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British PCs can now hack your personal computer without a warrant
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Comments (16)
It's a bit boggling how easy it is for the various $sods to get away with this cr@p.
In a funny way, I'm actually enjoying it.
It's a continuation of the silly good guys/bad guys theme....
Focus on the "bad guys", and you'll be unprepared when the "good guys" stick one in your back.
It's a continuation of the silly good guys/bad guys theme....
Focus on the "bad guys", and you'll be unprepared when the "good guys" stick one in your back.
Wait, what constitutes the *real* issue for LXer.com readers?
What if you don't hold UK citizenship (disclaimer: I don't). Can the various British police agencies perform a "remote search" on my PC? What if I visit a UK web site (i.e my favorite on-line trade rag, The Register)? How can they determine my citizenship? Surely my IP address doesn't contain such an indicator.
Secondarily, can the British police "remote search" my linux boxes? I read /var/log/httpd/access_log and /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog regularly. I run "last" every once in a while to see who logs in from where. Unless they physically break in to my house and put on a hardware keylogger, I'll probably notice the intrusion. I also semi-regularly spill coffee in my keyboard, and thus have numerous spare, semi-working keyboards that I trade around on a regular basis. I might notice a hardware keylogger with the next coffee spill.
Honestly, it seems to me that any such "remote search" will hose up my computers, one way or the other and I'll notice it (maybe as a "bug" or "crash") and fix it.
Tertiarily, will all the various "anti"-virus vendors have to attain complicity in this? If they A-V programs don't detect the British Police Trojan, can't the VX-ers use that as a way for them to stay undetected themselves? How can they enforce this on my Slackware systems, where I regularly decide to replace packages like "psmisc", "e2fsprogs" and compile my own, slimmed-down kernels?
I gues that I don't understand how the British Police will accomplish this on a technical basis. Are British Citizens required to run some specific software? That's the only way I can see it working.
What if you don't hold UK citizenship (disclaimer: I don't). Can the various British police agencies perform a "remote search" on my PC? What if I visit a UK web site (i.e my favorite on-line trade rag, The Register)? How can they determine my citizenship? Surely my IP address doesn't contain such an indicator.
Secondarily, can the British police "remote search" my linux boxes? I read /var/log/httpd/access_log and /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog regularly. I run "last" every once in a while to see who logs in from where. Unless they physically break in to my house and put on a hardware keylogger, I'll probably notice the intrusion. I also semi-regularly spill coffee in my keyboard, and thus have numerous spare, semi-working keyboards that I trade around on a regular basis. I might notice a hardware keylogger with the next coffee spill.
Honestly, it seems to me that any such "remote search" will hose up my computers, one way or the other and I'll notice it (maybe as a "bug" or "crash") and fix it.
Tertiarily, will all the various "anti"-virus vendors have to attain complicity in this? If they A-V programs don't detect the British Police Trojan, can't the VX-ers use that as a way for them to stay undetected themselves? How can they enforce this on my Slackware systems, where I regularly decide to replace packages like "psmisc", "e2fsprogs" and compile my own, slimmed-down kernels?
I gues that I don't understand how the British Police will accomplish this on a technical basis. Are British Citizens required to run some specific software? That's the only way I can see it working.
phsolide --
Making sense of what they get might be a problem, but it sounds like part of this, at least, is simply a version of "war driving".
Making sense of what they get might be a problem, but it sounds like part of this, at least, is simply a version of "war driving".
@phsolide: This applied to wifi hacking, from the article. They're not going to hack you over the internet, but hack into your computer(s) through your wifi.
Quoting:Back then the police decided that BT users had given implied consent for BT to allow Phorm to secretly monitor their Internet usage, arguing that no offence had been committed as the trials were in the interest of the users.
That is actually the scariest part of the whole article, I read this, in essence, if you allow your computer to be infected with some malware/virii, even unknowingly, then you have given implied consent for anyone to remotely access and monitor your computer. That I believe is the backdoor that the EU could take.
wifi, folks in this day and age, not knowing that you need to lock down your wifi connections is like not knowing that hot coffee is hot, and hot things can hurt if spilled. Although the US legal system doesnt recognize that fact.
Dino, here's a quote from someone who echo's exactly what you said:
...darn, I just can't find it. Basically, it was "Be careful when you pick your friends. No enemy will do you as much damage as a false friend."
But I did find a few other ones from the same source:
http://www.lneilsmith.org/tactical.html
Choose your allies carefully: it's highly unlikely that you'll ever be held morally, legally, or historically accountable for the actions of your enemies.
Choose your enemies carefully: you'll probably be known much better and far longer for who they were, than for anything else you ever managed to accomplish.
...darn, I just can't find it. Basically, it was "Be careful when you pick your friends. No enemy will do you as much damage as a false friend."
But I did find a few other ones from the same source:
http://www.lneilsmith.org/tactical.html
Choose your allies carefully: it's highly unlikely that you'll ever be held morally, legally, or historically accountable for the actions of your enemies.
Choose your enemies carefully: you'll probably be known much better and far longer for who they were, than for anything else you ever managed to accomplish.
Quoting:Wait...what's that you say?
Brussels? London?
Dino, Dino, Dino... I suggest you read news more often, then you would have noticed amongst others it were the Germans who started this (again), I think in 2006/7 or so. Spying on citizens by the government and other citizens is just something that happens in the best democratic republics / monarchies, like in the Deutsche Democratic Republic.
Ah the good ole DDR! Stasi Memories.....
Kommen Sie zu uns sonst kommen wir zu Ihnen
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-33892.html#bac...
Kommen Sie zu uns sonst kommen wir zu Ihnen
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-33892.html#bac...
Hans --
A seed that falls on infertile ground will not grow.
***cough*** Brussels ***cough*** London ***cough***
Amsterdam?
A seed that falls on infertile ground will not grow.
***cough*** Brussels ***cough*** London ***cough***
Amsterdam?
As a UK resident (and UK citizen) this is nothing more than a joke. The Keystone Cops 'hacking' (s/be 'cracking' btw) getting past my firewalled Snort box while I browse behind my TOR/privoxy-enabled, no-scripted Firefox running on my SElinux-enabled PC? Pull the other one.
Shag, what about your neighbor, the windows user whose wireless network is wide open.
Az, UserFriendly had a _fantastic_ comic or two on that subject in the last week. I recommend userfriendly.org highly.
@Bob: It's been running all week. The start is here: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20090105
azerthoth, there's only so much I can do. His Netgear DG834T still has the default 'password' for the 'admin' web login and he's running 802.11g completely open (not even WEP). Anyways, I still need his network so that I test my own firewall and IDS with Nmap.
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Wait...what's that you say?
Brussels? London?
Aren't those in the EU?
Never mind.