Dev.SN

NSA Snooping Tactics will be Copied by Criminals

posted by janrinok on Sunday March 02 2014, @09:30AM   
from the old-crooks-meet-the-new-crooks dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"Schneier: NSA snooping tactics will be copied by criminals in 3 to 5 years. If you thought NSA snooping was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet: online criminals have also been watching and should soon be able to copy the agency's invasive surveillance tactics, according to security guru Bruce Schneier.

'The NSA techniques give about a three to five year lead on what cyber-criminals will do,' he told an audience at the RSA 2014 conference in San Francisco. 'These techniques for exfiltrating data aren't magical, they are just expensive. Everything we know about technology is that it gets cheaper. So the notion of putting up a fake cell tower or wireless access point, of jumping air gaps, you're going to see this stuff it's really just a matter of time.' "

• They're doing it already They're doing it already (Score: 5, Interesting) by jt on Sunday March 02 2014, @09:35AM

  by jt (2890) on Sunday March 02 2014, @09:35AM (#9587)

  The big hitters are doing this stuff already. Fake wireless access points? This has been going on for years. Jumping airgaps? Just bribe/threaten someone on the inside to do it for you; old-school tactics still work in the information age. Custom written malware? Sold to the highest bidder.

  The entire premise, that there is a difference between NSA and organized crime, is of course an entirely different debate.

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• Re:They're doing it already Re:They're doing it already (Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Sunday March 02 2014, @01:19PM

  by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Sunday March 02 2014, @01:19PM (#9667) Homepage Journal

  I thought the NSA were just copying what the cybercriminals were doing?

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  • Re:They're doing it already (Score: 3, Interesting) by jt on Sunday March 02 2014, @02:05PM

    by jt (2890) on Sunday March 02 2014, @02:05PM (#9685)

    I would be deeply shocked if the NSA and their three-letter buddies are not carefully monitoring what the blackhats are doing out in the Real World. They have the advantage that they can take all the public domain techniques, but don't have to give back their own proprietary inventions. Kind of a BSD v GNU arrangement :)

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  • Re:They're doing it already (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday March 02 2014, @05:16PM

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday March 02 2014, @05:16PM (#9743)

    I thought the NSA were just copying what the cybercriminals were doing?

    I thought the NSA were cybercriminals.

    But seriously, Bruce Schneier seems to forget that the NSA has the authority to essentially say to ANYONE "these are not the droids you were looking for" and have them go away and be quiet.

    Criminals will never have this leverage. Criminals would never be able to walk into AT&T router farm and have them build a secret room with a fiber direct to their doorstep. Not going to happen on anything even vaguely like the NSA's scale.

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