NSA has VPNs in Vulcan death grip—no, really, that’s what they call it

[securitybreach]

The National Security Agency’s Office of Target Pursuit (OTP) maintains a team of engineers dedicated to cracking the encrypted traffic of virtual private networks (VPNs) and has developed tools that could potentially uncloak the traffic in the majority of VPNs used to secure traffic passing over the Internet today, according to documents published this week by the German news magazine Der Speigel. A slide deck from a presentation by a member of OTP’s VPN Exploitation Team, dated September 13, 2010, details the process the NSA used at that time to attack VPNs—including tools with names drawn from Star Trek and other bits of popular culture.

 

OTP’s VPN exploit team had members assigned to branches focused on specific regional teams, as well as a “Cross-Target Support Branch” and a custom development team for building specialized VPN exploits. At the regional level, the VPN team representatives acted as liaisons to analysts, providing information on new VPN attacks and gathering requirements for specific targets to be used in developing new ones....

 

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/nsa-has-vpns-in-vulcan-death-grip-no-really-thats-what-they-call-it/

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Sadly, I'm not at all surprised about this.

[securitybreach]

Sadly, I'm not at all surprised about this.

 

Of course not......

[ebrke]

I wonder how comfortable this makes multi-national businesses (not that I really care) who use VPNs routinely. I can't believe they're short-sighted enough to think that only the NSA can do this.