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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 th

• 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)."
  • colordrops 12y ago
    How do you know that?
• Yver 12y ago
  > when it's disclosed that .govs run nmap it's time to patch your TCP stacks? They don't just nmap the internet, they systematically compromise vulnerable targets as per the article and the slides. And unlike common criminals, there's no hope of them being stopped by any law enforcement agency. If they're really going after every non 5-Eyes machine they can compromise, people living outside of the 5-Eyes need to protect themselves.
  • MisterWebz 12y ago
    > people living outside of the 5-Eyes need to protect themselves. I wonder what would happen if they started using Monstermind-like software?
  • a3n 12y ago
    And unlike common criminals, if they decide that you deserve to be extraordinarily rendered, there's no hope of stopping them. This is why you should resist government spying, because once you come to their attention, they could mistakenly or rightly decide that you need to be fucked with in some way, which could range from a brief arrest to murder. Merely coming to a government's attention puts you at risk, so we should minimize the chance that anyone can come to the government's attention.
• revelation 12y ago
  Yeah, I mean this colossal misunderstanding (or willful ignorance, really) also comes up in basically every discussion on privacy. "Oh, so you give all that information to Facebook, but you don't want the goverment to have it?" Well yes, smartypants, that's because the government has the monopoly on violence. Full stop.
• regularfry 12y ago
  It's obvious, but I've not seen it presented clearly before: the interesting bit for me was that if your attacker can see all the traffic on the network, traditional means of hiding a host (moving off a common port, and port knocking) don't do you any good because your attacker can see the traffic when you use it, and use that as leverage to acquire themselves an ORB. Normally you wouldn't assume that J. Random Skiddie has your router.
• atmosx 12y ago
  I'm staggered by the level of distortion: I don't have any sort of demand from "Rob Graham", but I have many demands from my government.