http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/nsa-hacking-catalogue/
By Kim Zetter
Threat Level Wired.com
12.30.13
While most Americans spend their time shopping Amazon, Target and
Apple.com, the National Security Agency’s elite team of hackers spends its
time shopping a secret high-end catalog of custom tools designed to
subvert firewalls, servers, and routers made by U.S. firms, impersonate a
GSM base station to intercept mobile phone calls, or siphon data from a
wireless network.
Hackers in the Tailored Access Operations division get the “ungettable”
data the NSA can’t otherwise obtain from tapping undersea cables or
collecting bulk data from companies like Yahoo and Google. They do this by
by installing backdoors and other implants remotely or by physically
intercepting hardware being delivered to customers and planting backdoors
in firmware, der Spiegel reports, citing newly disclosed documents from
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
“For nearly every lock, ANT seems to have a key in its toolbox,” der
Spiegel writes. “And no matter what walls companies erect, the NSA’s
specialists seem already to have gotten past them.”
With names like PICASSO, IRATEMONKEY, COTTONMOUTH, and WATERWITCH, the
various tools allow NSA snoops to map networks and not only monitor data
but surreptitiously divert it or modify it.
[...]
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