Why the ‘Equation Group’ Spying Program Should Make Us Proud

Learning about NSA spying programs is generally terrifying. Still to this day, Glenn Greenwald is trickling out leaked information from the Snowden revelations, and just today,Al Jazeera announced that they havemajor NSA news on the way.

But every once in a while, the U.S. government reminds us that it can totally nail it in terms of running a spy program.

Earlier this week, the world learned of the godfather of cyber-espionage programs. The Equation Group, as its discoverer Kaspersky Labs calls it, is sort of an Illuminati Death Star puppeteer of spy programs two decades old and almost certainly run by the NSA.

So why shouldnt we be reviled that the U.S. government could possibly run such a pervasive and persistent surveillance program?Well, given that the U.S. will almost always run some sort of spy program, there are three main reasons why this isexactly the kind of program the NSA should be running, instead of the broad domestic surveillance theyve developed in recent years:

1. Its targeted surveillance

The thing most people hate about the NSA isnt just that it operates in secret, or that they have so much influence over our foreign affairs, but that they manage to sweep up millions of innocent Americans in their surveillance programs.

But the malware created by the Equation Group targets individual computers and networks, and is often hand delivered to targets the group has already deemed interesting targets. From what Kaspersky labs could determine,only a few individuals were targeted by the Equation Groups attacks.

The Equation group uses several malware platforms to conduct highly targeted cyber-espionage attacks, Costin Raiu, Director of the Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky Lab, told the Observer. I would even say that the attackers work with a surgical precision.

As American cryptographer Bruce Schneierwrote in his popular cybersecurity blog last week, weve come to regard the NSAas over-reaching because in order to run a broad operation, it requires us all to give up a little bit of our security. The Equation Group was focused on severely penetrating and undermining a few powerful targets, not chipping away at as many parties as possible.

[I]ts the sort of thing we want the NSA to do, Mr.Schneierwrote. Its targeted. Its exploiting existing vulnerabilities. In the overall scheme of things, this is much less disruptive to Internet security than deliberately inserting vulnerabilities that leave everyone insecure.

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Why the ‘Equation Group’ Spying Program Should Make Us Proud