From PC World: In addition to having its own arsenal of digital weapons, the U.S. National Security Agency reportedly hijacks and repurposes third-party malware.
The NSA is using its network of servers around the world to monitor botnets made up of thousands or millions of infected computers. When needed, the agency can exploit features of those botnets to insert its own malware on the already compromised computers, through a technology codenamed Quantumbot, German new magazine Der Spiegel reported Sunday.
One of the secret documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published by Der Spiegel contains details about a covert NSA program called DEFIANTWARRIOR that’s used to hijack botnet computers and use them as “pervasive network analysis vantage points” and “throw-away non-attributable CNA [computer network attack] nodes.”
This means that if a user’s computer is infected by cybercriminals with some malware, the NSA might step in, deploy their own malware alongside it and then use that computer to attack other interesting targets. Those attacks couldn’t then be traced back to the NSA.
According to the leaked document, this is only done for foreign computers. Bots that are based in the U.S. are reported to the FBI Office of Victim Assistance.
The NSA also intercepts and collects data that is stolen by third-party malware programs, especially those deployed by other foreign intelligence agencies, if it is valuable. It refers to this practice as “fourth party collection.”
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