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CIA’s Gus Hunt On Big Data: We ‘Try To Collect Everything And Hang On To It Forever’
Speaking before a crowd of tech geeks at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York City, CTO Ira “Gus” Hunt said that the world is increasingly awash in information from text messages, tweets, and videos — and that the agency wants all of it.
Hackers working from China have reportedly had access to Nortel’s networks since breaching the telecommunication company’s networks as far back as 2000. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, hackers stole seven passwords from Nortel’s top executives, granting them access to reports, business plans, employee e-mails and other documents.
Brian Shields, a former Nortel employee, led the internal investigation into the breach and told the Journal that the hackers “had access to everything.” An internal report indicated that Nortel reset the passwords that had been taken but didn’t do anything else to keep the hackers out.
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In recent years, lawmakers and advocacy groups have made increased efforts to protects users’ privacy online. Here are some cases that helped stoke the debate about tracking and privacy on the Web.
Nortel, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the story.
The report said that Nortel discovered the hackers in 2004, after an employee noticed some unusual downloads being made in the name of an executive. Shields told the paper that he found that the hackers have been using China-based Internet addresses for the transmissions. He said that he noticed unusual transmissions every month or so, but that Nortel decided to ignore his recommendations to enhance network security.
via Report: Chinese hackers breach Nortel networks – The Washington Post.
A group of hackers in China breached the computer defenses of America’s top business-lobbying group and gained access to everything stored on its systems, including information about its three million members, according to several people familiar with the matter.
WSJ Washington bureau chief Jerry Seib has details of a cyber attack against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by Chinese hackers in which more than 300 Internet addresses were breached. AP Photo.
The break-in at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is one of the boldest known infiltrations in what has become a regular confrontation between U.S. companies and Chinese hackers. The complex operation, which involved at least 300 Internet addresses, was discovered and quietly shut down in May 2010.
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It isn’t clear how much of the compromised data was viewed by the hackers. Chamber officials say internal investigators found evidence that hackers had focused on four Chamber employees who worked on Asia policy, and that six weeks of their email had been stolen.
It is possible the hackers had access to the network for more than a year before the breach was uncovered, according to two people familiar with the Chamber’s internal investigation.
If you have any decently modern Android phone, everything you do is being recorded by hidden software lurking inside. It even circumvents web encryption and grabs everything—including your passwords and Google queries.
Worse: it’s the handset manufacturers and the carriers who—in the name of “making your user experience better”—install this software without any way for you to opt-out. This video, recorded by 25-year-old Android developer Trevor Eckhart, shows how it works. This is bad. Really bad.
Fast forward to 9:00 for the damning sequence.
The spying software is developed by a company called Carrier IQ. In their site, the company says they are “the only embedded analytics company to support millions of devices simultaneously, we give Wireless Carriers and Handset Manufacturers unprecedented insight into their customers’ mobile experience.”
It seems like a good goal and, indeed, most manufacturers and carriers agree: according to Eckhart, the spyware is included in most Android phones out there. Carrier IQ software is also included in Blackberry and Nokia smartphones, so it probably works exactly the same in those smartphones as well. It doesn’t even matter if your telephone was purchased free of carrier contracts. As Eckhart shows in this video, it’s always there.
The problem is that it does a lot more than log anonymous generic data. It grabs everything.
Read More: http://gizmodo.com/5863849/your-android-phone-is-secretly-recording-everything-you-do
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