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NSA’s Surveillance State: Hacking Keyboards, USB Drives, Firmware, Monitors and More

Wednesday, February 26, 2014 14:52

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(Before It's News)

By Ezra Van Auken

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

What’s been said about the National Security Agency (NSA) since the Edward Snowden leaks is certainly frightening to privacy and civil libertarian advocates. Whether these leaks are a positive or negative move by whistleblower is debatable, but the fact remains that what Snowden did has changed the landscape of government discussion.

NSA’s Surveillance State Revealed

Digging right in…. In December 2013, computer hackers and gurus converged on Brazil for the 2013 Chaos Communication Conference (CCC), the thirtieth year in a row the event has taken place. Of course though, this year, government spying revelations have hit tech junkies and privacy backers like a ton of bricks. Featured at the CCC event were speakers well known to the current tech community such as Jacob Applebaum and Julian Assange.

Given the current government surveillance debate, Applebaum and Assage were pretty much expected, considering both have dealt heavily with intrusive spying. During the event, Assange video-chatted into the Brazilian conference and offered solution, telling hackers and computer gurus to fight against state-sanctioned surveillance. What Applebaum had to offer though, is what brought down the house for listeners.

Just moments before Applebaum’s CCC speech, Germany’s newspaper Der Spiegel dropped new revelations – probably the most revealing yet – showing the NSA’s vast backdoor access into systems worldwide. Applebaum, member of the Tor project, which is an Internet web browser dedicated to increasing anonymity, decided to gear his speech around the latest revelations. What came during Applebaum’s hour-long speech turned wake-up call, shook the room and YouTube views.

To begin, Applebaum revealed a handful of programs, tools and backdoor hacks, which the NSA uses to monitor people’s systems and data. Let’s take a detailed look into each.

The RAGEMASTER Implant

The first newly leaked NSA component called “RAGEMASTER” is a hardware implant that detects and seizes image signals from VGA monitors. The implant itself is hidden in the ferrite insulation of the monitor cable, behind the plug. What is even more mind numbing is the way it works.

When RAGEMASTER is illuminated by the radar unit, the signal is inflected with the red video information. As explained on the released slide:

This information is re-radiated, where it is picked up at the radar, demodulated, and passed onto the processing unit and an external monitor

This then recreates the horizontal and vertical sync of the monitor, giving NSA personnel the ability to see exactly what’s on the monitor.

The SURLYSPAWN Hack

Now that we’ve learned how the NSA is able to view exactly what is on your monitor, let’s take a look at “SURLYSPAWN”. This particular hack allows NSA personnel to record and analyze keystrokes, even when the computer isn’t connected to the Internet. SURLYSPAWN is a hardware implant as well, and assists in the transmitting of what a user is typing. The slide noted that:

An invisible signal emitted by the implant is modified by every keystroke, and then a radar signal emitted by a device located outside the building makes the implant’s invisible signal visible.

Once the signal is visible, personnel around the target can see everything being stroked on the keyboard. Using similar processes as RAGEMASTER, the SURLYSPAWN hack requires the implant onto a keyboard.