http://www.wired.com/2014/08/nsa-monstermind-cyberwarfare/
By Kim Zetter
Threat Level
Wired.com
08.13.14
Edward Snowden has made us painfully aware of the government’s sweeping
surveillance programs over the last year. But a new program, currently
being developed at the NSA, suggests that surveillance may fuel the
government’s cyber defense capabilities, too.
The NSA whistleblower says the agency is developing a cyber defense system
that would instantly and autonomously neutralize foreign cyberattacks
against the US, and could be used to launch retaliatory strikes as well.
The program, called MonsterMind, raises fresh concerns about privacy and
the government’s policies around offensive digital attacks.
Although details of the program are scant, Snowden tells WIRED in an
extensive interview with James Bamford that algorithms would scour massive
repositories of metadata and analyze it to differentiate normal network
traffic from anomalous or malicious traffic. Armed with this knowledge,
the NSA could instantly and autonomously identify, and block, a foreign
threat.
Cryptographer Matt Blaze, an associate professor of computer science at
the University of Pennsylvania, says if the NSA knows how a malicious
algorithm generates certain attacks, this activity may produce patterns of
metadata that can be spotted.
[...]
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