"Snowden used inexpensive software to access secret files" ?

[Andre Kesteloot]

*Press Trust of India | Washington - Feb 09 , 2014*

Last Update at 19:45 IST


    'Snowden used inexpensive software to access secret files'


US whistleblower Edward Snoweden, who honed his hacking skills in India 
</search?type=news&q=India>, used inexpensive and widely available 
software to "scrape" the National Security Agency's networks, according 
to American intelligence officials probing his high-profile case.

Using "web crawler" software designed to search, index and back up a 
website, 30-year-old Snowden "scraped data out of our systems" while he 
went about his day job, The New York Times quoted a senior intelligence 
official as saying.

"We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and 
downloading this much material in sequence," the official said.

The process by which Snowden gained access to a huge trove of the 
country's most highly classified documents, he said, was "quite 
automated" and the former CIA contractor kept at it even after he was 
briefly challenged by agency officials.

The findings are striking because the NSA's mission includes protecting 
America's most sensitive military and intelligence computer systems from 
cyber attacks, especially the sophisticated attacks that emanate from 
Russia and China, the report said.

Snowden's "insider attack," by contrast, was hardly sophisticated and 
should have been easily detected, investigators found.

Snowden had broad access to the NSA's complete files because he was 
working as a technology contractor for the agency in Hawaii, helping to 
manage the agency's computer systems in an outpost that focuses on China 
and North Korea.

A web crawler, also called a spider, automatically moves from website to 
website, following links embedded in each document, and can be 
programmed to copy everything in its path.

Snowden appears to have set the parameters for the searches, including 
which subjects to look for and how deeply to follow links to documents 
and other data on the NSA's internal networks. US intelligence officials 
told a House hearing last week that he accessed roughly 1.7 million files.

According to media reports, Snowden had traveled to India in 2010. He 
spent six days in New Delhi </search?type=news&q=New+Delhi>, taking 
courses in "ethical hacking," where he learned advanced techniques for 
breaking into computer systems and exploiting flaws in software, the 
reports said.

Among the materials prominent in the Snowden files are the agency's 
shared "wikis," databases to which intelligence analysts, operatives and 
others contributed their knowledge. Some of that material indicates that 
Snowden "accessed" the documents. But experts say they may well have 
been downloaded not by him but by the programme acting on his behalf.

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73
André N4ICK



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