Politico reports that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly's cell phone was compromised back in December.
I know this is news because of who he is, but I hope every major government official of any country assumes that their commercial off-the-shelf cell phone is compromised. Even allies spy on allies; remember the reports that the NSA tapped the cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel?
The Wall Street Journal has a bombshell of a story. Yet another NSA contractor took classified documents home with him. Yet another Russian intelligence operation stole copies of those documents. The twist this time is that the Russians identified the documents because the contractor had Kaspersky Labs anti-virus installed on his home computer.
This is a huge deal, both for the NSA and Kaspersky. The Wall Street Journal article contains no evidence, only unnamed sources. But I am having trouble seeing how the already embattled Kaspersky Labs survives this.
WSJ follow up. Four more news articles.
EDITED TO ADD: This is either an example the Russians subverting a perfectly reasonable security feature in Kaspersky's products, or Kaspersky adding a plausible feature at the request of Russian intelligence. In the latter case, it's a nicely deniable Russian information operation. In either case, it's an impressive Russian information operation.
What's getting a lot less press is yet another NSA contractor stealing top-secret cyberattack software. What is it with the NSA's inability to keep anything secret anymore?
In the wake of the Equifax break, I've heard calls to replace Social Security numbers. Steve Bellovin explains why this is hard.
Reuters is reporting that HP Enterprise gave the Russians a copy of the ArcSight source code.
The article highlights that ArcSight is used by the Pentagon to protect classified networks, but the security risks are much broader. Any weaknesses the Russians discover could be used against any ArcSight customer.
What is HP Enterprise thinking? Near a I can tell, they only gave it away because the Russians asked nicely.
Supply chain security is very difficult. The article says that Russia demands source code because its worried about supply chain security: "One reason Russia requests the reviews before allowing sales to government agencies and state-run companies is to ensure that U.S. intelligence services have not placed spy tools in the software." That's a reasonable thing to worry about, considering what we know about NSA's interdiction of commercial hardware and software products. But how can Group A convince Group B of the integrity and security of hardware/software without putting itself at risk from Group B?
This is one of the areas where open-source software has a security edge. If everyone has access to the source code -- and security doesn't depend on its secrecy -- then there's no advantage in getting a copy. As long as companies rely on obscurity for their security, these sorts of attacks are possible and profitable.
I wonder what sorts of assurances HP Enterprise gave its customers that it would secure its source code, and if any of those customers have negligence options against HP Enterprise.
Interesting survey paper: on the privacy implications of e-mail tracking:
Abstract: We show that the simple act of viewing emails contains privacy pitfalls for the unwary. We assembled a corpus of commercial mailing-list emails, and find a network of hundreds of third parties that track email recipients via methods such as embedded pixels. About 30% of emails leak the recipient's email address to one or more of these third parties when they are viewed. In the majority of cases, these leaks are intentional on the part of email senders, and further leaks occur if the recipient clicks links in emails. Mail servers and clients may employ a variety of defenses, but we analyze 16 servers and clients and find that they are far from comprehensive. We propose, prototype, and evaluate a new defense, namely stripping tracking tags from emails based on enhanced versions of existing web tracking protection lists.
Blog post on the research.
This report discusses the new trend of remote malware attacks against ATMs.
