A report released today dives deep into technical aspects of a Linux backdoor now tracked as Bvp47 that is linked to the Equation Group, the advanced persistent threat actor tied to the U.S. National Security Agency.
Some components in the Shadow Brokers leaks were integrated into the Bvp47 framework - dewdrop and solutionchar_agents - indicating that the implant covered Unix-based operating systems like mainstream Linux distributions, Junipers JunOS, FreeBSD, and Solaris.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/nsa-linked-bvp47-linux-backdoor-widely-undetected-for-10-years/dewdrop and solutionchar_agents... Damn, you've got to love the way they name these exploits.
Another confirmation of the fact that there's only one way to ensure complete privacy/anonymity/security: stay offline & use a paper wallet. Jimbo knows.
The attack vectors on mainstream operating systems is so wide no one person can battle them all anymore.
True... If backdoors and implanted code can be present in
open-source operating systems for such a long time without being detected, just imagine what could be present in a closed-source OS, such as Windows... I don't think any currently available OS, even Linux, can be trusted.
I use the data encryption s/w VeraCrypt (the successor of TrueCrypt), which is open-source (obviously, or I would not trust it), but I do not have the time and possibly the capability to go through the code line-by-line to verify that there are no backdoors. Researchers/experts worldwide are supposedly scrutinizing the code for such malicious content and will report any findings, which reassures me, to a degree, but it looks like such malicious code could be obfuscated in such a way as to avoid detection for a long time.
Seems like nothing can really be called 100% secure... Maybe a one-time pad... Or Bitcoin.