The NSA doesn't just hack into the computers of politicians, or innocent citizens. It also piggybacks on the work professionals hackers. We call them professionals because they hack to earn money. Now why is the secret service beating other hackers? But why does she want to gain control of the already hacked machines and use them for her own purposes.
This is one of the amazing facts that emerged from Edward Snowden's latest leaks.
The big revelation in today's Intercept story is that the NSA, in July 2010, had built the TURBINE system designed to upgrade sophisticated computer hacking operations, as we reported in a previous post. The NSA has infected 85.000 to 100.000 systems with malicious "implants," according to Snowden's previous stories. With the new command platform and control TURBINE of the NSA, the service may well increase and manage "millions of implants" at once.
The TURBINE platform achieves "the creation of a system that automatically controls group implants and not individually".
This is precisely the solution that hackers use to massively control many systems. When vulnerable Windows appeared ten years ago, hackers could infect very easily. It was difficult to control them massively.
So black hat developers invented the "bot" - a type of malware that silently exists in a hacker-controlled IRC chat room. Infected systems are connected in the same chat room. From there, the hacker can issue bulk commands to all hacked computers at once, or to a subset of them.
Large modern botnets can contain 2 million hacked machines, and are used for click fraud, denial of service attacks, password theft, bitcoin miningand other things.
It is logical that the NSA would like to take advantage of such a solution. Interestingly, the NSA did not simply create its own botnet. Since August 2007, he has been creating the QUANTUMBOT program, which is dedicated to taking over the management and control systems of the existing and inactive bots. A top-secret slide describes the program as "highly successful" with "over 140.000 bots"
It is not clear what the NSA is doing with the 140.000 accidentally infected machines. Hackers are fighting for control of botnets all the time, because a good botnet can make money. But the NSA has money. Computer security researcher Nicholas Weaver theorizes that the service could use bots as cover - if you find your computer blocked by a known botnet hacker, you will not suspect that the most advanced information service in the world is behind it. At least, not until now.
The publication was made by Wired
