New research from Russian researchers at the Kaspersky Labrevealsthat the someone — most likely the NSA — has developed spy software that can be hidden deep with hard drive . Known to work with ironware made by Western Digital , Seagate , Toshiba and more , it ’s said to render the agency with the means to listen in “ on the majority of the world ’s computers . ”
Kapersky Lab has in fact found a series of unlike backdoors , reports Reuters . It ’s set up such computer software on figurer in over 30 countries around the world , including Iran , Russia , Pakistan , Afghanistan , China , Mali , Syria , Yemen and Algeria . The targets of the back door frequently included government and military institutions , telecom companies , banks , energy company , nuclear researchers , medium , and Islamic militant .
While Kapersky Lab did n’t actually name the NSA as being behind the computer software , it did say it was connect to rootage of Stuxnet — which was developed by the NSA . Also , a former NSA employee has “ confirmed that the NSA had developed the prized proficiency of hide spyware in intemperate drives , but tell he did not know which undercover agent exploit relied on it,”according to Reuters . Kapersky has , however , dub the the writer of the backdoors “ the Equation group”—seemingly after their love of encoding formulae .
The backdoors place malicious software in the firmware of hard drives , establish it every fourth dimension a computer the boot . Kapersky claims the software “ made a technological breakthrough ” in the way it was placed there , allowing it to “ taint the computer over and over . ” Apparently that would have required access to the proprietary source code that controls the hard drives , something that would n’t be possible with publicly usable data .
It ’s not entirely clear how the NSA would have obtained that data — though an ex - employee has explained to Reuters that the Agency sometimes put as a harmless Pentagon customer that merely needs to check package is secure in parliamentary procedure to lay its hands on code . Either way , reconstruction of the software made by Kapersky show that it could work on disk drive made by Western Digital Corp , Seagate Technology Plc , Toshiba Corp , IBM , Micron Technology Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd ..
Kaspersky has now published the technical detail of its enquiry , in the hope that asylum bear upon by the spying will be able to observe software on their networks . They should certainly try : some of the catching conduct using the proficiency apparently dates back to 2001 . While the backdoor could have give remote access to computers around the world , Kapersky explains that it believes the spies were extremely selective and “ only show full remote control over simple machine belong to the most worthy extraneous butt . ”
Which is perhaps reassuring for you and I — but , in the final stage , the story is just another stark reminder of how thick the NSA ’s tentacle stretch out . [ Reuters ]
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