On 22 July 2013 17:31, James S. K. Makumbi <[email protected]> wrote:

> When they tried the same stunt on MTN (you did not hear this from me) it
> took MTN down during a very tricky period. Unless the entire “ubos computer
> outsourcing center” were used as zombie computers, we don’t have the
> horsepower or space to do this.
>

actually we do... and as is said by Monitor, could be happening. It depends
largely on the type of filtering technology you want to use. All I need is
to ask an ISP to enable netflow (or its equivalent) on its routers and you
have more than you need... Not to mention that mirroring all the traffic to
a specific port could collect all the data flowing through ones ISP...
there are simple technologies out there that one can use that do not need
the processing capabilities of NSA and CIA super computers. Of course you
will need to get into the ISP's data centers and have access to their
networking equipment... or even easier if they are using proxy's in their
network.

Hey, with a few GPU's you can even reduce the super computers to a desktop
with more than enough ePCI interfaces to take on some powerful nvidia GPU
cards... some parallel processing later and you have all your data chewed
up and stored just the way you want it... Space... really... All I need is
a storage system built on ZFS file system with lzma lossless compression
and I can shrink a 1GB file to as little as 80MB and still access it as
though it was a full 1GB file... not to mention throwing on de-duplication
madness on the storage system and that even shrinks my space usage by a
whole lot. Not to mention that you can now get a 3TB disk very cheap and
there are low end (about $8000) storage system out there that pack a
whopping 160TB disk space for entry level systems.

The other alternative is to use technology like stuxnet that exploits
zero-day attack vectors. It does not have to be that complicated. A kid in
US was arrested for writing an app embedded in a word document that turned
on your camera, microphone, bluetooth, wireless card, read files on your
harddisk and more without one's knowledge. Deployment was the simplest part
of it.

Then there is finfisher... this is so simple to install it can even be
embedded on a picture and have it sent to you... anyone received the Zain
Challenge pictures (co-workers who took pictures of.....) yeah a quick
embed of the payload and you will never know you are being monitored.

Mobile monitoring is even easier, if you leave your bluetooth on, its easy
to hack it and install malware that will turn on your microphone and get
someone to listen in on you... Ever left your phone somewhere to charge and
returned later to pick it up... or forgot it somewhere and a "good"
samaritan returned it?

There a millions of ways to monitor things these days. If you do not want
to be snooped on, throw out anything that gets onto the Internet and all
phones, yes even land lines.

One of the ways to make it had is encrypt your stuff... files, disks,
Internet traffic... well sorry, your mobile phone conversations would have
to suffer on this... unless you use satellite phones with encryption
enabled.



-- 
Mike

Of course, you might discount this possibility, but remember that one in a
million chances happen 99% of the time.
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