September 13, 2013
The NSA used ‘man in the middle’ hack attacks to impersonate Google
and fool web users, leaks have revealed. The
technique circumvents encryption by redirecting users to a copycat
site which relays all the data entered to NSA data
banks.
Brazilian television network Globo News released a report based on classified data
divulged by former CIA worker Edward Snowden on Sunday.
The report itself blew the whistle on US
government spying on Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, but hidden in
amongst the data was information the NSA had impersonated Google to
get its hands on user data.
Globo TV showed slides from a 2012 NSA presentation explaining how
the organization intercepts data and re-routes it to NSA central.
One of the convert techniques the NSA uses to do this is a ‘man in
the middle’ (MITM) hack attack.
This particular method of intercepting internet communications is
quite common among expert hackers as it avoids having to break
through encryption. Essentially, NSA operatives log into a router
used by an internet service provider and divert ‘target traffic’ to
a copycat MITM site, whereupon all the data entered is relayed to
the NSA. The data released by Edward Snowden and reported on by
Globo News suggests the NSA
carried out these attacks disguised as
Google.
When the news broke about the NSA gathering information through
internet browsers, tech giants such as Google and Yahoo denied
complicity, maintaining they only handover data if a formal request
is issued by the government.
"As for recent reports that the US government has found ways to
circumvent our security systems, we have no evidence of any such
thing ever occurring. We provide our user data to governments only
in accordance with the law," said Google spokesperson Jay
Nancarrow to news site Mother Jones.
Google, along with Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo, has filed a
lawsuit against the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA)
to allow them to make public all the data requests made by the
NSA.
“Given the important public policy issues at stake, we have
also asked the court to hold its hearing in open rather than behind
closed doors. It's time for more transparency," Google’s
director of law enforcement and information security, Richard
Salgado, and the director of public policy and government affairs,
Pablo Chavez, wrote in a blog post on Monday.
The tech giants implicated in NSA’s global spying program have
denied criticism that they could have done more to resist NSA
spying. Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, claimed that speaking out
about the NSA’s activities would have amounted to ‘treason’ at a
press conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.
In Yahoo’s defense, she argued that the company had been very
skeptical of the NSA’s requests to disclose user data and had
resisted whenever possible. Mayer concluded that it was more
realistic to work within the system,” rather than fight against
it.
http://rt.com/news/nsa-disguised-google-spy-801/