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Bruce Schneier has written about The Further Democratization of QUANTUM, the NSA's program for packet injection:
...when I was working with the Guardian on the Snowden documents, the one top-secret program the NSA desperately did not want us to expose was QUANTUM. This is the NSA's program for what is called packet injection -- basically, a technology that allows the agency to hack into computers. Turns out, though, that the NSA was not alone in its use of this technology. The Chinese government uses packet injection to attack computers. The cyberweapons manufacturer Hacking Team sells packet injection technology to any government willing to pay for it. Criminals use it. And there are hacker tools that give the capability to individuals as well. All of these existed before I wrote about QUANTUM. By using its knowledge to attack others rather than to build up the Internet's defenses, the NSA has worked to ensure that anyone can use packet injection to hack into computers.
And now it's become a homework assignment:
Michalis Polychronakis at Stony Book has assigned building QUANTUM as a homework assignment. It's basically sniff, regexp match, swap sip/sport/dip/dport/syn/ack, set ack and push flags, and add the payload to create the malicious reply. Shouldn't take more than a few hours.
The assignment is due May 1st.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Whoever on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:15PM
Why does the President assign these old warhorses to run the NSA?
The NSA has put a lot of effort into offensive capabilities and failed repeatedly in its defensive role.
In traditional warfare, it is often true that the best form of defence is an attack. But attacks across the Internet don't work like that -- an attack is unlikely to disrupt your opponent's ability to attack you as it would in conventional warfare.
These old warhorses don't appear to understand that, at the NSA, they are fighting a different type of war. They are the wrong type of people to assign to lead the NSA. Of course, looking at the military's procurements, one might think that the Generals and Admirals are still preparing for yesterday's war in other areas -- buying a small number of ultra high-tech weapons to fight low-tech opponents. Or perhaps they did not even learn from yesterday's war: for example in WWII, the allies overwhelmed Germany with a larger number of cheaper (but individually less effective) weapon systems.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @11:42PM
Read about the history of the NSA for your answers. I recommend the book "The Puzzle Palace" for a very thorough history. The short version is every branch of the military demands a piece of the intelligence pie but all the good crypto guys aren't inclined to be military types. Thus a compromise was made where it is a split system with brass on top. That position was historically a cushy one to pad the pension for a few years before retirement. Things have changed somewhat due to 9/11 and the goldrush of intelligence funding but the original deal to have old greyhair leadslingers lead the show has stayed in place.