21st Century Learning and Teaching

The Equation Group's attack on hard-drive firmware is one of the most advanced ever discovered, Kaspersky Lab said.

A cyberespionage group with a toolset similar to ones used by U.S. intelligence agencies has infiltrated key institutions in countries including Iran and Russia, utilizing a startlingly advanced form of malware that is impossible to remove once it's infected your PC.

Kaspersky Lab released a report Monday that said the tools were created by the “Equation” group, which it stopped short of linking to the U.S. National Security Agency

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The tools, exploits and malware used by the group—named after its penchant for encryption—have strong similarities with NSA techniques described in top-secret documents leaked in 2013.

Learn more:

- http://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?tag=REGIN

- http://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?tag=Warriorpride

- http://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?tag=Quantum

- http://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?tag=cyberwar

- http://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?tag=NSA

- http://www.scoop.it/t/securite-pc-et-internet/?tag=TAO

- https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/visual-it-securitypart2-your-computer-as-a-possible-cyber-weapon/

Mets-en de côté, ça peut servir.

La NSA ne dévoile pas toujours les failles qu'elle découvre. Il aurait fallu être naïf pour croire le contraire, et de nombreux indices et révélations vont dans ce sens depuis des années. Cela dit, que la Maison blanche l'admette et se fende d'un billet de blog pour détailler les procédures menant à la divulgation ou à la rétention de failles, c'est nouveau.

Cindy Cohn, legal director and general counsel for the EFF, called the ruling a tremendous victory and a courageous decision by the court, which moves the group's efforts one step closer toward establishing the government surveillance programs as unconstitutional under the First and Fourth Amendments.

The recent PRISM scandal has validated both the general public's growing unease with federal law enforcement agencies, and many of the fringe element's accusations about Big Brother's online behavior.

A report in The New York Times, based on documents from 2011 obtained by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveal that the US security agency's reliance..

The selfie phenomenon is undoubtedly making the NSA’s job easier by producing a mountain of tagged online data to feed its facial recognition algorithms.

A report in The New York Times, based on documents from 2011 obtained by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveals that the US security agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly under the Obama administration – coinciding with a rise in popularity of taking and tagging self portraits on online social networks.

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Learn more:

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- http://gustmees.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/naivety-in-the-digital-age/

- http://gustmees.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/smartphone-pictures-pose-privacy-risks/

The Heartbleed bug is unusually worrisome because it could possibly be used by the NSA or other spy agencies to steal your usernames and passwords — for sensitive services like banking, ecommerce, and web-based email — as well as the private keys that vulnerable web sites use to encrypt your traffic to them.

Either way, there are now signatures available to detect exploits against Heartbleed, as Dutch security firm Fox-IT points out on its website, and depending on how much logging companies do with their intrusion-detection systems, it may be possible to review activity retroactively to uncover any attacks going back over the last two years.