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posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 24 2015, @09:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the so-that's-why-the-antivirus-programs-run-so-slowly dept.

The National Security Agency and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, have worked to subvert anti-virus and other security software in order to track users and infiltrate networks, according to documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, according to a story at Glen Greenwald's Intercept. The document, a GCHQ warrant renewal request written in 2008 and provided under Section 5 of the U.K.'s 1994 Intelligence Services Act, must be renewed by a government minister every six months and seeks authorization for GCHQ activities that "involve modifying commercially available software to enable interception, decryption and other related tasks, or 'reverse engineering' software."

Of note is that while Kaspersky Labs is particularly singled out, Bitdefender, ESET, Avast, AVG, and F-Secure are also mentioned as specific targets, while the US/UK based McAfee, Symantec and Sophos are all notable by their absence raising questions over whether they have might colluded with the NSA and GCHQ, or whether the other vendors mentioned might have colluded with their own national security services. Should that be the case then the debate over the merits of whether or not compromising encryption tools is a good idea given the potential for the backdoor to be found and exploited by foreign governments and criminals perhaps ought to apply to more general security software as well.


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  • (Score: 2) by kadal on Wednesday June 24 2015, @06:46PM

    by kadal (4731) on Wednesday June 24 2015, @06:46PM (#200522)

    For me, the best possible result of the post mortem into the OPM breach would be that it were to be determined that the suspects (Chinese, Russians, whoever) managed to compromise the OPM systems through a backdoor deliberately placed in software at the behest of the NSA or GCHQ to make it easier to hack other governments. Perhaps a wake up call of that nature might finally make them realise the insanity of the path they are on and take a more responsible attitude before things move beyond PI data leaks and into the realms of hacking critical infrastructure placed onto the IoT - not that they'd ever admit to being wrong, of course.

    They will probably install non-backdoored versions on government systems. However, if a whole bunch of Congressmen were to have their laptops hacked, that might change things. Though, in that case, Congress would probably force the NSA to install backdoored version on their laptops and have everyone else stay as fucked as before.

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  • (Score: 2) by kadal on Wednesday June 24 2015, @06:47PM

    by kadal (4731) on Wednesday June 24 2015, @06:47PM (#200524)

    Ugh, i mean Congress will have NSA install the "secure" version on their laptops and let the rest of us get fucked as usual.