| https://wikileaks.org/bnd-inquiry/docs/Sek/MAT%20A%20Sek-13-... That pdf from the NSA in the BND documents on Wikileaks clearly shows that NSA decrypts VPN, both IPSEC and PPTP, in real time and in bulk. The BND leaks came out what, over a year ago?
20,000 "hackers" attended the most recent Defcon. How not one person notices this slide deck, including Assange himself, is pretty shocking in itself. Hello, McFly, is anybody who's job earning 6 figures in Infosec paying attention? Why is the Computing industry so asleep at the wheel? Yet the Beogrammers cranking out widgets for Startup Inc think they're the smartest guys in the room. The arrogance from all the fake paper billions in this industry has made everyone lazy and dumb. NSA LOVES it when the sysadmins are lazy and dumb. They're so much easier to hunt. Of course that slide deck presents more technical questions than answers, but it proves VPN is no longer the Silver Bullet we once thought it was. "Well that's what they're supposed to do, NSA is just doing their job, so that's not my Department" you say. Yeah, well look at home careless NSA is with Cyberweapons and exploits.
They lost the Keys to the Kingdom to the Shadowbrokers, and god only knows what else they lost that they never tell us about. It is entirely reasonable to believe NSA lost their VPN exploit pack too. Try to imagine the chaos that's possible in a scenario like that. We might as well not have ANY security. Which is funny, because yet again, RMS was right! His tales about the MIT Media Kab in the 70's where he rejected new mandatory security policy and instead all users of the system shared the sysadmin's password. The honor system used to work. As a system of trust, high trust small tribes will always be better than any artificial security mechanisms. We as an industy need to somehow get back to that.
Trust in computing is only going to get worse, the hacks are going to become deeper as they copycat NSA's methods of industrial scale, and the consequences are truly unknowable. Skynet and Mr. Robot could end up looking like naive optimism. |