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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday May 05 2015, @05:07AM   Printer-friendly

Among all of the NSA hacking operations exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden over the last two years, one in particular has stood out for its sophistication and stealthiness. Known as Quantum Insert, the man-on-the-side hacking technique has been used to great effect since 2005 by the NSA and its partner spy agency, Britain’s GCHQ, to hack into high-value, hard-to-reach systems and implant malware.

Quantum Insert is useful for getting at machines that can’t be reached through phishing attacks. It works by hijacking a browser as it’s trying to access web pages and forcing it to visit a malicious web page, rather than the page the target intend to visit. The attackers can then surreptitiously download malware onto the target’s machine from the rogue web page.

Quantum Insert has been used to hack the machines of terrorist suspects in the Middle East, but it was also used in a controversial GCHQ/NSA operation against employees of the Belgian telecom Belgacom and against workers at OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The “highly successful” technique allowed the NSA to place 300 malicious implants on computers around the world in 2010, according to the spy agency’s own internal documents—all while remaining undetected.

But now security researchers with Fox-IT in the Netherlands, who helped investigate that hack against Belgacom, have found a way to detect Quantum Insert attacks using common intrusion detection tools such as Snort, Bro and Suricata.

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/researchers-uncover-method-detect-nsa-quantum-insert-hacks/

[Related]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/05/detecting_quant.html

 
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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by isostatic on Tuesday May 05 2015, @01:35PM

    by isostatic (365) on Tuesday May 05 2015, @01:35PM (#179088) Journal

    You don't know it now, but you will be reelecting The Obama. It makes no difference who you think you vote for. Every vote is a vote for Obama. Now go out and vote, stupid motherfuckers. Obama Forever!!

    For someone with that much control he's not done a very good job with it. Probably a good thing if he gets re-elected them, imagine what a competent super-villan could do?

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