Poetic justice. Serves the bastards right. I'm sure hackers are flocking to the download in search of awesome tools. If they're there, then we might see independent, malware authors building some interesting things to produce headaches with. Interesting times continue.
Note that many of us in INFOSEC said years ago that these offensive, cyber companies developing weapons was a risk to us if they double-dealed or got breached. Their weapons which we (and others) funded might get turned against us. Depending on what's in the torrent, that scenario might begin playing out.
Looks like they're double dealing, too. Invoices to Egypt and other oppressive governments have already been found in the torrent dump.
Christopher Soghoian on Twitter: "Just from Torrent File listing, Hacking Team's customers includes South Korea, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Lebanon, and Mongolia."
I posted a link to his stream with the rest on Schneier's blog. The stream is... Hacking Team's own answer to Failblog. I only wish I had 400GB of storage handy with a good network in case it gets taken down or something. Hope people are copying the shit out of it.
Note: There torrent is so big and has so much stuff that this laptop I'm using (few years old) was lagging on scrollbar with fan on full blast. Had to close it lol.
Oh noes, pissing off abusive regimes to make a few bucks more, I'd say they deserve all they get and should have been part of their business risk assessment.
Not only for those reasons, but also for creating a malware market driven by nation state money. The way we have found and fixed vulnerabilities in civilian IT systems has been turned into a market where the end result are less secure persons, companies, organizations and states.
A fabulous way to spend tax money aim to protect us imho...
Normally I'm a bit more reserved when a company I dislike gets hacked, but take a look at Hacking Team's history and you'll probably want to celebrate too.
> ...Hacking Team's customers include South Korea, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Lebanon, and Mongolia. Yet, the company maintains that it does not do business with oppressive governments.
I was curious if those were all oppressive governments, especially since South Korea was included. According to a couple indices on Wikipedia [1] South Korea is pretty free (only the press freedom index is lower than America's), and Mongolia's not so bad (political freedom, but weakness in press and economic freedom). Pretty hard to lump South Korea in with Saudi Arabia or Kazakhstan.
South Korea is fairly recently free-ish. Up until 1987 South Korea had a heavily US-influenced authoritarian government with a token legal opposition. The US still has a very strong influence in South Korea. There are also recent incidents that betray a lack of confidence in democracy: http://www.wsj.com/articles/south-korea-court-dissolves-left...
It's a perfectly nice place to visit. People there apparently feel free to talk about everything: The war, the Park era, etc. Unions can be quite militant. But they are not as free as Americans.
Allegedly a South Korean assemblyman created a sleeper cell that would become 'activated' when North Korea attacks South Korea based on a testimony by an unknown member of the sleeper cell who have never appeared in public or known to even exist. They dissolved the opposition group based on a report by the NIS (intelligence agency of Korea with a long tradition of torturing and suppressing dissidents). The same agency also tied cement around former president Kim Dae Jung (who happens to be from the west province of Korea, who have long been oppressed and persecuted for centuries) after kidnapping him from a Japanese hotel during 70s, but just as they were about to throw him over the boat, guess who, American soldiers stopped them.
You pick up a Korean newspaper, you are almost certainly reading a mouthpiece of the government.
There are even more frightening stories during this time. Playing national anthem 4 oclock every fucking day, forcing people to stop what they are doing, and sing, many of which were propaganda songs composed by the president with the help of his daughter, the current president of Korea.
The most scary one is where people just 'disappear' only to reappear in mental hospitals because they got a bit drunk and talked shit about the government during the 70s or 80s.
Plenty of young men conscripted into Korean military would die because what the concept of human rights has long been an alien ideology, basically a curfew and martial law during this period where you couldn't do jack shit after 10pm or you'd get arrested or get a good beating.
Let's not also get started with women's rights, but perhaps the most frustrating is the social fabric of Korea is hierachial and oppressive. Kindergarteners going to overly priced private tutors after school ends and coming home at midnight because they are told the same lie that studying will get you places, teachers beating kids with corporal punishment for low scores on exams, and the constant war drumming of the 'suffering' or 'han' of Korean history and teaching to hate neighboring countries, especially Japan.
It's no wonder that millenial Koreans are desperate to leave the country, even if it means being a plumber in Germany with an advanced degrees.
By no means has South Korea ever been a democracy, the same traditions continue but hidden beneath disinformation and surveillance of opponents.
This sounds quite different from all the things I have heard about South Korea and the general impression I have of the society and the people. Do you have some sources to back these claims up?
Oh, give over! As if the US of A were the ultimate land of freedom. With the NSA, Guantanamo, race-based police violence...
[Disclaimer: I have nothing against the USA (well, almost nothing). But I can't stand people talking about it as if it was the only true democracy/free country/heaven on earth.]
But they have guns. For some reason there is the belief that if you have guns then you are more free than someone without guns. Perhaps because the original intention was that if you have an armed population then they cannot be ruled over by means of force or they would at least be able to rise up against their opressors in a meaningful fashion.
Guns in America are a bit of an opiate for the masses, people have guns and feel free therefore they dont need to rise up against their government no matter what other constitutional freedoms they shit on as long as they dont attempt to take their guns they will pretty much let them get away with anything.
That's an interesting way of looking at it, though I disagree. Consider the society depicted in Brave New World (or, more recently, District 1 in the Hunger Games).
It may be fiction, but I think it showcases a true-to-life phenomenon where people feel free only because of hyper-stimulation. Because they have so much, they don't think about everything they lack.
One could say the same about any so-called free people. Do you feel free? Even though you don't have eternal life? Even though you can't afford to fly to work every day in a jetpack? Even though you can't have sex with a woman other than your wife? If you have the things that matter to you, and can make the choices that are meaningful to you, then you are free.
I have to disagree. There are some very definite indicators of whether someone is free or not. You can be conditioned to accept your situation but that doesnt make you free.
Everyone has their own indicators. If you are conditioned to accept your situation in a way that makes you feel free, then you are free. Birds and dolphins probably have their own definite indicators of whether someone is free or not that the "freest" human by your criteria would fail spectacularly.
This is something I wish was addressed more in conversation when it devolves into a pissing match of freedom.
Here's the deal. Yes, the US has been getting into some shady areas, even more-so since 9/11. All the things you reference are big issues that haven't been addressed properly yet. I'll grant you all that and more, because it's true.
Here's the problem though. This is where I generally hear about how the Nordic/Scandinavian countries have a much higher level of "freedom", (que statistics dump here), and how the US isn't really free.
The problem I have with this outlook is that it forgets the history and origins of the US, and it's purpose and function as a place of freedom where there was little in other places; namely freedom under the laws of the land, which in the US is the Constitution.
Yes, the Constitution is in tatters at the moment. We have had presidents abusing it and stretching it, congress who disregards it, and a public that is largely apathetic about it. The bottom line though, is that while, functionally, we are indeed less "free" than many other nations, we at least have a legal framework to base a new kind of freedom upon, where as many of those other countries lack key freedoms.
I think the best example of this is freedom of speech. The US still has the best levels of freedom of speech according to law (an important distinction to be made between the law, eg the Constitution, and practice, eg stifling of dissent via programs like COINTELPRO.)
Here some some experts from a Christopher Hitchens speech on the related matters.
“…It’s not the right of the person who speaks to be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience to listen and to hear; and every time you silence somebody, you make yourself a prisoner of your action because you deny yourself the right to hear something.
…It’s a tiny thought experiment: if you hear the Pope saying he believes in God, you think, well, the Pope is doing his job again today. If you hear the Pope saying he’s really begun to doubt the existence of God, you begin to think he might be on to something.
…And one person gets up and says, “you know what, this holocaust, I’m not even sure it happened. In fact, I’m pretty certain it didn’t. Indeed, I begin to wonder if the only thing is that the Jews brought a little bit of violence on themselves.”—That person doesn’t just have a right to speak, that person’s right to speak must be given extra protection. Because what he has to say must have taken him some effort to come up with. Might be, might contain, a grain of historical truth; might, in any case, give people to think why do they know what they think they already know. How do I know I know this except I’ve always been taught this and never heard any thing else? It’s always worth establishing first principle….don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus and the feeling that, whatever you think, you’re bound to be okay because you’re in the safely, moral majority. One of the proudest moment in my life, that’s to say, in the recent past is defending the British historian David Irving, who is now in prison in Austria, for nothing more than the potential of uttering an unwelcomed thought on Austrian soil. He didn’t actually say anything in Austria. He wasn’t even accused of saying anything; he was accused of perhaps planning to say something that violated an Austrian law that says only one version of the history of the Second World War may be taught in our brave little Terellian republic. The republic that gave us Kurt Waldheim, Secretary General of the United Nations, a man wanted in several countries for war crimes. You know, the country that has Jorg Haider, the leader of its own Fascist party, in the cabinet that sent David Irving to jail.”
So you are absolutely right. The US is not the only place that values freedom, and in many cases the US is far from the best, but its ...
I have the highest respect for the history of the United States and where they came from. Perhaps the founding fathers were not the first to think thoughts of freedom, but they were among the forerunners in implementing a system that was actually based on the idea of freedom.
But I also very much agree that there is an increasing difference between freedom in theory and in practice in the States - something that I hope its citizens will manage to sort out sooner rather than later.
As Jefferson said: "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
Update 5:
Hacking Team currently has, based on internal documents leaked by the
attackers on Sunday evening, customers in the following locations:
Egypt, Ethiopia, Morocco, Nigeria, Sudan
Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, United States
Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand
Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Australia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary
Italy, Luxemburg, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Bahrain, Oman
Saudi Arabia, UAE
However, the cynic in me suggests that those who sell weapons to nation-states tend to receive protection from nation-states.
Which percentage of their customers will not be pissed off enough to watch them burn over sticking their neck out to help, though? Probably only the most corrupt, if an appropriate amount of funds are dispersed to support rapid processing.
Just looking at the torrent I found Coca Cola, Google, Carrefour, and Movistar. I would love to see an index of this information to quickly search the content.
Im trying to load "hackedteam.torrent" into uTorrent and Frostwire but neither will work with it.. Although frostwire does show me the internal files, but it simply wont add the torrent.
I had a look at the contents of the files I grepped with Google in the name and it appears most of them are invoices and contracts for things like Maps, Earth and Adwords.
My guess is they use Google Maps for finding addresses from GPS or vice versa. Or something like that.
"The licences, which cost €200,000 (£171,228) per annum, are never sold to states that are under EU or UN arms embargoes or to private companies or individuals."
Quote from the Telegraph article seems to provide the definition of 'ethical government' that the company was using.
Normally I'm not one for ad hominems but he comes off as a huge poser dbag. The only things missing were the duck grimace and Donald Trump pluging his 2016 campaign.
I'm on windows trying to download this. qBittorent gives an error message on import, utorrent does nothing (0% metadata loaded) and transmission loads metadata to 100 % and then starts over. In the logfile it says: "[ERROR] Hacked Team: Invalid metadata entry "path"". Transmission version is 2.84 (14386). Is there anyone loading this torrent on windows?
The magnet link didn't work for me.
But then I tried using http://infotomb.com/eyyxo.torrent instead, which worked immediately with Transmission 2.90 (OSX) and Tixati (Windows).
btw:
The MD5 of eyyxo.torrent is 26183ae8f24e798a15d77dd3476f5ed9
South Korea? Well I'm not surprised. Beneath the veil of democracy is a nanny state, forcing kids to install surveillance tool on their mobile phones, forcing bank and military to use IE and wonderfully secure ActiveX (required to do just about anything private and sensitive in Korea), requiring social insurance number to sign up for any website, use your real name so they can take you away if you write a blog post in Korean about smoking marijuana in Amsterdam, insanely bizarre Korean defamation law, polarized view of 'right' and 'left', with left being persecuted and painted in the same light as North Koreans, oppression of laborers, workers working for family owned conglomerates, indecency law (make Korean porno in Canada and get arrested once in Korea), hiding Gwangju massacre (officially a north korea inspired rebellion), silence and censorship of poor treatment of foreign workers (especially poorer Asian countries), east & west regionalism that creates discriminating policies based on lineage, the shit list far too long to go on.
It's no North Korea or Saudi Arabia, but there is active surveillance which seems to be readily tolerated along with nepotism and corruption, because Confucius says you should do what someone with an earlier birth date or higher social status. To go against this machine is to give up the government's version of Korean identity, a constant victim of passed aggressions of neighboring countries which happened because Korea has never been blessed with a great government or kings that always put the country in such predicaments.
Confucius says you should do what someone with an earlier birth date or higher social status
That's categorically false.
In one example in an old confucian book I read - if you are the ruler of the country, and your parents committed a murder, you should first send an arrest order against your parents - even if they protest otherwise, and then abdicate and help your parents escape the law.
This example directly contradicts your generalised assertion[1].
In confucianism - you must try to fulfil your roles at all times. Yes you must respect your elders, but in no way you should obey their commands without considering your own position - and even if you wish to, do not obey them blindly to the point of betraying the responsibilities of your other roles. Don't murder your brother just because your parents told you to do so.
The "in confucianism you must obey your elders at all times" is a convenient myth perpetrated by various governments and parents throughout history.
[1] According to confucianism, the parent always has higher social status than the child, and, the parent could also be a visiting ruler of a much larger country.
Your argument may be true but it's semantics. The poster's point was that Confucianism has a hierarchical/obedience type of effect on society, promoting a mindset that fosters an acceptance of totalitarian rule. That's hard to argue against.
The major Confucian-derived modern states are China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, arguably Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam.
Personally, my visit to the headquarters of one of the major Korean major mobile device manufacturer felt like a hideous preview of a dystopian future where the workers are forced in to utter obedience: entering through airport levels of security on a daily basis, living in numbered cells provided by the company, taking company-provided transport from their assigned residence to work. Even smoking was only permitted between certain regulated minutes, at certain areas. Everyone wore a personalized tracking device used in order to move about the campus. It was hard to describe as anything but oppressive, yet the conditions for those workers are reportedly sought after!
(Edit in reply to below: Yes, I'm definitely in the Taoist camp.)
Ah, what you see is one reason why the old Taoists railed against Confucianism so much in their philosophy - Confucianism tells people what they should or should not do, and in doing so, defeats itself in the kind of society it wants to promote.
Confucianism claims the values of humanity are filial piety, kindness, benevolence, justice, loyalty. The following passage from Tao Te Ching challenges Confucianism directly.
The great Tao fades away
There is benevolence and justice
Intelligence comes forth
There is great deception
The six relations are not harmonious
There is filial piety and kind affection
The country is in confused chaos
There are loyal ministers
Chapter 18, Tao Te Ching
The Taoists say, by the time you're writing a rulebook about how to have humanity, all the values you're "treasuring" have already been lost. They complain as you do the lack of spontaneity in a society following confucian order.
The Sinic civilisation has been following a cycle swinging the pendulum between Taoism "spontaneity" and Confucian "filial piety and benevolence" for the past two thousand years, so I wouldn't worry about it.
The Tao is constant in non-action
Yet there is nothing it does not do
Chpater 37, Tao Te Ching
Not sure at all what you mean by 'Sino countries'.
AFAIK in Japan the predominant pre-Buddhist shinto beliefs paralleled Taoism in their nature-focus.
Korea and Vietnam had Taoism, at least in Vietnam it is still sort of alive, though Buddhism far dominates. In Korea Buddhism and Christianity dominate. Taiwan has numerous Taoist shrines, though Buddhism dominates it is not to the same extent. Mainland China has effectively killed off Taoism almost entirely.
IMHO, what Confucius meant was that parental authority should be respected on condition that elders behaved like role models. In his ideal, the kings, officials and subordinates should all follow their ethics, like atoms in regular expression, which of course was overambitious like other thoughts of idealism in the history and met its contemporary Waterloo.
"regulations are annoying, it cuts into our profit margin when we have to find a reseller and give them a percentage"[0]
Well this could certainly shed light on the role that contractors operate in ways we have yet to see from the snowden "leaks" (of which most still remains unleaked[1])…
RE: "Media practice of consulting with governments on what to publish or withhold of material disclosed by risk takers, is anti-democratic, unconsitutional, venal, protective of privilege and betrayal of public trust."[2]
I don't know how it is over there, but legally mandated record keeping requirements are a pretty good excuse for not using public key encryption on corporate mail servers. There are products that act as middlemen that transparently convert between keys that are public and self generated... but that kind of defeats the purpose of public key encryption.
Not at all. Just securely store a copy of all work keys on a non-networked, "cold storage" server and back it up for redundancy. Record keeping is preserved while you gain the full benefits of PGP.
You're right about the cold storage aspect, I was thinking about some of the transparent encryption gateway products that are out there. Email sent to folks without PGP would still be unencrypted when it goes through the corporate MTA, but a copy encrypted with the sender's public key would be stored long term.
It's been quite a while, surprised Twitter hasn't caught on to this and stepped in or something? I guess it's not necessarily their responsibility though.
This is actually really bad, happy as I am to see this company get ruined.
People with an agenda are going to latch on to this to further push bad legislation like Wassenar, and criminalize security research, or worse, make it "terrorism", because Soghoian runs his mouth and policy makers don't understand how things really work.
This seems to include all their deals/financial data, the full source code to everything (including some novel things like EFI malware and possibly some Office/Flash 0days), all their mail, badges of every employee, personal screenshots/porn habits etc etc.
What if it was a deliberate effort from Hacking Team itself to fake a breach, produce a torrent file to be downloaded and compromise whoever is downloading it?
The size would need to be large enough that whoever trying to download it will have to stay a relatively long time.
It's very easy to spin up rTorrent on some machine not attached to you so this doesn't seem like a very good plan, especially considering the PR damage. Maybe if they managed to embed malware in some commonly trusted file format but that again doesn't seem likely since there are too many viewers, and security researchers will generally be careful.
The massive PR hit they're taking means their company will most likely die. And "compromising" someone merely by letting one download stuff is at best a gamble, any decent infosec professional will examine this stuff with the same precautions as when analyzing malware.
This is exactly what I'm talking about: What I'm being downvoted for and what each comment is doing is rationalizing why this simply can't happen. Everyone is confident about what Hacking Team is or isn't doing/thinking.
How can someone be so sure what an entity is thinking or doing? Yes, it's not likely. Yes, it's risky.. but what if they were really bold?
The PR hit is a non issue if it is the case, since they can simply say what happened: "Basically, here's how to own a huge number of very sophisticated people". Make nice slides, and show them at Black Hat or something like that. It's "research".
The icing on the cake would be to present this material to the very security researchers who've been ownd. This would be a huge PR stunt since it's basically security researchers who will download the file.. And if security researchers are as confident as most people that this simply can't be a con, then all the better :)
It is still not likely, but it would be beautiful.
PS: Something like that happened at NASA many, many, years ago. There was a security breach and instead of shutting it down, the security team uploaded a ton of bogus classified files, plans, and reports to keep the guy coming and unsuspecting. Until they got him.
> Yes, it's risky.. but what if they were really bold?
Isn't the question really how careless the people downloading the file are?
Is it possible to infect hardware through a virtual machine? Let's just assume it is; what's to stop someone from using a throwaway, one-way laptop? Get fresh laptop, install the tools you need, copy the files over via USB or network, disconnect the laptop and never connect it to anything ever again. What am I missing?
To transfer a lot of data (e.g. analysis results) back from the potentially infected machine, play back the data encoded as audio, record that with another computer and convert it back to binary/plain text/whatever. (There might be better ways but hey)
Sure, most people probably won't bother with any such stuff, and just stick to "only" viewing text files and images etc., but then all HT would have shown is what has been proven with email spam already: that if you can get people to treat unknown files carelessly, not to mention run executables, you can infect them.
"Our network security staff hard at work while 5 MB/s is transferred out of our internal network through his computer." along with presumably is a screenshot of said staff watching youtube and reading facebook.
239 comments
[ 26.4 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] threadNote that many of us in INFOSEC said years ago that these offensive, cyber companies developing weapons was a risk to us if they double-dealed or got breached. Their weapons which we (and others) funded might get turned against us. Depending on what's in the torrent, that scenario might begin playing out.
Christopher Soghoian on Twitter: "Just from Torrent File listing, Hacking Team's customers includes South Korea, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Lebanon, and Mongolia."
https://mobile.twitter.com/csoghoian/status/6178628794050641...
Edit - just read Christopher Soghoian's entire Twitter stream for the juicy bits. It's bad news for Hacking Team:
https://mobile.twitter.com/csoghoian
Note: There torrent is so big and has so much stuff that this laptop I'm using (few years old) was lagging on scrollbar with fan on full blast. Had to close it lol.
A fabulous way to spend tax money aim to protect us imho...
But their software is a risk now, I agree.
Normally I'm a bit more reserved when a company I dislike gets hacked, but take a look at Hacking Team's history and you'll probably want to celebrate too.
H A C K E D !!!!!
Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll face bankruptcy with their stuff available for free now. :)
I was curious if those were all oppressive governments, especially since South Korea was included. According to a couple indices on Wikipedia [1] South Korea is pretty free (only the press freedom index is lower than America's), and Mongolia's not so bad (political freedom, but weakness in press and economic freedom). Pretty hard to lump South Korea in with Saudi Arabia or Kazakhstan.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices
It's a perfectly nice place to visit. People there apparently feel free to talk about everything: The war, the Park era, etc. Unions can be quite militant. But they are not as free as Americans.
You pick up a Korean newspaper, you are almost certainly reading a mouthpiece of the government.
There are even more frightening stories during this time. Playing national anthem 4 oclock every fucking day, forcing people to stop what they are doing, and sing, many of which were propaganda songs composed by the president with the help of his daughter, the current president of Korea.
The most scary one is where people just 'disappear' only to reappear in mental hospitals because they got a bit drunk and talked shit about the government during the 70s or 80s.
Plenty of young men conscripted into Korean military would die because what the concept of human rights has long been an alien ideology, basically a curfew and martial law during this period where you couldn't do jack shit after 10pm or you'd get arrested or get a good beating.
Let's not also get started with women's rights, but perhaps the most frustrating is the social fabric of Korea is hierachial and oppressive. Kindergarteners going to overly priced private tutors after school ends and coming home at midnight because they are told the same lie that studying will get you places, teachers beating kids with corporal punishment for low scores on exams, and the constant war drumming of the 'suffering' or 'han' of Korean history and teaching to hate neighboring countries, especially Japan.
It's no wonder that millenial Koreans are desperate to leave the country, even if it means being a plumber in Germany with an advanced degrees.
By no means has South Korea ever been a democracy, the same traditions continue but hidden beneath disinformation and surveillance of opponents.
Oh, give over! As if the US of A were the ultimate land of freedom. With the NSA, Guantanamo, race-based police violence...
[Disclaimer: I have nothing against the USA (well, almost nothing). But I can't stand people talking about it as if it was the only true democracy/free country/heaven on earth.]
Guns in America are a bit of an opiate for the masses, people have guns and feel free therefore they dont need to rise up against their government no matter what other constitutional freedoms they shit on as long as they dont attempt to take their guns they will pretty much let them get away with anything.
It may be fiction, but I think it showcases a true-to-life phenomenon where people feel free only because of hyper-stimulation. Because they have so much, they don't think about everything they lack.
Here's the deal. Yes, the US has been getting into some shady areas, even more-so since 9/11. All the things you reference are big issues that haven't been addressed properly yet. I'll grant you all that and more, because it's true.
Here's the problem though. This is where I generally hear about how the Nordic/Scandinavian countries have a much higher level of "freedom", (que statistics dump here), and how the US isn't really free.
The problem I have with this outlook is that it forgets the history and origins of the US, and it's purpose and function as a place of freedom where there was little in other places; namely freedom under the laws of the land, which in the US is the Constitution.
Yes, the Constitution is in tatters at the moment. We have had presidents abusing it and stretching it, congress who disregards it, and a public that is largely apathetic about it. The bottom line though, is that while, functionally, we are indeed less "free" than many other nations, we at least have a legal framework to base a new kind of freedom upon, where as many of those other countries lack key freedoms.
I think the best example of this is freedom of speech. The US still has the best levels of freedom of speech according to law (an important distinction to be made between the law, eg the Constitution, and practice, eg stifling of dissent via programs like COINTELPRO.)
Here some some experts from a Christopher Hitchens speech on the related matters.
So you are absolutely right. The US is not the only place that values freedom, and in many cases the US is far from the best, but its ...I have the highest respect for the history of the United States and where they came from. Perhaps the founding fathers were not the first to think thoughts of freedom, but they were among the forerunners in implementing a system that was actually based on the idea of freedom.
But I also very much agree that there is an increasing difference between freedom in theory and in practice in the States - something that I hope its citizens will manage to sort out sooner rather than later.
As Jefferson said: "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
https://twitter.com/csoghoian/status/617892200618291200
However, the cynic in me suggests that those who sell weapons to nation-states tend to receive protection from nation-states.
Which percentage of their customers will not be pissed off enough to watch them burn over sticking their neck out to help, though? Probably only the most corrupt, if an appropriate amount of funds are dispersed to support rapid processing.
My guess is they use Google Maps for finding addresses from GPS or vice versa. Or something like that.
Quote from the Telegraph article seems to provide the definition of 'ethical government' that the company was using.
https://www.gov.uk/current-arms-embargoes-and-other-restrict...
The list is quite short.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R63CRBNLE2o
Just look at how seductively he lifts his hoodie to reveal his face in the darkness, 10/10 would buy exploit again.
udp://coppersurfer.tk:6969/announce
udp://9.rarbg.me:2710/announce
http://mgtracker.org:2710/announce
http://bt.careland.com.cn:6969/announce
udp://open.demonii.com:1337
udp://exodus.desync.com:6969
udp://tracker.leechers-paradise.org:6969
udp://tracker.pomf.se
udp://tracker.blackunicorn.xyz:6969
btw:
The MD5 of eyyxo.torrent is 26183ae8f24e798a15d77dd3476f5ed9
I mirrored the torrent file on my server in case infotomb gets offline again: https://hecker.io/eyyxo.torrent
It's no North Korea or Saudi Arabia, but there is active surveillance which seems to be readily tolerated along with nepotism and corruption, because Confucius says you should do what someone with an earlier birth date or higher social status. To go against this machine is to give up the government's version of Korean identity, a constant victim of passed aggressions of neighboring countries which happened because Korea has never been blessed with a great government or kings that always put the country in such predicaments.
In one example in an old confucian book I read - if you are the ruler of the country, and your parents committed a murder, you should first send an arrest order against your parents - even if they protest otherwise, and then abdicate and help your parents escape the law.
This example directly contradicts your generalised assertion[1].
In confucianism - you must try to fulfil your roles at all times. Yes you must respect your elders, but in no way you should obey their commands without considering your own position - and even if you wish to, do not obey them blindly to the point of betraying the responsibilities of your other roles. Don't murder your brother just because your parents told you to do so.
The "in confucianism you must obey your elders at all times" is a convenient myth perpetrated by various governments and parents throughout history.
[1] According to confucianism, the parent always has higher social status than the child, and, the parent could also be a visiting ruler of a much larger country.
The major Confucian-derived modern states are China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, arguably Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam.
Personally, my visit to the headquarters of one of the major Korean major mobile device manufacturer felt like a hideous preview of a dystopian future where the workers are forced in to utter obedience: entering through airport levels of security on a daily basis, living in numbered cells provided by the company, taking company-provided transport from their assigned residence to work. Even smoking was only permitted between certain regulated minutes, at certain areas. Everyone wore a personalized tracking device used in order to move about the campus. It was hard to describe as anything but oppressive, yet the conditions for those workers are reportedly sought after!
(Edit in reply to below: Yes, I'm definitely in the Taoist camp.)
Confucianism claims the values of humanity are filial piety, kindness, benevolence, justice, loyalty. The following passage from Tao Te Ching challenges Confucianism directly.
The Taoists say, by the time you're writing a rulebook about how to have humanity, all the values you're "treasuring" have already been lost. They complain as you do the lack of spontaneity in a society following confucian order.The Sinic civilisation has been following a cycle swinging the pendulum between Taoism "spontaneity" and Confucian "filial piety and benevolence" for the past two thousand years, so I wouldn't worry about it.
Tao seems a bit like buddhism when it comes to the ephemeral, I like it.
AFAIK in Japan the predominant pre-Buddhist shinto beliefs paralleled Taoism in their nature-focus.
Korea and Vietnam had Taoism, at least in Vietnam it is still sort of alive, though Buddhism far dominates. In Korea Buddhism and Christianity dominate. Taiwan has numerous Taoist shrines, though Buddhism dominates it is not to the same extent. Mainland China has effectively killed off Taoism almost entirely.
Interesting to see that they do in fact work with oppressive governments...
Well this could certainly shed light on the role that contractors operate in ways we have yet to see from the snowden "leaks" (of which most still remains unleaked[1])…
RE: "Media practice of consulting with governments on what to publish or withhold of material disclosed by risk takers, is anti-democratic, unconsitutional, venal, protective of privilege and betrayal of public trust."[2]
[0]: https://twitter.com/hackingteam/status/617892908583243776
[1]: http://cryptome.org/2013/11/snowden-tally.htm
[2]: http://thecryptosphere.com/2014/07/24/cryptome-kills-the-kic...
Time to break out the popcorn.
People with an agenda are going to latch on to this to further push bad legislation like Wassenar, and criminalize security research, or worse, make it "terrorism", because Soghoian runs his mouth and policy makers don't understand how things really work.
This whole "demonize Soghoian" strategy simply isn't working. People who engage in it sound petulant, not persuasive.
My guess is more than half of HN readers would sympathize with his positions.
On balance, I think he probably does more good than harm for our community. But it's a very close call.
This seems to include all their deals/financial data, the full source code to everything (including some novel things like EFI malware and possibly some Office/Flash 0days), all their mail, badges of every employee, personal screenshots/porn habits etc etc.
It's not possible to get hacked harder than this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BrdX7VdOr0
Anyway, serves them right.
The size would need to be large enough that whoever trying to download it will have to stay a relatively long time.
How can someone be so sure what an entity is thinking or doing? Yes, it's not likely. Yes, it's risky.. but what if they were really bold?
The PR hit is a non issue if it is the case, since they can simply say what happened: "Basically, here's how to own a huge number of very sophisticated people". Make nice slides, and show them at Black Hat or something like that. It's "research".
The icing on the cake would be to present this material to the very security researchers who've been ownd. This would be a huge PR stunt since it's basically security researchers who will download the file.. And if security researchers are as confident as most people that this simply can't be a con, then all the better :)
It is still not likely, but it would be beautiful.
PS: Something like that happened at NASA many, many, years ago. There was a security breach and instead of shutting it down, the security team uploaded a ton of bogus classified files, plans, and reports to keep the guy coming and unsuspecting. Until they got him.
Isn't the question really how careless the people downloading the file are?
Is it possible to infect hardware through a virtual machine? Let's just assume it is; what's to stop someone from using a throwaway, one-way laptop? Get fresh laptop, install the tools you need, copy the files over via USB or network, disconnect the laptop and never connect it to anything ever again. What am I missing?
To transfer a lot of data (e.g. analysis results) back from the potentially infected machine, play back the data encoded as audio, record that with another computer and convert it back to binary/plain text/whatever. (There might be better ways but hey)
Sure, most people probably won't bother with any such stuff, and just stick to "only" viewing text files and images etc., but then all HT would have shown is what has been proven with email spam already: that if you can get people to treat unknown files carelessly, not to mention run executables, you can infect them.
"Our network security staff hard at work while 5 MB/s is transferred out of our internal network through his computer." along with presumably is a screenshot of said staff watching youtube and reading facebook.
Also, various content: https://github.com/hackedteam (repo with their malware source code) https://twitter.com/Viss/status/617950211239837696 http://i.imgur.com/26jLFmH.png (torrent content) http://i.imgur.com/XtVUiI8.png (torrent content) http://i.imgur.com/W4mzsHa.png (emails) http://i.imgur.com/tdAKXFD.jpg (emails) http://i.imgur.com/3ALTFdB.jpg (their customers) https://archive.is/SYrgc
> The torrent contains a virus, it's best to let the authorities examine the evidence and stop seeding and spreading false info.
Yes, the hackers fabricated 400GB of lies and please don't look at them.
http://i.imgur.com/tdAKXFD.jpg
Sad.