[ISN] SpyPhone: Pentagon Spooks Want New Tools for Mobile 'Exploitation'

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 03:47:51 -0600 (CST)
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/12/dia-devices/

By Spencer Ackerman
Danger Room
Wired.com
12.13.12

The Pentagon wants to upgrade its spy corps. And one of its first jobs 
will be finding out what’s on your iPhone.

If the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) gets its way, it’ll send an 
expanded cadre of spies around the world to scope out threats to the 
U.S. military. And it won’t just be a larger spy team, it’ll be a 
geekier one. The DIA wants “technical exploitation” tools that can 
efficiently access the data of people the military believes to be 
dangerous once their spies collect it.

That’s according to a request for information the DIA sent to industry 
on Wednesday. The agency wants better gear for “triage and automation, 
advanced technical exploitation of digital media, advanced areas of 
mobile forensics, software reverse engineering, and hardware 
exploitation, reverse engineering, and mobile applications development & 
engineering.” If the DIA runs across digitized information, in other 
words, it wants to make rapid use of it.

One of the emphasized cases here is “captured/seized media.” Think, for 
instance, of all the flash drives, hard drives and CDs that Navy SEALs 
seized during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Flynn wants to 
understand both the text they’d contain, through “automation support to 
enable rapid triage,” and their subtexts or metadata, using 
“steganography” tools to decipher coded messages and “deep analysis of 
malicious code/executables.” And that’s on top of “deep hardware 
exploitation of complex media with storage capacity” and 
reverse-engineering tools “to discover firmware artifacts.”

[...]


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Received on Fri Dec 14 2012 - 01:47:51 PST

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