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posted by
janrinok
on Friday February 28 2014, @10:30PM
from the It's-not-illegal-if-governments-do-it dept.
from the It's-not-illegal-if-governments-do-it dept.
AnonTechie writes:
"A surprising number of governments are now deploying their own custom malware and the end result could be chaos for the rest of us, F-Secure's malware chief Mikko Hypponen told the TrustyCon ( https://www.trustycon.org/ ) conference in San Francisco on Thursday.
'Governments writing viruses: today we sort of take that for granted but 10 years ago that would have been science fiction,' he told the public conference. 'If someone had come to me ten years ago and told me that by 2014 it will be commonplace for democratic Western governments to write viruses and actively deploy them against other governments, even friendly governments, I would have thought it was a movie plot. But that's exactly where we are today.'
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OS/2 must die!
(Score: 1) by mrider on Friday February 28 2014, @11:24PM
True. But unless the kernel is vulnerable to a remote exploit, then almost certainly the delivery mechanism that would work for you wouldn't work for me.
Doctor: "Do you hear voices?"
Me: "Only when my bluetooth is charged."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by crutchy on Saturday March 01 2014, @01:18AM
probably, but i doubt most linux users would review kernel source changes before updating, so if torvalds opted to insert some kind of remote exploit into the kernel (thanks to some friendly "enhanced interrogation" techniques) most would have no idea. a lot would, particularly the core kernel devs, but no doubt they would be targeted too in that scenario.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 01 2014, @01:31AM
The malware is in the hardware microcode. No amount of OS safeguarding will prevent a government organization taking over the hypervisor you never knew was running on your Intel CPU.
(Score: 2) by SMI on Saturday March 01 2014, @03:22AM
I'm interested to know more, if you have any reference material. I checked the links in TFS, but didn't find anything. I'm about to buy a new laptop, and full virtualization support in the CPU is one of my requirements. Unfortunately, there isn't much available with an AMD chip these days, not even in the custom laptops I've looked at.