SoylentNews

fliptop [soylentnews.org] writes:

Bruce Schneier has written about The Further Democratization of QUANTUM [schneier.com], the NSA's program for packet injection:

...when I was working with the Guardian on the Snowden documents, the one top-secret program [theguardian.com] the NSA desperately did not want us to [wired.com] expose [medium.com] was [spiegel.de] QUANTUM [spiegel.de]. This is the NSA's program for what is called packet injection­ -- basically, a technology that allows the agency to hack into computers. Turns out, though, that the NSA was not alone in its use of this technology. The Chinese government uses [icir.org] packet injection to attack computers. The cyberweapons manufacturer Hacking Team sells [firstlook.org] packet injection technology to any government willing to pay for it. Criminals use it. And there are hacker tools that give the capability to individuals as well. All of these existed before I wrote about QUANTUM. By using its knowledge to attack others rather than to build up the Internet's defenses, the NSA has worked to ensure that anyone can use packet injection to hack into computers.

And now it's become a homework assignment:

Michalis Polychronakis at Stony Book has assigned [stonybrook.edu] building QUANTUM as a homework assignment. It's basically sniff, regexp match, swap sip/sport/dip/dport/syn/ack, set ack and push flags, and add the payload to create the malicious reply. Shouldn't take more than a few hours.

The assignment is due May 1st.

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Original Submission