Rob Joyce runs the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations group, the spies who figure out how to hack systems, publishing a spook’s version of the Skymall catalog, filled with software and hardware that other spies can order for use.
TAO’s existence was only revealed in 2013 when leaked documents confirmed its existence. Joyce gave a presentation yesterday at the Enigma conference, a new security conference in San Francisco, explaining how TAO operates, and advising the attendees on how to prevent state-level actors from infiltrating and exploiting their networks and IT systems.
One revelation was that TAO is very patient: they will monitor adversaries’ systems as a matter of course, waiting for an opportunity – such as when a system malfunctions and the vendor asks the administrators to temporarily turn off password protection for a few moments.
Another favored mode of access is devices shared with workers’ children – the agency uses games on tablets that are brought between home and the office as a vector to penetrate the office networks. Joyce singled out Steam games as a favored vector for penetration.
Joyce did not talk about traffic injection, a tactic revealed in a separate Snowden leak: the agency and its Five Eyes allies have infiltrated fiber backbones, and are able to interrupt connections between sensitive systems and the public Internet and inject attack-code in those sessions.
Orange County has many claims to fame: Richard Nixon, the S&L scandal, subprime boiler-rooms, Disneyland, an airport honoring a cowboy named Marion, and now, the revelation that its police force secretly uses low-flying surveillance aircraft to break the encryption of thousands of cellphone users, track their movements, and intercept their communications.
The ACLU made the discovery after winning a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Anaheim police, forcing the force to disclose its use of “Dirtboxes” – DRTs, or Digital Receiver Technologies, are Boeing’s aircraft-mounted “Stingrays on steroids,” used to break the weak crypto on cellphones to listen in on their traffic and track their owners.
It’s not clear how or when or if the Anaheim PD uses the Dirtboxes. A 2014 memo complained that the equipment hadn’t been updated by Boeing. The department has a Cessna it uses for surveillance.
