An elite team of US government hackers left Syria without internet, when they tried to hack one of the cores routers but instead crashed it, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said.
The three-day nationwide internet blackout in war-torn Syria in November 2012, which was blamed on either the government or the rebels, depending on who you listened to, was actually the doing of the Tailored Access Operations (TAO), a group of hackers in the employment of the US National Security Agency. And more more interesting.
Read moreAccording to Security Affairs, vulnerabilities that reveal information about the user and execute code remotely were discovered in the operating system, called Tails.
The American information security company, called Exodus Intelligence has found some critical zero day vulnerabilities that allow attackers to disclose personal information. Note that the operating system Tails, which was based on Linux and provided anonymity through Tor, was recommended by Edward Snowden. Loc Nguyen, the information security expert from Exodus Intelligence said that the found problems allow both hackers and security services to gain access to personal user‘s data, in addition they help execute code remotely with the help of it attackers can have complete control over victim.
Read moreIt’s been a persistent question ever since Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Agency’s expansive spying operations just over a year ago: Have the disclosures damaged U.S. interests?
A new report by the nonpartisan New America Foundation surveyed the revelations’ impact on U.S. businesses. The authors found that the resulting erosion of trust is having serious consequences for U.S. technology firms and for U.S. credibility around the world. Summarizing the research to date, the report notes a widely cited 2013 paper by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a business-friendly think tank, which found that the revelations could cost the U.S. cloud computing industry between $22 and $180 billion by 2016.
Read moreEdward Snowden wants to develop new methods of improving information security. The former employee of the NSA wants to create programs which will be able to stop surveillance. So, he asked for help information security experts.
On July 19, in New York the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) took place where Snowden asked for help a via video link and requested to create anti-surveillance technology. He also declared that he plans to spend a lot of time to develop programs against government surveillance. According to the former employee of National Security Agency of the USA, he is going to spend enough time to advance new technologies, especially those which give people the chance to talk anonymously and to encrypt messages.
Read moreNSA whistleblower Edward Snowden dropped his two cents on file storage security in an interview with The Guardian on Thursday.
He thinks Dropbox, the cloud storage firm with over 200 million users, is “hostile to privacy,” and urged people to switch to what he calls more-secure storage services like SpiderOak. “Dropbox is a targeted wannabe PRISM partner,” Snowden told The Guardian. “They just put Condoleezza Rice on their board, who is probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine … So they’re very hostile to privacy.” Snowden said that a company like SpiderOak is better because it offers “zero knowledge,” a term used to describe services that have zero access to the data they are storing on their servers.
Read moreAll the remaining Snowden documents will be released this month, according to whistle-blowing site Cryptome, which said in a tweet that the release of the info by unnamed third parties would be necessary to head off an unnamed "war".
Cryptome said it would "aid and abet" the release of "57K to 1.7M" new documents that had been "withheld for national security-public debate [sic]". The site clarified that will not be publishing the documents itself. Transparency activists would welcome such a release but such a move would be heavily criticised by intel experts and military officials, who argue the dump of intelligence documents have set intelligence efforts back years.
Read moreThe latest Edward Snowden leaks reveal that the NSA intercepts millions of images from the internet per day for use in its facial recognition program.
According to James Risen and Laura Poitras, it's unclear how many people around the world — or how many Americans — are subject to the image surveillance, but tens of thousands of "facial-recognition quality images" are collected each day. The agency intercepts "millions of images per day" — including about 55,000 "facial recognition quality images" — which translate into "tremendous untapped potential," according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.
Read moreCisco’s chief executive has written to President Barack Obama warning of a collapse of trust in US technology after evidence emerged showing the National Security Agency breaking into his company’s equipment.
In a letter John Chambers called for “standards of conduct” to rein in government surveillance so that national security objectives do not interfere with the US’s leading position in the global technology market. The letter was dated the day after pictures circulated on the internet showing NSA staff opening boxes of Cisco gear so that the US security agency can monitor internet traffic after the equipment has been shipped to customers. Mr Chambers complained that the NSA actions would undermine confidence among customers of US technology firms.
Read moreThe British government claims that the purpose of surveillance is to display the online trends in cities around the world.
According to Edward Snowden British authorities spy on what people are doing on some of the world’s most popular social media sites, such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc. Nevertheless, he denies spying on specific users. The latest information from the National Security Agency was obtained by NBC News with journalist Glenn Greenwald, who was the first to report on Snowden’s documents about NSA and United Kingdom espionage while on the staff of the Guardian. NBC doesn’t mention when the information was received.
Read moreIs telephone metadata sensitive? The debate has taken on new urgency since last summer’s NSA revelations; all three branches of the federal government are now considering curbs on access.
Consumer privacy concerns are also salient, as the FCC assesses telecom data sharing practices.
President Obama has emphasized that the NSA is “not looking at content.” “[T]his is just metadata,” Senator Feinstein told reporters. In dismissing the ACLU’s legal challenge, Judge Pauley shrugged off possible sensitive inferences as a “parade of horribles.” On the other side, a number of computer scientists have expressed concern over the privacy risks posed by metadata.
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