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  • Dirty NSA hacked into Webcam of millions of Yahoo users for Private images

    Once again, a new revelation showed the ugly side of the Government who are conducting Global Mass surveillance and previous documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden have defaced the US Intelligence Agency NSA, who were taking care of a number of projects like PRISM, XKeyscore, DROPOUTJEEP, and various others to carry out surveillance of millions of people.

    Now, it has been revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) helped its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), to allegedly capture and store nude images and others from webcam chats of millions of unsuspecting Yahoo users, The Guardian reported.

    Documents handed to the Guardian by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the GCHQ’s worked with the US intelligence agency NSA on a joint project dubbed as ‘Optic Nerve’. The project carried out a bulk surveillance program, under which they nabbed webcam images every five minutes from random Yahoo users’ video chats and stored them in a database.

    The project didn’t target individual users; rather it targeted Yahoo webcam chats between 2008 and 2010. Indeed, the method of collection appears somewhat recklessly, and in just six months of period alone, the still images of about 1.8 million users were captured and stored in the government servers in 2008.

    Instead of saving full videos, the program logged one image every five minutes from a user’s chat. The document says that between 3 and 11 percent of the images taken contain “undesirable nudity.

    One GCHQ document states, “It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.

    The collected webcam information was stored in the NSA’s XKeyscore search tool, and the NSA research was used to build the tool which identified Yahoo’s webcam traffic, reads the report.

    NSA Optic Nerve Webcam hacking

    GCHQ webcam spying program, Optic Nerve, was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ wiki page accessed that year.

    Why Images??? It is known from the revealed documents that the images were collected by the government agency, so that the group could experiment with facial recognition.

    Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for ‘mugshots’ or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face,” it reads. “The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright.

    NSA Optic Nerve Webcam hacking

    The GCHQ agency staffs were allowed to display “webcam images associated with similar Yahoo identifiers to your known target”, the document reads, also it states “Bulk surveillance of Yahoo users was begun” as “Yahoo webcam is known to be used by GCHQ targets.

    Not Surprising, because your knotty private webcam sex session you loved and enjoyed with your lover four years back was potentially pored over by the suits at GCHQ.

    Yahoo has reacted furiously and denied any prior knowledge of the webcam interception program, and said that it had no awareness of or involvement with the GCHQ collection, describing the activity as “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy.

    And a GCHQ spokesman said in a statement, “It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters. Furthermore, all of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence service commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee,” adding, “All our operational processes rigorously support this position.

    The NSA spokesperson declined to respond saying, “As we’ve said before, the National Security Agency does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence activity that the US government would be legally prohibited from undertaking it.

    This is how our privacy is getting ruined by the government intelligence officials that we all trust blindly.

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  • The Mask, A malware campaign that remained undetected for 7 years

    A Sophisticated cyber spying operation, ‘The Mask’, that has been under the mask for about 7 years targeting approximately 31 countries, has now been ‘unmasked’ by researchers at Kaspersky Labs.
    The Researchers believe that the program has been operational since 2007 and is seems to be sophisticated nation-state spying tool that targeted government agencies and diplomatic offices and embassies before it was disclosed last month.
    In the unveiling document published by Kaspersky, they found more than 380 unique victims, including Government institutions, diplomatic offices/embassies, private companies, research institutions, activists etc.
    The name “Mask” comes from the Spanish slang word “Careto” (“Ugly Face” or “Mask”) which the authors included in some of the malware modules.
    Developers of the ‘Mask’ aka ‘Careto’ used complex tool-set which includes highly developed malware, bootkit, rootkit etc. that has the ability to sniff encryption keys, VPN configuration, SSH keys and RDP file via intercept network traffic, keystrokes, Skype conversation, PGP keys, WI-Fi traffic, screen capturing, monitoring all file operations, that makes it unique and dangerous and more sophisticated than DUQU malware.
    The malware targets files having an extension:

    *.AKF, *.ASC, *.AXX, *.CFD, *.CFE, *.CRT, *.DOC, *.DOCX, *.EML, *.ENC, *.GMG, *.GPG, *.HSE, *.KEY, *.M15, *.M2F, *.M2O, *.M2R, *.MLS, *.OCFS, *.OCU, *.ODS, *.ODT, *.OVPN, *.P7C, *.P7M, *.P7Z, *.PAB, *.PDF, *.PGP, *.PKR, *.PPK, *.PSW, *.PXL, *.RDP, *.RTF, *.SDC, *.SDW, *.SKR, *.SSH, *.SXC, *.SXW, *.VSD, *.WAB, *.WPD, *.WPS, *.WRD, *.XLS, *.XLSX.

    Victims of this malware found in: Algeria, Argentina, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Egypt, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States and Venezuela.
    The malware remains untraceable for about 7 years and was able to infect Mac OS X version, Linux, Windows, iPad/iPhone and android running devices.
    According to the researchers, the Mask Malware was designed to infect the 32- and 64-bit Windows versions, Mac OS X and Linux versions, but researchers believe that possibly there may be more versions for Android and iPhones (Apple iOS) platforms.
    In its main binary a CAB file having shlink32 and shlink64 dll files are found during the research from which the malware extract one of them, depending upon the architecture of the victim’s machine and install it as objframe.dll.
    It includes the most sophisticated backdoor SGH, which is designed to perform a large surveillance function and except this it has DINNER module which gets executed via APC remote calls and reload ‘chef’ module responsible for network connectivity and ‘waiter’ modules responsible for all logical operations.
    Another backdoor called SBD (Shadowinteger’s Backdoor) which uses open source tools like netcat is included in the malware. To infect Linux versions, Mozilla Firefox plugin “af_l_addon.xpi” was used and was hosted on “linkconf[dot]net”
    Spear phishing, a favorite attack used by most cyber attackers like SEA, was used to distribute this malware. Users were lured to click some malicious websites that contain a number of exploits to compromise their systems.
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