Your TV is watching you
Love them or hate them as I write this WikiLeaks has just dropped a large batch of new documents for all the world to see, this time CIA secret materials. The part that has caught most attention is the information on how to spy on people, using commonly found household items. Apple and Android devices, Samsung TV’s (glad I recently changed to Sony), Macs and Windows devices can all be used to spy on people — no one in the US of course — and pass info back to the CIA. There are also different malware products that can be used to infect all manner of devices including a USB stick that can be used to jump that critical air-gap between your system and the outside world. For anyone living in the real world none of this will be of any surprise. All the leaks really do is confirm what everyone knows and every country does.
The 8,761 leaked files are code named “Year Zero” and indicate that the CIA lost control over some of their creations. The files were originally doing the rounds among the Black Hats hacker community before parts of the information was passed on to WikiLeaks. It turns out that by the end of 2016 the CIA through their Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) division produced thousands of hacking vectors writing more code than is used to run a major social media platform. To put it another way, the CIA had their own version of the NSA running without oversight or accountability at the same time duplicating much of what the NSA does.
WikiLeaks did not publish the how to do it part of the documents, stating that they had filtered out the practical cyberweapon pieces, presumably to use for themselves? WikiLeaks also redacted the targets of these malware attacks, for the time being that is. The Year Zero portion is part of a larger Vault 7 collection. The usual suspects are saying that the source of the material is the Russians but this makes no sense, if they had captured the info they would have held onto it and quietly kept it all for themselves. The good news is that most of the malware requires physical interaction with devices.
If you have a spare US$50,000, being 50 Bitcoins, cybercrooks will sell you some “undetectable” Mac malware. The claim is that Proton will take over a macOS device without being detected. If I was Apple I would buy the product and build in protection for their users. The malware is a remote access Trojan (RAT). Since you can get these for free this is just a very expensive rat.
Firefox has version 52 out and ready for use. The new version bans all plug-ins except Flash. This means no Silverlight, Java or Acrobat. The new version will warn you if you are visiting a non-HTTPS website. If you want to know more you can find it on the Mozilla site. I still use the Firefox browser and on occasion Google’s Chrome and even less often IE. The reason is that some sites still work best with IE and when I want a Cookie-free experience I use Chrome. Firefox has all the ad-blocking and script blocking facilities engaged for safer browsing.
Personal computer sales are still on the way down but an estimated 280 million will still be sold this year with the biggest providers being Lenovo, Dell and HP. When it comes to more portable devices with the advances in USB 3.1, USB-C and Thunderbolt, the dock may be a thing of the past replaced by a cable dock, mostly based on USB-C. It is predicted that Thunderbolt will replace HDMI sometime but I think that is wishful thinking by Intel. Regular USB will stay for a while yet because of the plethora of peripherals that abound across the globe.
The PC will shrink in size, notebooks will get thinner and the all-in-one, built-into-the-monitor range, will continue to grow. The standard RAM is still around 4GB but companies will now offer 16GB as a standard option for both i5 and i7 based machines. 10GB Ethernet is also staring to appear on the top end units. The big three will still be offering Windows 7, if you have the license, and even 8.1, but for the latter why bother? For the rest it will be Windows 10 as the standard.
Something not found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is access to the internet. In India the state of Kerala has declared that all of its citizens have a right to access the internet. Free internet will be provided to 2 million poor people. This is a good thing. Access to the internet is not a right in places like China, North Korea and several others around the planet.
James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years’ standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.