Russian Researchers get a major achievement in exposing ‘NSA’s secret weapon’ that let America to spy on every home computer in the world that remains uncovered. The US National Security Agency (NSA) has successfully come out with the technique of how to hide a spying software inside deep into the hard drive of the top manufacturing companies like Seagate, Toshiba, etc. With this they have successfully got the control to peep inside into every computer in the world.
Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker said that they have found home computers in 30 countries in the world that are infected by one or other spying program.
Some of the countries where infections of these programs are found are Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria with Iran on top of the list. Every sector from government to military institution is being getting infected with these spying programs as mentioned by Kaspersky.
Although Kaspersky has not made any public announcement about the name of the country which is their behind such spying activities, but they have given the hint that it is closely related to Stuxnet. Stuxnet is a cyber weapon which is responsible for the attack of Iran’s uranium enrichment facility. In 2001 this infection started and till 2008 it had increased rapidly. 2008 was the same year when Barack Obama was elected as a President.
Recently, Kaspersky has publicly published the technical details of its research that could help infected institutions to detect the spying program that are in their system. Even the computers that are not connected to the Internet are infected with these programs. The people responsible for making hard drives are not aware that these programs have been embedded in their hard drives.
With the publication of technical details and massive leakage of information from former contractor Edward Snowden, the sales of the US technology products in countries like China etc. can be hampered to a great extent.
In the official blog JOSEPH MENN mentioned that,
“According to Kaspersky, the spies made a technological breakthrough by figuring out how to lodge malicious software in the obscure code called firmware that launches every time a computer is turned on.
Disk drive firmware is viewed by spies and cyber security experts as the second-most valuable real estate on a PC for a hacker, second only to the BIOS code invoked automatically as a computer boots up.”
Kaspersky researcher Costin Raiu in an interview says that the hardware will be able to infect the computer again and again. The source code of the spying program has an ability to open all possible ways for vulnerabilities giving attackers more chance to attack.
The NSA refused to give any comment on any allegations in the Kaspersky report. Kaspersky called the authors of the spying program as ‘the Equation group’ who use a variety of methods to spread spying programs throughout the world.
