a different intelligence agency, doesn't involve routers, doesn't involve attacks of any sort, and could not have brought down the Internet in Asmara Eritrea, let alone Syria.
      • opendais 12y ago
        What do you think "take control of as many machines as possible" means? Asking them nicely to hand over their SSH keys? "The covert infrastructure includes so-called Operational Relay Boxes (ORBs), which are used to hide the location of the attacker when the Five Eyes launch exploits against targets or steal data (Figure 18). Several times a year, the spy club tries to take control of as many machines as possible, as long as they are abroad. For example, in February 2010 twentyfour spies located over 3000 potential ORBs in a single work day (Figure 19). However, going over the port scan results provided by HACIENDA was considered too laborous (Figure 20), so they programmed their OLYMPIA system to automate the process (Figure 21). As a result, the spies brag that they can now locate vulnerable devices in a subnet in less than five minutes (Figure 22)."
• munin 12y ago
  An anonymous hacker announces that they owned thousands of home routers to scan the entire Internet, security expert Rob Graham runs his masscan tool to scan the entire Internet, but when it's disclosed that .govs run nmap it's time to patch your TCP stacks? Whether or not you think that governments should spy, the amount of hype here seems staggering.
  • opendais 12y ago
    The difference is, Rob Graham isn't going to compromise the box and use it to mask the origin of future scans and malware attacks.
    • munin 12y ago
      Will he? What about the tens of thousands of other people that can run that tool? What about people that can type queries into SHODAN? Why are they not problems? If you don't think that you government should spy, that's fine, a lot of very respectable people have had this opinion over the course of human history. I just don't buy the remediation story, at all.
      • opendais 12y ago
        > Will he? What about the tens of thousands of other people that can run that tool? What about people that can type queries into SHODAN? Why are they not problems? You seem to conveniently ignore the fact they are doing this with the intent to exploit. Its cute and all but honestly, anyone who is going to do that then seek to compromise a box is a problem. Its the intent of compromising the box that is the issue, not simply scanning. Did you not RTFA? "The covert infrastructure includes so-called Operational Relay Boxes (ORBs), which are used to hide the location of the attacker when the Five Eyes launch exploits against targets or steal data (Figure 18). Several times a year, the spy club tries to take control of as many machines as possible, as long as they are abroad. For example, in February 2010 twentyfour spies located over 3000 potential ORBs in a single work day (Figure 19). However, going over the port scan results provided by HACIENDA was considered too laborous (Figure 20), so they programmed their OLYMPIA system to automate the process (Figure 21). As a result, the spies brag that they can now locate vulnerable devices in a subnet in less than five minutes (Figure 22)."
• jdong 12y ago
  BREAKING: Government has discovered nmap.
• tptacek 12y ago
  There is absolutely no way the USG's best program for mass-scale network reconnaissance relies on nmap. All possible respect to Fyodor, but nmap just isn't very good at that task, and if ever there was a bikeshedding problem in software security, port scanning and active host identification is it.
  • regularfry 12y ago
    Is anyone saying this is the "best"? I'd put it down to "most easily hacked together under time pressure".
  • dsl 12y ago
    I assume when doing active probes, you'd want to match the fingerprint of the most common tool for plausible deniability. I also highly suspect that this predates open source alternatives like masscan and zmap. Performance isn't a concern because they are using lots of other peoples infrastructure.
  • jeffmcjunkin 12y ago
    Though I respect both your opinion and Fyodor greatly, I have to disagree here. Mass-scale isn't really the issue. They have plenty of hosts to work with, so masscan wouldn't help. They're doing more than just open port detection, so nmap's many other features are helpful, as is the fact that nmap's scanning signatures aren't as suspicious as a custom scanning service that just so happened to be deployed worldwide.
  • AlyssaRowan 12y ago
    It isn't the best, but it's not bad, and they do use it.
• blouberzam 12y ago
  So they break into my router, then fuck with somebody else's network, and then I'm getting blamed for it ? 1. using my bandwidth, electricity etc is theft. 2. framing me for for their crimes is criminal conspiracy. 3. fucking with somebody else's network is terrorism. Either all these people (not just the scape goats) go to jail, or they just declared the internet as law less zone. Effectively legalizing piracy spam blackhat-hacking etc. Because proving guilt is now impossible, every plaintive can just point to dark government circles having control over their computer. In case proving guilt is no longer the guiding principle for justice they just lost the bases for governmental monopoly of violence, the right to collect taxes etc. Also it's only going to be a matter of time, until some other criminal(s) gets access to their ORBs & start ddosing or blackmailing everybody with impunity. Governments should stay out of the internet, because now we have cyberwar. They just create MORE chaos & disorder. Give the internet back to the geeks & maybe we'll get some semblance of decency back.