Category Archives: NSA

New material leaked by Edward Snowden shows which Internet security protocols the NSA had beaten as of 2012 and which encryption tools were still stymying cyber spies.

Digital spies in the National Security Administration cracked Skype's encryption back in 2011 and can make quick work of the VPNs many businesses believe make their communications secure.

But more robust security protocols and encryption techniques may still be secure from prying NSA eyes, according to documents revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Der Spiegel has the rundown on the NSA's battle against what its training documents described as the "threat" of secure Internet communication. Snowden's documentation is several years old now, of course. Whether or not U.S. cyber spies have managed to crack some of the toughest nuts in the intervening years, like Tor network communications, isn't known.

First, the security layers that the NSA considered to be "trivial," "minor," or "moderate" challenges to get through as of 2012. These include such tasks as simply monitoring a document as it travels across the Internet, spying on Facebook chats, and decrypting mail.ru emails, according to the Snowden documents.

But there are others that NSA cryptologists have had a much tougher time defeating, Der Spiegel noted, as documented in their sorting of threats "into five levels corresponding to the degree of the difficulty of the attack and the outcome, ranging from 'trivial' to a 'catastrophic.'"

"Things first become troublesome at the fourth level," according to Der Spiegel, which culled its report from a specific NSA presentation on Internet security.

As of 2012, the agency was having "major problems in its attempts to decrypt messages sent through heavily encrypted email service providers like Zoho or in monitoring users of the Tor network," the newspaper reported. Other "major," or fourth-level challenges included open-source protocols like Truecrypt and OTR instant-messaging encryption.

"Experts agree it is far more difficult for intelligence agencies to manipulate open source software programs than many of the closed systems developed by companies like Apple and Microsoft. Since anyone can view free and open source software, it becomes difficult to insert secret back doors without it being noticed," Der Spiegel noted.

The toughest method of Internet communication for the NSA to crack? It's not any one dark Internet tool but rather a bunch of them layered on top of each other, according to the Snowden documents.

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NSA Docs Reveal Spy-Proof Encryption Tools

BERLIN In a crescendo of anger over American espionage, Germany expelled the CIAs top operative, launched an investigation of the vast U.S. surveillance programs exposed by Edward Snowden and extracted an apology from President Obama for the years that U.S. spies had reportedly spent monitoring German Chancellor Angela Merkels cellphone.

In an address to Parliament last year, Merkel warned that U.S.-German cooperation would be curtailed and declared that trust needs to be rebuilt.

But the cooperation never really stopped. The public backlash over Snowden often obscured a more complicated reality for Germany and other aggrieved U.S. allies. They may be dismayed by the omnivorous nature of the intelligence apparatus the United States has built since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but they are also deeply dependent on it.

Over the past year, Germany has secretly provided detailed information to U.S. spy services on hundreds of German citizens and legal residents suspected of having joined insurgent groups in Syria and Iraq, U.S. and German officials said.

Germany has done so reluctantly to enlist U.S. help in tracking departed fighters, determining whether they have joined al-Qaeda or the Islamic State and, perhaps most importantly, whether they might seek to bring those groups violent agendas back to Germany.

The stream of information includes names, cellphone numbers, e-mail addresses and other sensitive data that German security services ever mindful of the abuses by the Nazi and Stasi secret police have been reluctant even to collect, let alone turn over to a suspect ally.

A senior German intelligence official compared the U.S. relationship to a dysfunctional marriage in which trust has bottomed out but a breakup is not an option. Amid what Germans see as evidence of repeated betrayal, the question remaining is whether the husband is a notorious cheater or can be faithful again, said the official, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. Were just going to have to give it another try. There is no alternative. Divorce is out of the question.

More than 550 German citizens have gone to Syria, officials said, and at least nine have killed themselves in suicide attacks.

The exodus is part of a much broader flow of more than 15,000 foreign fighters who have entered Syria over the past four years from 80 countries. At least 3,000 of them are from Europe the largest contingent of Islamist jihadists with Western passports that counterterrorism agencies have ever faced.

As a result, nearly every country in Europe is turning over significant data on their own departed fighters to the United States. Some of these nations, including Germany, have capable security and intelligence agencies of their own. But even their combined resources probably cannot match the scope and reach of their U.S. counterparts.

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Backlash in Berlin over NSA spying recedes as threat from Islamic State rises

Oliver Stone making Movie About NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden
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Long war tactics ... or how we learned to stop worrying and love the NSA [31c3]
Long war tactics or how we learned to stop worrying and love the NSA Referring to the seminal talk Dymaxion gave at the closing of the NoisySquare at OHM in ...

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Long war tactics ... or how we learned to stop worrying and love the NSA [31c3] - Video

NSA Thunder Remix (Its a tad fast)
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With little fanfare, the National Security Agency dropped hundreds of pages worth of surveillance reports into the dead of night before Christmas Evesome of which detailed U.S. citizens that were "inadvertently" swept up in the government's data dragnet.

As Americans were preparing to open holiday gifts, the agency quietly published a trove of declassified data spanning more than a decade of intelligence gathering. Those documents, required by the President's Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), were heavily redacted to protect disclosures of sensitive information.

Read MoreMeet the NSA's hacker recruiter

Entire swaths of text were blanked out, making it nearly impossible to determine specific names, programs or occurrences of privacy violations. However, the documents detailed a number of instances where analysts "erroneously" gathered information on U.S. citizens, or were at least guilty of shoddy practices.

In a 2012 quarterly report, for example, an analyst "forwarded in an email to unauthorized recipients the results of a raw traffic database query that included terms associated with "an unidentified U.S. citizen. The email was recalled, the report said, without providing further information.

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NSA Xmas gift: 12 yrs of surveillance data

Three out of three? That could be the score for the U.S. National Security Agencys cryptographic most wanted list of 2012.

In January 2012, it saw Internet traffic anonymizing tool Tor (The Onion Router), Linux distribution Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) and disk encryption system TrueCrypt as the biggest threats to its ability to intercept Internet traffic and interpret other information it acquires.

Since then, flaws have been found in Tor, and the FBI has unmasked Tor users. A vulnerability was found in Tails allowing attackers to determine users IP addresses.

Whilea source-code audit gave TrueCrypt a relatively clean bill of health in April, TrueCrypts anonymous developersinexplicably abandoned the software a few weeks later, warning it was insecure.

That the NSA considered these tools dangerous is perhaps little surprise: In July it was revealed that the agencys XKeyScore traffic interception tool contains rules for tracking who visited the websites of the Tor and Tails projects.

But now German magazine Der Spiegel has published further documents from the cache leaked by Edward Snowden, including one outlining, on page 25, the tools the NSA most wanted to crack in order to intercept and decrypt its targets communications.

The tools were ranked by their impact, from trivial to catastrophic, and their use risk, from current highest priority targets down to experimentation by technical thought leaders.

In the slide deck, the NSA explained that, with rare exceptions, it only developed application-specific solutions based on those two criteria, impact and use risk. In a resource-constrained environment, it said, the need for responses to current threats would always trump speculative work on threats that might become more widespread. Der Spiegel had something to say about those constraints: Of the NSAs 2013 budget of over $10 billion, some $34.3 million was allocated to Cryptanalysis and Exploitation Services.

Top of the NSAs list of major or catastrophic threats, capable of causing a majority or near-total loss or lack of insight into the highest-priority targets communications or online presence, were Tor, Tails and TrueCrypt.

Of course, its unlikely that the published attacks on Tor and Tails were developed by the NSAbut with the Tor's unmasking attack costing researchers just $3,000, the NSA could certainly have done something similar with its budget over the last three years. Although some of the wilder conspiracy theories linking TrueCrypts demise to the NSA have evaporated, there is still no convincing explanation for why the developers abandoned a tool that had just come through a code audit with no major flaws found.

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Tor, TrueCrypt, Tails topped the NSA's 'most wanted' in 2012, per newly revealed Snowden leaks

The National Security Agency is supposed to collect data to protect American citizens from security threats. It turns out that isn't the only reason the agency is collecting data.

It has been found that NSA agents have abused their surveillance authority to spy on their love interests, previously referred to as LOVEINT or Love Intelligence, by the Wall Street Journal.

Recently released NSA documents show that their have been at least 12 cases of intentional misuse by intelligence authorities.

One of the reports shows that an NSA colleague was spying on his foreign girlfriend. Another case involved an NSA spy monitoring the calls of a number she found in her husbands cellphone, suspecting he was unfaithful.

Slate reported last year that six other LOVEINT cases were recorded by the NSA. One case revealed an analyst was searching her spouse's telephone records for two years before being told to stop. These are just the reported cases.

The list of NSA documents stem back to 2001. The heavily redacted documents show that this type of spying has been going on for more than a decade.

Source: New York Daily News, NSA, Wall Street Journal, Slate / Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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NSA Documents Show Agents Spying On Love Interests

NSA Head Cracking Down On Whistleblowers

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The NSA chose Christmas to detail 12 years of accidental spying
The NSA chose Christmas to detail 12 years of accidental spying.

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The NSA chose Christmas to detail 12 years of accidental spying - Video