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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-
by 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)."
- tptacek 12y agoIf you literally believe that GCHQ has owned up every machine it is technically and feasibly capable of owning up, there's not a lot of reasonable conversation that can happen between the two of us.
- opendais 12y agoPretty much. You blatantly ignore the repeated statements that the vulnerability scan is a prelude to actively attacking machines for some reason. I'm not sure why. I'm not saying they are attacking any machine they can. They are, however, attacking some machines. You don't develop the capability to build target lists, to attack targets, and state you do attack targets...unless y'know, you actually do. You might use it on a limited scale at specific targets but you do use it. The problem is, I don't have faith they actually engage in selective targeting.