Further leaked documents have revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been increasing its ability to infect computers with malware designed to aid surveillance. The agency even posed as Facebook servers to help them gain access to computer hard drives and infect computers.
The various malware installed have different abilities. Some are designed to record audio from laptop microphones, take photos using webcams or corrupting and disrupting downloads. What’s interesting about this information is not that the NSA spies in this way, but the numbers involved. An automated infection system, named TURBINE was created, to automatically attack the computers of millions of ‘targets’.
As well as obvious privacy concerns, infecting millions of computers with malware can make everyone less secure. One piece of malware can create new insecurities in a system, which can then be exploited by other groups. The TURBINE system has been active since July 2010, and has already infected between 85,000 and 100,000 devices around the world, and the NSA plans to keep increasing that number.
Writing in The Intercept, authors Ryan Gallagher and Glenn point out how as the US and UK secret services have increasingly used malware and infection to attack or monitor targets, this has meant other governments have started to use the same methods. “There has been an unprecedented proliferation of aggressive surveillance techniques” like malware, they say, and it seems this is only likely to increase in the future.
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[Source: The Intercept]
