Month: February 2017

On Monday, The Washington Post reported one of the most stunning breaches of security ever. A former NSA contractor, the paper said, stole more than 50 terabytes of highly sensitive data. According to one source, that includes more than 75 percent of the hacking tools belonging to the Tailored Access Operations. TAO is an elite hacking unit that develops and deploys some of the world's most sophisticated software exploits.

Attorneys representing Harold T. Martin III have previously portrayed the former NSA contractor as a patriot who took NSA materials home so that he could become better at his job. Meanwhile, investigators who have combed through his home in Glen Burnie, Maryland, remain concerned that he passed the weaponized hacking tools to enemies. The theft came to light during the investigation of a series of NSA-developed exploits that were mysteriously published online by a group calling itself Shadow Brokers.

Investigators have floated several theories. One holds that Martin directly provided the tools to the person or group responsible for the leak. An alternate theory is that the leakers obtained the software by hacking Martin. As reported in October, Martin was charged with felony theft of government property and unauthorized removal and retention of classified material. Monday's Washington Post article says that prosecutors will likely file charges of "violating the Espionage Act by 'willfully' retaining information that relates to the national defense, including classified data such as NSA hacking tools and operational plans against 'a known enemy' of the United States."

Enlarge / Anas Modamani outside court today in Wurzburg, Germany. (credit: Getty Images)

Anas Modamani, a Syrian refugee living in Germany, went to court against Facebook today. He argued that the online giant didn't do enough to stop his image from being associated with bogus news stories about terrorism.

In 2015, Modamani snapped a selfie with German chancellor Angela Merkel when she visited the shelter where he was living in Berlin. At the time, he was excited. The photo ended up on on television and on the front pages of newspapers. The publicity led to him being taken in by a German foster family, he told Deutsche Welle.

"For the first five months, I thought it was a good luck charm," Modamani told CNN. "But now I think it's bad luck."

While developing a tool for evaluating mobile application security, researchers at Sudo Security Group Inc. found out something unexpected. Seventy-six popular applications in Apple's iOS App Store, they discovered, had implemented encrypted communications with their back-end services in such a way that user information could be intercepted by a man-in-the-middle attack. The applications could be fooled by a forged certificate sent back by a proxy, allowing their Transport Layer Security to be unencrypted and examined as it is passed over the Internet.

The discovery was initially the result of bulk analysis done by Sudo's verify.ly, a service that performs bulk static analysis of application binaries from Apple's App Store. Will Strafach, president of Sudo, verified the applications discovered by the system were vulnerable in the lab, using a network proxy configured with its own Secure Socket Layer certificate.

In the post about his findings being published today, Strafach wrote: