China’s Massive Hack of U.S. Employees an Inside Job

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This new HBO documentary will make you want to delete your search history

businessinsider

Ian Phillips

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Ex-NSA director: China has hacked 'every major corporation' in U.S.

money.cnn.com

Mike McConnell, the ex-NSA director, says Chinese hackers "have penetrated every major corporation of any consequence in the United States and taken information." 

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Here Are the World's Five Cybercrime Hotspots

TIME

Google codifies its right to crawl through your emails..fuck you Google!

Follow The Money

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/google-codifies-its-right-to-crawl-through-your-emails-20140417-zqvok.html?google_editors_picks=true

It’s no secret that Google keeps an eye on what users of its services are into. But on Monday, the company updated Gmail’s terms of service to spell out its relationship with users in no uncertain terms:
“Our automated systems analyse your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customised search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.”

A Google spokesman told The New York Times that the changes “will give people even greater clarity and are based on feedback we’ve received over the last few months.”

By feedback, Google might mean a federal judge’s swift denial of the company’s attempt to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Gmail users and non-users who’ve sent emails to Gmail accounts. The lawsuit claimed Google violated federal and state wiretapping laws by scanning emails without consent.

In its motion to dismiss, Google argued that Gmail and non-Gmail users had given express or implied consent to have their e-mails scanned. Northern California US District Judge Lucy Koh rejected Google’s claims, noting that Google’s terms of service didn’t explicitly say they scanned emails.

Snowden: 'Yes Absolutely' Would Leak Again

AssociatedPress

How to Make a Strong Password (and Actually Remember It)

TIME

Castro envía de urgencia "Las Avispas Negras" para sofocar rebelión estudiantil en Caracas

Oscar Suarez

Quantum espionage

KurzweilAI

Will a future NSA quantum computer really be capable of cracking nearly every kind of encryption, as reported in The Washington Post (based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden)?

Not likely, say some experts. “Even if a quantum code cracker can be built, it might be defeated by encryption algorithms already in the works — or by another technology, called quantum key distribution, that relies on quantum mechanics itself for security, says Science Magazine staff writer Adrian Cho.

The latest leaked Snowden documents, however, also reveal that the NSA is attempting to exploit practical loops in QKD under a program known as “Owning the Net,” according to an article by Jon Cartwright in Physics World Feb. 2014 (the article will be freely available on Feb. 6).

“It seems improbable that the NSA could be that far ahead of the open world without anybody knowing it,” says Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist at MIT, according to the same Washington Post article.

And new public key algorithms, like “lattice methods” (under development at Georgia Tech), might also fend off a quantum computer, Cho notes.

Smart refrigerators and TVs hacked to send out spam, according to a new report

NBC News.com

A LG representative shows a smartphone with Home Chat in front of a LG smart refrigerator on the final day of the 2014 International CES, January 10, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The LG Smart Home system with the Home Chat smart platform allows users to communicate with home appliances via text message. AFP PHOTO / ROBYN BECKROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

Julianne Pepitone

Et tu, refrigerator?

A new report shows cyberattacks aren’t relegated to laptops anymore: Now, even a fridge or a TV can send malicious emails.

Security firm Proofpoint has uncovered a cyberattack that involved the hacking of “smart” home appliances connected to the Internet. Hackers broke into more than 100,000 gadgets -- including TVs, multimedia centers, routers, and at least one fridge – and used the appliances to send out more than 750,000 malicious emails between December 23 and January 6.

The attack also included compromised laptops and tablets, but Proofpoint said about 25% of the emails were sent from appliances beyond the traditional Internet-connected gadgets.

According to Proofpoint, the cyberattack could be the first proven breach of the so-called “Internet of Things”: an exciting tech trend that promises a Jetsons-like future, with all of our home appliances and other gadgets connected to one another.

But as smart home devices – like Nest, the thermostat and smoke detector company Google bought for $3.2 billion this week – continue to grow more popular, Proofpoint’s report is a sobering reminder that anything connected to the Internet can potentially be hacked.

“The ‘Internet of Things’ holds great promise for enabling control of all of the gadgets that we use on a daily basis,” said Michael Osterman, principal analyst at messaging-focused research firm Osterman Research, wrote in Proofpoint’s report. “It also holds great promise for cybercriminals … to launch large and distributed attacks.”

To launch those types of large-scale attacks, hackers link up compromised devices to create what’s called a botnet: an army of “zombie” devices that attack other computers through tasks like overloading a website with traffic or, in this case, sending hundreds of thousands of spam emails.

These attacks can be more difficult to track as the world of Internet-connected devices expands far past laptops and tablets. In the attack Proofpoint detailed, no more than 10 emails were sent from any single IP address, making it tough to block based on location.

Perhaps worse: In “many cases,” the smart devices weren’t difficult to hack, according to Proofpoint. Instead, the appliances either were not set up correctly, or they used default passwords that were easy to find on public networks.

Proofpoint does have a vested interest in this issue, as a security firm that sells solutions to protect gadgets from such attacks.

But by 2020, research firm Gartner expects more than 30 billion Internet-connected devices will be in use worldwide – up exponentially from 2.5 billion in 2009.

As the Internet-connected world expands to thermostats, refrigerators and even window shades, so too grows the threat of potential cyberattacks -- even in the frozen foods aisle.

Snowden leaks: NSA gathers 200 million text messages daily

Mary Greeley

NSA Quantum Program Tapped Computers Not Connected To Internet

TIME

Today Google Starts Using Your Name and Face in GoogleAds

breitbart

By Elizabeth Sheld

Google has officially updated their terms of service to allow the company to use your name and image on their ads that populate the internet. 

YOU CAN OPT OUT OF THIS HERE. 

The new terms of service read:

If you have a Google Account, we may display your Profile name, Profile photo, and actions you take on Google or on third-party applications connected to your Google Account (such as +1’s, reviews you write and comments you post) in our Services, including displaying in ads and other commercial contexts. We will respect the choices you make to limit sharing or visibility settings in your Google Account. For example, you can choose your settings so your name and photo do not appear in an ad.

The Wall Street Journal provides this nifty chart to see what your social networks are using you to promote. 

The new "shared endorsements" are ruffling some privacy feathers. "We think it's a problem," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It's a commercial endorsement without consent and that is not permissible in most states in the U.S."

Facebook tried something similar and was forced to pay a $20M settlement, when they were sued in a class action suit. Facebook had used "endorsements" in the ads run on the social network, but they did not provide a way for users to opt out. 

The NSA Is Building a Computer to Crack Almost Any Code

TIME

In theory, the computer would be able to make calculations faster than any traditional computer. While this could compromise everything from home banking to state secrets, the nearly $80 million project hasn't succeeded yet.

NSA Uses Google Tracking Cookies to Spy on Potential Targets

breitbart

irwebreport.com

A new information leak from Edward Snowden reveals that the NSA is using Google's tracking cookies to identify targets for government hacking. The Washington Post reports that Snowden's documents "show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations."

These tracking cookies allow a website to identify a user's browser, but do not contain any personal information.  "This cookie allows NSA to single out an individual's communications among the sea of Internet data in order to send out software that can hack that person's computer."

The slides released by Snowden do not say how the government accesses Google's tracking cookies, "but other documents reviewed by the Post indicate that cookie information is among the data NSA can obtain with a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order."

FBI can hijack webcams without users' knowledge

What you don’t know about Snowden’s former employer

seeker401

www.perkinswill.com

http://www.dailypaul.com/290258/booz-allen-hamilton-what-you-dont-know-about-snowdens-fomer-employer
Let’s take another trip down the rabbit hole, shall we?
Lost in the Edward Snowden debate is a critical look at his former employer, the company doing the spying on Americans in the first place: Booz Allen Hamilton.
Booz Allen Hamilton is a government contractor, with 99% of its revenue coming from the US government. Not only does it receive money from the NSA, but also the US Army, US Navy, US Air Force, US Marine Corps, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and … the IRS. In addition, Booz Allen is heavily connected to the CIA.
Among the individuals involved in running the company, we have:
James Clapper – current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), head of NSA, the man who lied to Congress about the fact that NSA is actively spying on Americans, is a former executive
Mike McConnell – a current executive of the company, had Clapper’s job (DNI) during George W. Bush’s administration (keep it in the family, eh?) — he worked for Booz Allen before Bush, then worked for Bush, then back to Booz Allen after Bush
James Woolsey – former CIA Director, current executive (see Jan Helfeld’s interview of Mr. Woolsey where it becomes clear that Woolsey has no interest in discussing principles, only war)
Melissa Hathaway – former executive, also worked for McConnell during the Bush administration
Ian Brzezinski – former executive, son of Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller, central figure in the NWO crowd, and mastermind of Operation Cyclone
Dov Zakheim – this character is … unbelievable:
1993 – His company, System Planning Corporation, had a subsidiary called Tridata Corporation, which was the company that “oversaw” the investigation of the 1993 WTC bombing
2000 – Part of the neocon Project for a New American Century, he is co-author of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” in which he is credited with the infamous line, “… some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
2001 – He is appointed Comptroller of the Pentagon, in which $2.3 trillion promptly goes “missing”
2001 – Attack on 9/11 occurs; some people are suspicious of his connections, since his company, SPC, in involved in flight systems capable of remote controlling aircraft, and because he was the guy who leased 32 Boeing 767 aircraft to McDill Air Force Base (2 of the 9/11 aircraft were 767′s), and McDill is close to Elgin AFB, which was the location that was to be used if Operation Northwoods had gone live
2004 – Goes to work for Booz Allen Hamilton.
2012 – Advisor on Middle East policy for Mitt Romney campaign (gee … ya think Romney would have gone to war in the Middle East???)
Booz Allen Hamilton is owned by the Carlyle Group.
One of the big investors in the Carlyle Group was the Bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia. Yeah … THAT Bin Laden family. And instrumental in being the “go between” for Carlyle/Bin Laden was a guy by the name of George H. W. Bush. Maybe you’ve heard of him?
The CEO of the Carlyle Group (remember, they OWN Booz Allen Hamilton) is Frank Carlucci. Mr. Carlucci has quite a resume:
Nixon Administration – Director of the Office for Economic Opportunity (the “War on Poverty” — and a great place to decide who gets government contracts)
Carter Administration – Deputy Director of the CIA
Reagan Administration – National Security Advisor and Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld is Carlucci’s protoge)
He is or has been with the Project for a New American Century and a member of the Board of Trustees for the RAND Corporation, a CIA front that develops policies that the Military Industrial Complex then carries out.
You want a NWO guy? Carlucci is your man. And CEO of Carlyle Group, owner of Booz Allen Hamilton, spying on YOU.
At RAND, his specialty was Middle East policy. What do you know? That was also the specialty of Graham Fuller, CIA guy who was the father-in-law of Ruslan Tsarni, uncle of Tamarlan Tsarnev, suspected Boston bomber.
Speaking of the Boston bombing and Tamarlan Tsarnev, he had a couple of trips to Russia that made the news. But what did not make the news (in America, but it did in Russia) is that he went there for “training” that was funded by the Jamestown Foundation. And what do you know? The Jamestown Foundation (CIA front) has among its past board members none other than Dick Cheney and Marcia Carlucci, wife of Frank Carlucci.
See my post here about the CIA connections to the Boston bombing:
http://www.dailypaul.com/290098/boston-bombing-was-a-cia-fal…
Given all their connections and government contracts, here’s an interesting question: Booz Allen Hamilton has not only been involved in spying via the NSA, but they have also received no-bid contracts from the IRS. What do they know about the American people via the IRS?
Now, one of the things you will start to see if you look around at some of the big corporations these days is that many of them are involved in what they call “corporate citizenship” or something similar. What this means at the surface level is they are being “good citizens” by donating to charity. But when you go beyond the surface, you will see something else going on.
Booz Allen Hamilton donates money to the Clinton Global Initiative. The CGI is a part of the Clinton Foundation (yeah, THAT Clinton).
The Clinton Foundation has been implicated in bribery on an international level. Clinton gave himself a special little privilege while president wherein he exempted the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation from the normal rules of disclosure regarding publicly listing who its contributors were. It’s a secret foundation. And it has over $200 million in assets now. And is alleged to be used as a way to funnel black money from corrupt governments around the world for behind-the-scenes deals like special oil contracts, arms dealing, US government foreign aid deals, whatever.
So folks, what you are not being told in the media about Edward Snowden’s former company is that it is not only spying on you, but it is probably checking out your tax returns, too, and also receiving some of your tax money in government contracts, which it then funnels to CIA-connected/Military Industrial Complex-connected/NWO-connected individuals and organizations.
Something like this: Your tax money (taken from you by force) -> IRS -> Booz Allen Hamilton -> Clinton Foundation -> foreign bribes -> more contracts for the Military Industrial Complex -> more spending by foreign governments -> more foreign aid from the US government -> more US government spending -> more taxes needed -> more taxes from YOU.
Oh … and they are spying on you, too.
But Edward Snowden … yeah HE is the bad guy here. Uh huh … move along … nothing to see here.
———–
thanks to eggins10 for the link..
here is the background to snowdens employer and the inter-connected world of money, military and politics..check this guy out on wikipedia..Dov Zakheim..unreal connections..and jewish..what a surprise..
and no surprise the clinton foundation is caught up in this..i have posted on them many times..they are fronts for laundering and payoffs..like the bill gates foundation..

Como Edward Snowden logro burlar la vigilancia electronica en Hong Kong

elmundo.es

gigabiting.com

El ex agente de Inteligencia Edward Snowden huyó de Hong Kong gracias a la estratagema de guardar los dispositivos móviles en un frigorífico para evitar escuchas mientras trazaba el plan de huida. Las paredes del electrodoméstico consiguieron aislar los aparatos eléctricos de forma que no pudieran ser utlizado como sistemas de escuchas.

Edward J. Snowden -el buscado ex agente de seguridad nacional conocido por filtrar documentos privados sobre las operaciones de vigilancia de Estados Unidos- mantuvo una cena secreta para planear su huida a Moscú el pasado domingo en la casa de Hong Kong en la que se encontraba antes de partir.

Interrumpir la comunicación

Según afirma 'The New York Times', Snowden insistió a los comensales para que dejasen sus teléfonos móviles en el frigorífico mientras durase la velada para evitar posibles escuchas. El motivo de esta extraña petición es que el ex agente sabía que los materiales de los que estaban hechas las paredes del frigorífico lo convertían en una caja de seguridad antiescuchas para los dispositivos. O lo que es lo mismo, en una jaula de Faraday, "su robusta cobertura metálica convierten al frigorífico en además de un aislante térmico, en un aislante de ondas", han explicado fuentes técnicas a ELMUNDO.es.

Los móviles envían ondas de radio a la antena más cercana. Las antenas se agrupan formando celdas de forma que dan cobertura a los dispositivos. "Si estás al aire libre y le quitas la batería al móvil, éste manda una última señal a la celda dando así su localización", explican estas fuentes. "En cambio, si lo haces dentro de una caja de Faraday -que actúa como un inhibidor de frecuencias electromagnéticas- este mensaje no llega a comunicarse". Y si los datos no pueden salir, tampoco pueden entrar, por lo que resulta imposible conectarse al dispositivo de manera remota.

Snowden quiso arriesgarse a quitar la batería de los móviles simplemente, pues de esta manera "no se garantiza el bloqueo total de las escuchas", según explicó el diseñador especializado en productos de vigilancia Adam Harvey para 'The New York Times'. "Muchos dispositivos modernos (no solo móviles) cuentan con estados intermedios entre encendido y apagado, en los que algunos circuitos están encendidos y otros apagados", explica en el diario norteamericano, el experto Seth Schoen.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: How To Make Sure The NSA Can't Read Your Email

businessinsider
Dylan Love

Article 12 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home, or correspondence."

It's that last one that's gotten everyone's attention lately. Just how private is your correspondence online?

Depending on your politics, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is either a vile turncoat or a revered hero, but either way he has advice on how to stay two steps ahead of the NSA.

He held an awesome "press conference" of sorts on The Guardian's website, taking written questions from readers and typing out his answers online.

We were most intrigued by his response to a question about encryption. If someone wants to stay off the NSA's radar, could he or she encrypt emails and send them without arousing any suspicion?

Snowden's response: "Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it."

A brief caveat before we dive in deeper with encryption. This whole "NSA domestic spying" news item is weird and scary, sure, but it has much more to do with the "connectivity matrix," or the relationship that exists between personal and commercial computers all around the world and the fact that the NSA can exploit it. Yes, your privacy matters, but the real issue raised here is that the NSA can basically use a "cheat code" to become all-powerful in the internet "video game."

That said, it's useful to know how to effectively encrypt your email. Let's talk about PGP encryption, one of the most popular ways of doing so.

PGP stands for "Pretty Good Privacy." It uses two "keys," one publicly viewable to the world, the other kept solely to yourself. You can generate PGP keys to your heart's content using the free tool at iGolder and a number of other services around the web.

Here's a sample public key:

Screenshot

This looks like a random string of numbers and letters to you, but to a computer, it's a set of instructions on how to properly encode a message. But this is only half of the recipe, because for every public key freely available to the world, there's a private key that the recipient keeps locked away.

Here's the private key that's tied to the public key above:

Screenshot

It's pretty much the same story here – random nonsense characters. But your computer looks at this and sees the instructions on how to properly decode any messages that were encoded using the public key above.

If we want to send the message "Hello world." to a recipient using our example public key, we use an encryption tool (also freely available at iGolder and elsewhere around the web). Copy and paste the recipient's public key into the appropriate box, then type out your message as you normally would.

Screenshot

The last step is easy. Just click on "Encrypt Message" and it spits out your very unreadable secret email:

Screenshot

Then copy and paste this into a new email and press send:

Screenshot

You've officially unleashed an encrypted message into the world. Since it looks like a bunch of nonsense, it contains no keywords that could trigger any alarms at the NSA. And if the message should somehow be intercepted, no one would have the first idea what to do with it.

Think of PGP encryption like a Star Trek transporter. Instead of disassembling a human being's atoms and reassembling them elsewhere, we're breaking down written language, emailing the "junk," and then having the recipient turn the junk into a readable email using his private key.

Nico Sell is the founder of Wickr, a mobile security app that boasts a slew of features like "self-destructing" messages that disappear after a preset amount of time. Its greatest strength (other than its "military-grade encryption") is how user-friendly it is. By bringing this PGP-style encryption method to your phone as a non-threatening and intuitive app, Wickr might just be the ticket to a world where even your technophobic uncle is sending you encoded emails.

Sell told Business Insider that both her three-year-old son and 70-year-old mother use Wickr all the time.

How well does PGP work? Well enough that it's been actively used since it was introduced in 1991, making for 22 years of active privacy-protecting service. And in internet time, this makes PGP a grizzled but fearsome veteran. Just take it from Sell, who told us: "When it comes to email, PGP's about as good as it gets."

Let's revisit the last half of Snowden's comment. He said: "endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it."

While "endpoint security" encompasses a lot of different ideas – everything from using strong unguessable passwords to setting up a firewall – we presume that Snowden is referring to the potential for someone to gain hardware-level access to your computer.

You've seen this happen before in cheesy thriller movies. A hacker sits down at a computer, whacks a few keys, and someone else's desktop appears on the minitor. The hacker reclines in his chair and watches everything this faraway other person does on his computer, every word typed, every website visited.

While we strongly doubt it's that casual, it's far from impossible and the NSA would be just the organization to gain hardware-level access to someone's computer. An uninvited guest watching you go about your business online would obviously be troublesome for anyone, but people who make heavy use of PGP encryption have their own set of worries here – what good is an encrypted message when someone watches you type it out in plaintext ahead of time?

We assume that authorities would only monitor someone's computer on the hardware level if that person made his way onto a watch list by engaging in suspicious behavior. So for the Regular Joes out there, PGP is a really solid bet on making sure that your sensitive message arrives safely to the intended recipient.

Anyone who'd like to give this a shot is welcome to email me using my own public key here.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/edward-snowden-email-encryption-works-against-the-nsa-2013-6#ixzz2WVdQB6NB

Father of Edward Snowden urges son not to commit 'treason,' to return home

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