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posted by janrinok on Thursday March 12 2015, @11:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the as-if-more-were-needed dept.

Ars Technica reports that Kaspersky Labs have released further details tying the NSA to a group of expert hackers dubbed "Equation Group".

The Kaspersky researchers once again stopped short of saying the hacking collective they dubbed Equation Group was the handiwork of the NSA, saying only that the operation had to have been sponsored by a nation-state with nearly unlimited resources to dedicate to the project. Still, they heaped new findings on top of a mountain of existing evidence that already strongly implicated the spy agency. The strongest new tie to the NSA was the string "BACKSNARF_AB25" discovered only a few days ago embedded in a newly found sample of the Equation Group espionage platform dubbed "EquationDrug." "BACKSNARF," according to page 19 of this undated NSA presentation [PDF], was the name of a project tied to the NSA's Tailored Access Operations.

Similarities have been noted in the procedures and capabilities of Equation Group and those detailed in Edward Snowden's disclosures concerning the NSA, most notably the the ability to interdict hardware and software during shipping to be replaced with duplicates infected with highly sophisticated malware. The article also points to timestamp analysis that indicates the authors of the captured malware worked regular office hours: 8-5, Monday-Friday in the UTC-3 and UTC-4 time-zones. The Kaspersky report discounted intentional manipulation of these timestamps and suggests that Equation Group are located in the eastern United States.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by bob_super on Thursday March 12 2015, @11:44PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday March 12 2015, @11:44PM (#157016)

    At this point, compiling your own FPGA is about the only way you can be sure that there are no backdoors in your hardware.
    I just need a license for the same Linux version for Zynq used by the military contractors...

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2015, @11:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2015, @11:48PM (#157019)

    How can one know that the atoms of their FPGA have not been backdoored?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2015, @09:09AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 13 2015, @09:09AM (#157198)

      If they can backdoor atoms, then we live in the Matrix, and thus not even refraining from using any computer at all will help you in that case.

  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Friday March 13 2015, @12:41AM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 13 2015, @12:41AM (#157052)

    Or buying an ancient processor and building a computer from discrete parts (or as many as possible!).

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    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday March 13 2015, @12:56AM

      by bob_super (1357) on Friday March 13 2015, @12:56AM (#157062)

      Sure, but I got past my ASCII porn phase, and I would also prefer to keep my GigE ports for backups...