“If the tech industry is drawing one lesson from the latest WikiLeaks disclosures, it’s that data-scrambling encryption works, and the industry should use more of it,” Anick Jesdanun and Michael Liedtke report for The Associated Press.
“Documents purportedly outlining a massive CIA surveillance program suggest that CIA agents must go to great lengths to circumvent encryption they can’t break. In many cases, physical presence is required to carry off these targeted attacks,” Jesdanun and Liedtke report. “‘We are in a world where if the U.S. government wants to get your data, they can’t hope to break the encryption,’ said Nicholas Weaver, who teaches networking and security at the University of California, Berkeley. ‘They have to resort to targeted attacks, and that is costly, risky and the kind of thing you do only on targets you care about. Seeing the CIA have to do stuff like this should reassure civil libertarians that the situation is better now than it was four years ago.'”
“Encryption has grown so strong that even the FBI had to seek Apple’s help last year in cracking the locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers. Apple resisted what it considered an intrusive request, and the FBI ultimately broke into the phone by turning to an unidentified party for a hacking tool — presumably one similar to those the CIA allegedly had at its disposal,” Jesdanun and Liedtke report. “Government officials have long wanted to force tech companies to build ‘back doors’ into encrypted devices, so that the companies can help law enforcement descramble messages with a warrant. But security experts warn that doing so would undermine security and privacy for everyone. As Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out last year, a back door for good guys can also be a back door for bad guys. So far, efforts to pass such a mandate have stalled.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Plus, WikiLeaks data dump has identified unknown vulnerabilities that Apple can now fix and push out to end-users (something Google has difficulty doing with Android) and that will make iOS and macOS users even more secure!
SEE ALSO:
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Google’s Sundar Pichai: Android not designed to be safe; if I wrote malware, I’d target Android, too – February 27, 2014
Cisco: Android the target of 99 percent of world’s mobile malware – January 17, 2014
U.S. DHS, FBI warn of malware threats to Android mobile devices – August 27, 2013