02/17/15 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, Jason Ditz is on the line.
Thank God.
He is the managing news editor of Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com for his take on everything that you need to know.
All day, every day, it's incredible work, 10,000 entries there, news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And now, I've got to find my link.
I think I had it here just a second ago, but we've got brand new and important NSA news.
Well, here it is on the site, Advanced Cybercrime Gang Closely Linked to NSA.
You don't say, even though it rhymes.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I mean, calling them a cybercrime gang, I think, is Kaspersky Labs' way of being a bit generous because they don't know all the details of how it's organized.
It really seems, at least from the report that they submitted, that this is not so much an independent gang as just flat out an NSA operation.
Well, do they have any real reason to distinguish between the two?
Probably because they haven't conclusively got internal documents from the NSA linking the two.
Other than that, not really.
It seems like this is pretty straightforward that this is one of the NSA's operations for espionage.
This is collecting data on targets of interest with malware.
It's interesting, isn't it, how you reported the other day, you linked to this article by Bill Gertz.
Of course, is he formerly with the Washington Times?
I don't know.
But we all know who Bill Gertz is, right?
Washington Times, connected to the Pentagon, right-wing reporter.
He was saying the NSA is getting ready for this thing that's about to hit.
They almost went ahead and admitted their own guilt to a greater degree than they ended up being publicly accused, it sounds like.
Right.
So, as well, the NSA says that there's going to be a leak coming very soon, and they're gearing up for the fallout from it, and it's going to be detailing their operations, and it's going to come not from a leak like the Snowden leaks, where it's an insider, but from a security firm not operating out of the United States.
Of course, the following day, Kaspersky Labs, which is a Russian company, unveils this huge report on this equation group, which very much seems to be part of the NSA.
Yeah, just an office at Fort Meade.
Sounds like it.
All right.
All right.
Now, so, what's the big scandal?
What have they been up to?
Well, quite a bit, as it turns out.
They've got some of the most advanced malware on the planet, infecting computers, a lot of them industrial computers, foreign governments, some of them are just corporations that are seen as particularly likely to have useful information.
Some individuals are likely infected, too.
We don't really know the scope of the infections, because these are so advanced that they're very hard, even for really advanced antivirus systems, to detect.
Now, is it the kind of thing where AVG and those kinds of things, Avast, they'll be able to just update their database, and those programs will be able to find these now that they have been identified?
Or you're saying they might still be able to even hide from the seekers?
Well, hopefully, now that the Kaspersky report is out, they will be able to detect most of them in ways that they weren't able to before.
Some of the more advanced techniques, like overwriting the firmware on hard drives, I'm not sure it's even theoretically possible to develop antivirus software that could detect that, because a lot of the hard drive firmware is not meant to be read at an operating system level, let alone at an antivirus program level.
I see what you're saying.
That's the thing that's getting the big headlines, right, is the embedding it deep into the hard drives.
But now, so how is that accomplished?
They got spies that work at the factories, or they just sneak some code?
They break into the manufacturer's computers and sneak code into their firmware code, or what the hell?
No, it seems like this is, as I say, it's not meant to be accessed from an operating system level, the firmware, but theoretically it can be, and a lot of this access to the firmware is not well-documented.
A lot of it is manufacturer-to-manufacturer specific, but somehow this group, which I guess the somehow is because they're the NSA, was able to come up with how it's done on virtually every major manufacturer.
So once they compromise a computer, if it's a computer that they deem important enough, they can do this.
I see.
So it's still targeted for the owner of the computer itself.
They're not all leaving the factory like this with an embedded flaw.
Right.
So interestingly enough, they have intercepted some CD-ROMs of software from factories and infected them on their way to customers that were considered important targets.
So I wouldn't discount the possibility that if a target is getting a shipment of hard drives that they might intercept the shipment of hard drives and pre-install the firmware on it.
Yeah.
Didn't Greenwald or was it the Washington Post even published a picture of them doing it, right?
Opening up the packages?
Right.
And we've seen reports off and on on Twitter from people that are higher-ups in cybersecurity, private cybersecurity experts that have packages get this, they call it interdiction, where their package just gets inexplicably rerouted to Virginia on its way to them.
And then by the time it shows up, it's presumably been compromised.
I've seen reports of people ordering keyboards from places like Amazon.
It leaves on UPS like a normal shipment.
It's going from Texas to California.
For some reason, all of a sudden it takes a detour to Renton, Virginia, spends a couple days in Virginia and then gets sent to California.
And obviously you can't use that keyboard at that point because you know they installed something in it.
It's really incredible.
If you wrote a novel like this, I'd be like, I don't know, Jason, it doesn't really hold up, man.
But no.
Yeah, that's how they do it.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We'll be right back.
Y'all.
It's the great Jason Ditz from Antiwar.com.
News.antiwar.com.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I got Jason Ditz on the line.
He's the news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
And we're talking about the latest NSA scandal here.
And I want to see if I read you right here, if I understand you, right.
I forget if you said or not, Jason, but you're right here that they've been doing this.
The experts believe that this malware has been in existence since 2001 or even possibly as far back as 1996, that they've been able to successfully do this.
In other words, they've been getting away with blue bloody murder for a long, long time on this.
And then do I understand the cause and effect in the in the in the chronology here that the reason they're busted, that they're the ones who have done this is because they then use the same successful code as the basis of the Stuxnet virus that they used against Iran that had its flaws and escaped out into the wild and ended up getting caught.
And so this is an example of their, you know, horrible processes that they use, where they expose and sabotage and destroy a great, from their point of view, success in order to fail in another way.
Well, that's that's certainly part of it.
I mean, that's that's certainly where the obvious connections to the NSA and the US government come in.
But some of this is just plain bad luck with with their malware.
Some of the malware just just happened to finally get caught by security researchers.
And what what they do in this case, their malware is very sophisticated.
It starts at a operating system level, unless, of course, it's one of those cases where the hard drive is also compromised.
But it goes through several different checks to make sure that it's not going to be detected.
And if even one of those checks fails and there's even a hint of a chance that it's going to get detected, it self-destructs itself.
It wipes itself completely clean.
To prevent security companies from being able to figure out what happened.
Now, somewhere along the line, some of these just didn't do that right.
And that's how Kaspersky finally got a hold of some of this code, found some of these CD-ROMs that were supposedly Oracle-manufactured CD-ROMs, but were actually copies that had malware installed on them.
And they finally just started breaking through this and figuring out what they were doing.
Well, they sure sound like some mean mathematicians over there at the NSA.
Do the other hacker types, do they ever say, wow, man, now that's some badass malware or is it is it that much more advanced than malware produced out in the free market?
Well, in some ways, it seems to be some of the most advanced malware on the market because the NSA has access to these routes that, you know, a normal hacker organization isn't going to be able to reroute packages, and they're not going to be able to force hard drive manufacturers to hand over details of the inner workings of their hardware.
Some of this is things like that, but certainly some of the exploits that the NSA is taking advantage of here do end up getting copied by the private malware sector as well.
Yeah, that's the funny thing about the NSA, right?
They're in charge of cyber security and undermining all security at the same time.
I wonder which side's winning on any given day.
Right.
And RSA was considered one of the most reliable commercial security software for encryption for years.
And the NSA, it turned out, had paid them off to deliberately compromise some of the methods through which they were encrypting data so that the NSA could decrypt it at will.
So they've been deliberately going out of their way to make commercial software worse.
That's funny.
Yeah.
And, you know, I'm sure you know much better than me how all the stories about how the Internet companies have suffered so badly since all the Snowden revelations came out.
In terms of their international business and this, I saw some remarks on Twitter along those lines about these American hardware companies, too, now where just the U.S. government keeps making American business suspect in every other market on earth where people are just I mean, not like anybody else is necessarily immune from us, but with the Americans, you know, you're getting screwed.
It's basically the the brand that they're selling now.
Right.
And I think that's ultimately going to be if we ever get serious NSA reforms, that's going to have to be where it comes from, because I don't think politically there's enough clout anywhere else.
But if companies like IBM start losing international business because they simply don't trust Americans anymore because they know all American hardware is potentially compromised by the NSA, I think it's going to have to force at least some some reforms on the extent to which they do this.
Right.
Well, and, you know, if a corporation like that can't ask the empire to tone it down a little bit on an issue that is really killing them, then that just goes to show how big the empire has grown because it ain't like they've gotten any smaller.
Right.
And and we have seen, I mean, some limited extent, and there's been a lot of dispute in the financial markets as to how much of this is just coincidence and how much of it is because of the NSA.
But we have seen American hardware manufacturers losing some overseas business.
So I think it is starting to have an impact on the bottom line for companies like IBM.
Exactly how much IBM is probably in a better position to say than anybody.
But so far, they've been relatively mum on it.
And I think if it gets if it gets worse and it starts affecting more and more companies, you're going to start to see a backlash.
I'm surprised Microsoft, another one, isn't doing this because all of the all of the malware we're talking about with this with this new report is targeted at Microsoft's operating systems.
It hits literally every commercial Windows release since the mid 90s.
And, you know, that's that's a big incentive to use something other than Windows.
That's what I was thinking while I was reading it, I guess.
I don't know.
I always hear Linux described as, yeah, it's great.
But then when you download Adobe products from the Pirate Bay, they're not going to work right.
You know, you got to have Windows to run those.
Is that not right?
Well, I mean, that's probably beyond the scope of this discussion.
Certainly you can run them in Wine, which is a program within within Linux that allows you to run certain Windows programs.
I know it sounds like I got to be smarter to be able to do it.
That's what I've always thought about.
I don't want to I don't know if we want to get too into detail about how to do that with pirated versions of software or not, but it's it's definitely doable.
Hey, the Pirate Bay lives, man.
I ain't afraid to say I love those guys.
They got your first run movies, too, everybody.
All right.
Hey, listen, let me ask you about this real quick in a couple of minutes.
We got left here.
Tell me about Netanyahu.
And his leaks and the politics around Netanyahu's attempt to sabotage the Iran nuclear talks.
Well, it's really incredible.
He he openly said earlier this month.
I will do anything I can to sabotage these nuclear talks to make sure that no deal is reached.
I mean, it wasn't even him sort of hinting at it.
He flat out said, I'm going to do this.
Then a week later, it comes out, well, the U.S. isn't sharing all of its secret information about the talks with him anymore because they don't trust him not to leak parts to try to sabotage it.
And Netanyahu is acting shocked by this as though he didn't just say he was going to do literally anything he could to sabotage those talks.
Yeah, it was like the minutes from his cabinet meeting where he he went, he told Smithers, publish that in the Israeli Times or whatever, why not?
Right.
He's he's gone out of his way to make public his intention to sabotage U.S. diplomacy.
And yet he acts shocked that the U.S. isn't isn't giving him all the minutes of all their diplomatic details.
And I got my foot in a wrong.
It was Israel National News is where they got the best quote here about do anything that it'll take.
Well, anyway, I think it's blown up in his face.
And it's it's certainly a lot of fun to read your articles about it.
I know that.
Thanks very much, Jase, for coming on the show.
Appreciate it as always, dude.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
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