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[FYI] (Fwd) [Spy News] Spy virus (fwd)




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Date sent:      	Wed, 5 Dec 2001 14:15:31 +0200 (EET)
From:           	Jei <jei@cc.hut.fi>
To:             	eurorights@eurorights.org, ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk
Subject:        	[Spy News] Spy virus (fwd)
Send reply to:  	ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 22:41:48 +0100
From: Mario Profaca <Mario.Profaca@zg.tel.hr>
Reply-To: spynews-owner@yahoogroups.com
To: "[Spy News]" <spynews@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [Spy News] Spy virus

Spy virus
http://it.mycareer.com.au/news/2001/12/04/FFXNNPJ4RUC.html

Tuesday 04 December, 2001
By BARRY PARK
The Age

Would a software vendor cooperate with the United States Government to
spy on its citizens? Debate has raged in the past week over the
existence of a virus named Magic Lantern, supposedly part of a United
States Federal Bureau of Investigation project known as Cyber Knight,
itself part of the wider Carnivore eavesdropping project.

Is the US federal agency developing a trojan that would log users
keystrokes and then seeking the cooperation of US companies to
overlook its activities?

The furore has its roots in a small story run in the Washington Post
last week, and later picked up by MSNBC, announcing that global
anti-virus software maker McAfee had held talks with the FBI about
allowing a back door a software loophole to let the FBI slip a virus
into remote computers undetected.

McAfee has since denied any such talks with the FBI took place. The
journalist who broke the news, Associated Press Ted Bridis, stands by
his story, saying the information came from a senior McAfee officer.

However, online IT news portal The Register said last week that
another US anti-virus software maker, Symantec, had said it would not
update its virus definitions to detect an FBI-sponsored trojan. The
article says Symantec has contacted the US federal agency but was yet
to hear back from it.

What apparently has the FBI worried is the increasing use of
encryption, especially the widespread availability of encryption
software, such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP).

Bridis said the FBI was developing the Magic Lantern trojan as a way
of discovering the private PGP key used by targeted systems, an act
that, when combined with that systems public PGP key, opens data to
scrutiny. Keylogging the private PGP key is faster than decrypting a
message by reverse-engineering the public key.

MSNBC said the Carnivore beige boxes, developed by the FBI and used to
filter data packets of interest from the Internet, are useless against
encrypted data.

US Government officials have also admitted that the USA Patriot Act,
anti-terrorism legislation introduced after the September 11 terrorist
attacks, has helped lawmakers to achieve new levels of gathering
electronic information.

A US Senate hearing was told last week that the new laws had already
been used to obtain information from a cable company that provides
Internet services. Under previous legislation, US cable companies were
not obliged to hand over information.

The Senate inquiry into anti-terrorism legislation also makes
reference to court orders seeking logs from out-of-district Internet
service providers, as well as calling on emergency disclosure
provisions to support the use of information provided by an ISP.

Even with the power granted by the USA Patriot Act, the reach of the
US Governments cybercrime legislative power may get even wider. An
amendment being sought to US federal law proposes changes to what is
defined as a protected computer. Current legislation broadly limits
the protection to US-based computers. However, if the amendment to the
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is approved, US authorities will be able
to hunt down and prosecute international crackers attacking equipment
outside US physical borders if any part of the data used in the crack
passes through US-owned servers or routers.


---

FYI: This mail sent by Mario Profaca is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.303 / Virus Database: 164 - Release Date: 24. 11. 01


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