DevNull127 writes: MIT has a long-standing tradition. High school seniors who’ve been accepted into next year’s class at MIT are informed on Pi Day (March 14th — that is, 3/14). And each year there’s also a slick video touting the URL where students can check whether they’ve been admitted. (Last year’s video documented a massive project that involved 30 sacks of…
Tag: National Security Agency
NSA Phone Surveillance Program Cost $100 Million, Yielded One Major Investigation
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program that accessed American citizens’ domestic phone calls and text messages resulted in only one investigation between 2015 and 2019 despite costing $100 million, a newly declassified study found. The report, which was produced by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and briefed to Congress…
A Group of Ex-NSA and Amazon Engineers Are Building a ‘GitHub For Data’
A group of engineers and developers with backgrounds from the National Security Agency, Google, and Amazon Web Services are working on Gretel, an early-stage startup that aims to help developers safely share and collaborate with sensitive data in real time. TechCrunch reports: It’s not as niche of a problem as you might think, said Alex Watson, one of the co-founders. Developers…
What America’s NSA Thinks of Python
“Now budding Python developers can read up on the National Security Agency’s own Python training materials,” reports ZDNet:
Software engineer Chris Swenson filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the NSA for access to its Python training materials and received a lightly redacted 400-page printout of the agency’s COMP 3321 Python training course. Swenson has since scanned the documents, ran OCR…
Proof-of-Concept Exploits Published for the Microsoft-NSA Crypto Bug
Security researchers have published proof-of-concept (PoC) code for exploiting a recently-patched vulnerability in the Windows operating system, a vulnerability that has been reported to Microsoft by the US National Security Agency (NSA). From a report: The bug, which some have started calling CurveBall, impacts CryptoAPI (Crypt32.dll), the component that handles cryptographic operations in the Windows OS. According to a high-level technical…
Russian Cyberattackers Stole Iranian Tools, Then Attacked 35 Countries
An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg News: A Russia-linked group is believed to have utilized Iranian tools to conduct cyber attacks against dozens of countries, in an apparent effort to mask their identities, according to joint advisories by the U.S. and the U.K. The group, known as Turla, used tools from suspected Iran-based hacking groups and deployed them against old and new…
United States Files Civil Lawsuit Against Edward Snowden
The United States today filed a lawsuit against Edward Snowden, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), who published a book entitled Permanent Record in violation of the non-disclosure agreements he signed with both CIA and NSA. From a report: The lawsuit alleges that Snowden published his book without submitting it…
Trump Administration Asks Congress To Reauthorize NSA’s Deactivated Call Records Program
Breaking a long silence about a high-profile National Security Agency program that sifts records of Americans’ telephone calls and text messages in search of terrorists, the Trump administration on Thursday acknowledged for the first time that the system has been indefinitely shut down — but asked Congress to extend its legal basis anyway. From a report: In a letter to Congress…
NSA’s Free Malware Research Tool Gains Traction, 6 Months On
In March the National Security Agency released an internal malware research tool for free to the public, a first for the secretive agency. Six months later, by most indications, the release is an even bigger event than the NSA thought. From a report: Some aspects of researching malware have long required expensive software. The release of Ghidra, the NSA tool, has…
NSA Improperly Collected US Phone Call Data After Saying Problem Was Fixed
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: The National Security Agency improperly collected phone call records of Americans last fall, months after a previous breach that compelled the agency to destroy millions of records from the contentious program, documents released Wednesday revealed. The redacted documents, obtained by the ACLU in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, do not indicate…