In July
2013, GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security
Agency, forced journalists at the London headquarters of The Guardian
to completely obliterate the memory of the computers on which they
kept copies of top secret documents provided to them by former NSA
contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.
However, in
its attempt to destroy information, the GCHQ also revealed intriguing
details about what it did and why.
Two
technologists, Mustafa Al-Bassam and Richard Tynan, visited The
Guardian headquarters last year to examine the remnants of the
devices. Al-Bassam is an ex-hacker who two years ago pled guilty to
joining attacks on Sony, Nintendo, and other companies, and now
studies computer science at King’s College; Tynan is a technologist
at Privacy International with a PhD in computer science. The pair
concluded, first, that GCHQ wanted The Guardian to completely destroy
every possible bit of information the news outlet might retain; and
second, that GCHQ’s instructions may have inadvertently revealed
all the locations in your computer where information may be covertly
stored.
[...]
What
Al-Bassam and Tynan theorized was that the government may have
targeted parts of the Apple devices that it “doesn’t trust”:
pieces that can retain bits of electronic information even after the
hard drive is obliterated.
[...]
These hidden
memory storage locations could theoretically be taken advantage of,
Tynan and Al-Bassam said, by a computer’s owner, hackers, or even
the government itself, either during its design phase or after the
computer is purchased. The Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab
has presented evidence that an organization it calls “Equation
Group,” and which it suspects is connected to the NSA, has
developed ways to “create an invisible, persistent area hidden
inside [a computer’s] hard drive” that would be virtually
undetectable by the computer’s owner. This area could be used “to
save exfiltrated information which can be later retrieved by the
attackers.”
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