RUSSIAN FIRM KASPERSKYP: NSA INFECTED HARDRIVES, AND THE IMPLICATIONS
Ms. D.P shared this, and when you read it, you'll see why I'm passing it along to you, with my own cautionary observations. According to this article from Rueters Canada, the American NSA has been doing a whole lot more than just eavesdropping in on your emails of phone conversations. It has, apparently, been able to infect your computer harddrives straight from the factory:
Russian researchers expose breakthrough U.S. spying program
The key points are may be found in these paragraphs, and ponder their implications carefully:
"The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.
"That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyberespionage operations.
"Kaspersky said it found personal computers in 30 countries infected with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. The targets included government and military institutions, telecommunication companies, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media, and Islamic activists, Kaspersky said. (reut.rs/1L5knm0)
"The firm declined to publicly name the country behind the spying campaign, but said it was closely linked to Stuxnet, the NSA-led cyberweapon that was used to attack Iran's uranium enrichment facility. The NSA is the agency responsible for gathering electronic intelligence on behalf of the United States.
"A former NSA employee told Reuters that Kaspersky's analysis was correct, and that people still in the intelligence agency valued these spying programs as highly as Stuxnet. Another former intelligence operative confirmed that the NSA had developed the prized technique of concealing spyware in hard drives, but said he did not know which spy efforts relied on it."
And this a little further on in the article:
"According to Kaspersky, the spies made a technological breakthrough by figuring out how to lodge malicious software in the obscure code called firmware that launches every time a computer is turned on.
"Disk drive firmware is viewed by spies and cybersecurity experts as the second-most valuable real estate on a PC for a hacker, second only to the BIOS code invoked automatically as a computer boots up.
"'The hardware will be able to infect the computer over and over,' lead Kaspersky researcher Costin Raiu said in an interview."
There is a line from George Lucas' first Star Wars movie that is applicable here, and which shows the implications to which the USA, in its mad scramble to be "secure," seems to be falling prey. It is in a line uttered by the character Princess Leia to the imperial governor (of the Death Star), Tarkin. Leia says something to the effect that the more the Empire tightens its grip, the more inevitably slips through its fingers.
This policy of unrestrained electronic spying has already seen economic consequences hit: Brazil and Europe both began to talk, and Brazil to do something about, the US based internet by launching parallel systems. China has already introduced regulations curtailing the purpose of computer hardware directly from the USA. And don't forget that story that appeared in the aftermath of the Snowden scandal and the failure of the Russian space probe Phobos II, which was blamed on faulty computer chips. Russia, you'll recall, placed a similar ban on chip imports, and even went so far as to announce that it was considering a return to the typewriter in order to avoid the NSA's snooping. More recently we've seen Russian announcements of its own internal domestic financial clearing network, and its insistence that Visa and Mastercard locate their clearing centers for Russia in Russia. And my own hypothesized idea that the BRICSA bloc will have to build their own counterpart to SWIFT is based, in part, on the growing suspicion within the BRICSA bloc about the security and privacy of western mechanisms of clearing.
Now add to this the admission that harddrives are also infected, and we can see another economic consequence looming, one with potentially dire consequences for the American microchip and computer hardware industry (not to mention Toshiba in Japan): if you were Frau Merkel, or Mr. Putin, would you be inclined to place a major order for computers with Toshiba? Or IBM? Or Cray?
Probably not.
But there is yet another "flip side" to all this, and here comes the high octane speculation of the day: suppose you needed, for whatever unstated reason, to build a worldwide redundancy into global communications networks, including those of international financial clearing, and you had to do so in a climate where some nations do not fall into the "trusted partners" part of the ledger. How would you go about inducing them to do their part to build in that redundancy that you have determined - again for whatever reason - to be necessary? One way, of course, would be to convince them that you yourself, and your products and "services" could not be trusted, and that they had to build their own parallel industries and services to mimic your own.
The question, of course, is why one would need such redundancies... but that's high octane speculation for another day...
See you on the flip side...
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Way, way more on Kaspersky:
http://anolen.com/2015/03/25/what-is-kaspersky-lab/
There are no angels in this bunch…
The idea that this meme is deliberately being perpetrated by the PtB in order to force others to build partitioned redundancy into the system… I definitely did not see that one coming, but it does actually makes sense.
Lets have a little fun with the NSA shall we. Well if you boys are reading this post, then you will have realized that “we” don’t give a s**t what you think or what you do to us. Because in the end the chase for information is fruitless, why, because only the bad guys have secrets, and the general public doesn’t have secrets. So go someplace else for your entertainment, because the members of this web site are fully aware of your stupid spying game, and frankly nothing you do will change our minds about what you elites have hidden from us, goodbye !!!!!
Or could this be all a criminal scam where the government and organized crime become indistinguishable. To sell products like McAfree, Iolo Technologies which wouldn’t deter hackers of any type. Also by forcing us to buy online with debit-credit cards leave us all vulnerable to having our bank accounts stolen a planetary kleptocracy.
They’ve been one in the same for sometime[in my mind’s eye].
“Or could this be all a criminal scam where the government and organized crime become indistinguishable.”
They ARE indistinguishable. But at least the Mafia has some sense of honor and lives by a code, even if minimal.
The measure of a man is the extent to which there are things he will not do, no matter what the price. And there are indeed things that the Mafia will not do, on principle. On the other hand, there is absolutely nothing that the psychopathic human garbage in government and behind it will not do. The US government of the past 15 years is undoubtedly the most evil criminal organization of them all.
Very true.
I can’t help but think of Madeleine Albright’s quote of the price is right, in the killing of more than a half a million children.
Cased Closed.
That’s a wrap King[Sergeant Preston of the Yukon]
Any country that depends on an internet based business service must learn to make its own equipment and develope its own technology in this field if it is to compete on a world scale. The NSA is only taking advantage of the laziness of most of the countries that simply adapt the american systems into their own and expect everyone to play like good sports. The NSA is made up of Nazi’s,come on what do you expect and the Russians know that better than anyone. Surprise,surprise , surprise,,,,,the NSA doesn’t play fair,,,,sheezaam,,they can’t be trusted! Everyone in America knows they’re crap,its about time the rest of the world fiquares it out.
Yes, the irony of the tech industry. Outsource manufacturing, insource tech talents
There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in Cyber Space. I’ve related stories about NSA at MS and the FBI at AG Comm. Requesting backdoors into systems way back in 98!! So, this can be considered ze Master Plan! Where they don’t have to deal with the headache of de-encrypting anything. Encryption means nothing if the backdoor is wide open. I’m sure those Mfg’s had a gun to their head too. Put, our spyware in or go out of business. There’s an old saying it’s OK to do business with the Devil. Just as long as you know it’s the Devil you are doing business with.. Remember, Snail Mail is still the most secure method of communication.. I use it. You should too..
Yes.
It’s “Baked into the Cake”; from the recipes[software], to the ingredients[hardware], to the finished product[infrastructure].
Not ass backwards, as “they” knew the backdoors were to be layered; from the tip of the iceberg, to the depths of the deep blue sea. Because they “designed that way On Purpose. After all, this is warfare – for the 5th domain: cyberspace. Either it needs to be pulled out by its roots; or a new system built from the ground up, symmetric to private ownership.
ASYMMETRIC[typo!]
As far as Dr Farrell’s speculation for another day, I’m thinking it has something to do with having a more secure and redundant system for something like AI or some sort of transduced consciousness from the non local information field.
The USA[those in charge] has trashed it rep beyond measure.
Yet that spurns countermeasures that would imply a more resilient internet. Not only hardware but software and infrastructure need to become more “Open Sourced”; but all assembled in a manner/attitude that is more decentralized. One aspect of the above could be a “bitcoin protocol” platform. There are many other solutions that could work towards this end to counter the corrupted leadership’s control in communications around the world; including a most despicable worldwide “Western Style Private Press/Media Conglomerate”.
Information Wants To Be Free of Corruption.
A Free People Depend Upon The Free Flow of Information & ideas.
The World Is In The Mist Of War; Part of which is called:
Information Warfare
http://rt.com/shows/keiser-report/244625-episode-737-max-keiser/
I’m really curious as to what your speculation will be, but I just keep wondering if this is an effort to, if not destroy, then completely control their financial establishments, as it seems that their alternate systems of clearing could be penetrated and manipulated in a way that is impossible if they are part of the present system. I sometimes wonder if they aren’t playing right into the hands of the people they are trying to escape.