Report: NSA sticks backdoor tools in routers
Ready for another juicy NSA spying revelation? All right, here goes. According to the latest report by The Guardian, the National Security Agency implants backdoor tools in routers exported from the United States. The NSA then uses those tools to conduct network surveillance.
Source : Techreport
A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA's Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit. The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.
The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. The document gleefully observes that some "SIGINT tradecraft … is very hands-on (literally!)".
The document reportedly goes on to mention one instance of a router phoning home to the NSA several months after being implanted with spying tools. “This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network,” the document allegedly states.
As the Guardian points out, this news comes on the heels of repeated allegations by the U.S. government that Chinese-built hardware contains backdoors used by the Chinese government. The House Intelligence Committee went so far as to advise private companies in the U.S. not to do business with two Chinese telecommunications equipment firms, Huawei and ZTE, on those grounds that they “cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence.”
Comments(4)
Such a mess, this NSA nonsense.
We are all Terrorists in their eyes!
NSA are just bunch of vouyers. And vouyers are perverts, so they should be arrested.
I would recommend anyone interested in the topic to watch Person of Interest. It touches on the specific topic of surveillance and how “The Machine” finds all these terrorist. Sounds like the Machine is NSA.
That POI show is garbage. It started off well but after cheesing it up with “root”, vigilance, Carter dying and show creator’s active favoritism with uncle Nolan, it’s turned to crap.