Wed, 22 Jun 2011

Black ops: how HBGary wrote backdoors for the government

Your tax dollars at work - writing rootkits! I'm sure the targets will always be "bad guys" ... with whatever working definition of "bad" happens to be currently in vogue with the government.

And slipping this stuff in via USB ports or Firewire (as mentioned in the article) is not the easiest way to get malware onto a system. The easiest way is to get the user to install it themselves, or better yet, sell them the system with the vuln built in. I wonder if anybody out there in the wide world might think of us as "bad guys"?

In 2009, HBGary had partnered with the Advanced Information Systems group of defense contractor General Dynamics to work on a project euphemistically known as "Task B." The team had a simple mission: slip a piece of stealth software onto a target laptop without the owner's knowledge.

(link) [Ars Technica]

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