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Hidden USB transmitters

2014-01-15 15:37:54.627305+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

Time to build a faraday cage around the house: New York Times: N.S.A. Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers.

The claim is that the NSA has deployed about a hundred thousand USB input devices with transmitters in their cables that can be read from up to 8 miles away, although allegedly none of these have been deployed domestically.

Fairly consistent with what we know of keyloggers in the wild, what should be the wake-up call is the wireless bit: I'd kind of assumed many of these sorts of attacks were being done with a "log everything, but require physical access to get back to it". If the attack is "log everything, but do it off-site" that makes tracking down things like the perpetrators of credit card skimmer attacks much much harder.

And, of course, as potential jurors, and as citizens voting for politicians who should be the ones driving law enforcement policy, we can assume that "parallel reconstruction" for evidence gathering will become far far more prevalent.

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#Comment Re: made: 2014-01-15 21:28:32.343013+00 by: mkelley

I heard about this on Fresh Air today. Sounds like a variation of the TEMPEST project - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)