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.
(Score: 2) by kadal on Wednesday June 24 2015, @06:46PM
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.
(Score: 2) by kadal on Wednesday June 24 2015, @06:47PM
Ugh, i mean Congress will have NSA install the "secure" version on their laptops and let the rest of us get fucked as usual.