Hackers reverse-engineer NSA's spy tools
A team of radio signal hackers has used an NSA manual to build the agency's spy tools, so that we can start to protect against them.
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Great Scott Gadgets of Colorado explained to the New Scientist how it reverse engineered something called the Ragemaster and the Surlyspawn, "retro reflectors" that can harvest audio, keystrokes and images on a computer its implanted into.
Der Spiegel reported last year how the US intelligence services, with the help of the CIA and FBI, intercepts laptop shipments to implant malicious hardware and malware.
And the same newspaper published the catalogue of spy hardware delivered by a division known as ANT, with prices for the best gadgets around $250,000.
Among them was a piece of kit that lets you see what's on a computer's screen ($30), a fake mobile phone tower that lets spies intercept calls ($40,000) and computer bugs disguised as USBs (50 for $1 million).
With this in mind, Michael Ossmann of Great Scott Gadgets wanted to navigate a path to start defending against all eventualities. The main problem was, no one knew what a "retro reflector" was in the context of this type of hardware, and how it could transmit data wirelessly so far.
Ossmann used the NSA manual Edward Snowden leaked to put together a version of the NSA tools using technology known as software-defined radio (SDR), which uses software and digital-signal-processing chips to manipulate radio signals, their frequency and power.
He used a transistor, with a small piece of wire as an antenna, to replicate the reflector. Then came the SDR.
New Scientist reports that by manipulating the radio frequencies to create high-powered radar signals, it prompted the transistors into action -- it caused them to transmit the keystroke data on a computer wirelessly.
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It's this type of technology that is behind the revelation in January that the NSA could survey unconnected devices.
Just as we all came to terms with the spy agency's habit of trawling through everybody's personal data, we were told that tiny devices had been fitted into 100,000 devices to emit radio waves and transport data.
Apparently the only targets were Chinese and Russian military and drug cartels, but the NSA does appear to be a fan of mission creep, so Ossmann's work is verywelcome by a number of people.
Source: New Scientist