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Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Germany used the Stuxnet worm to infect its citizens’ PCs, collecting passwords, watching behavior, listening to personal communications (bypassing Skype’s encryption)

readd more from Skype Journal

Mikko Hypponen told TEDxBrussels last year that while most online attacks comes from hacktivists like Anonymous driven by their causes and communities, financial criminals driven by greed, and by governments extending their power, the intrusions of governments aren’t considered cybercrime. “Nobody seems to be making a fuss about it.” “They are using technology against us, their citizens.” He used the example of DigiNotar from the Netherlands, a certificate authority hacked in late 2011. Their certs enable encryption of traffic between browsers and servers. Iran forged rogue DigiNotar certs, enabling snooping on private citizens. Pre-Arab-Spring Egypt spied on its citizens using software from the West. Germany used the Stuxnet worm to infect its citizens’ PCs, collecting passwords, watching behavior, listening to personal communications (bypassing Skype’s encryption). Mikko frames this as a tension between freedom and control, not privacy vs. security. “While we might trust our governments right here, right now, in 2011, any rights we give away, will be given away for good. Do we blindly trust any future government, a government we might have fifty years’ from now?”

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