Spies Hack. But the Best Spies Hack Other Spies. (bleepingcomputer.com) 26
Andrada Fiscutean, writing for BleepingComputer: When cyber spies known as NetTraveler were busy snooping on hundreds of government and military victims in 40 countries a few years ago, little did they know that another hacking group was probably watching them. During their investigation of NetTraveler, Kaspersky Lab researchers discovered an unusual backdoor that could have helped another attacker access one of their main servers, and then use the group's infrastructure or steal data. In the past five years, cybersecurity experts have encountered several cases in which espionage groups likely pilfered one another's spoils, being interested in getting both data and hacking tools. Kaspersky Researchers Costin Raiu and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade talked about such incidents on Wednesday during the Virus Bulletin 2017 Conference in Madrid, Spain. Government hackers sometimes "obtain data by stealing it from someone else, who took it in the first place from the victims," Raiu told Bleeping Computer in an email interview before the conference. He and Guerrero-Saade believe that citizens' personal data could fall into the hands of a foreign intelligence agency that's better equipped than the domestic one. The experts based their presentation on so far unpublished research that shows how spies walk off with other spies' data and tools, gaining valuable insight into a foreign service's intelligence collection methods, recruitment tactics, procedural guidelines, and the targets operatives have to monitor.
MAD Magazine? Spy vs Spy? (Score:2, Funny)
MAD Magazine? Spy vs Spy?
Re: (Score:2)
He who hacks last (Score:2)
Hacks Best.
Or:
Who watches the watchers?
James Bond... (Score:3)
From what I've learned from watching James Bond you need to replace the word "Hack" in the title to another four letter word ending in "ck".
PROTIP: Stealing from theives (Score:3)
It was always easier to sniff TOR, run honeypots, and google strings from popular webshells than it was to find and hack something on your own.
One person could easily have the intrusion capability of a whole team worth of hackers. Who knows how long it takes to build a nice botnet but it takes a few hours to find one and steal it.
The second mouse (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
gets the cheese,
and the early worm gets eaten.
You think you're so smart (Score:2)
But it's spies all the way down.
Re: (Score:3)
Hubris does play a role... exploit and sniffing software can sometimes be way more vulnerable than the software it targets because the authors are coming at it from the mentality of "haha these guys write horrible code I can exploit" but rely almost entirely on the idea that their tool is too obscure to have been itself exploited for their own security.
Re: (Score:2)
This is a measure of bureaucratic hubris. When you do not separate attack from defence in electronics, defence will routinely fail. What happens in offence get the most funding and the best staff and the most corrupt management. Why corrupt management because it is an easy scam to look good, it is accepted that you routinely fail and rarely succeed, with those success counted way above what they actually produce. On the defence side, you get low funding and it is a dead end, you are expected to routinely su
The term is . . . (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Digging (Score:2)
And the Greatest of Spies... (Score:1)
...hack the spies who are hacking other spies.
And the the ultimate spy hacks that spy.