Jacob Applebaum's talk at the Chaos Communications Congress

[Magda Hassan]

Internet freedom activist, hacker, and independent journalist Jake Appelbaum was on the team of Der Spiegel reporters that published explosive stories last weekend about the NSA's 'Tailored Access Operations' division, a group of hackers dedicated to finding innovative ways to implant malware on machines and in computer networks. In hacker language, they are the masters of pwnage.
Shortly after publishing the stories on TAO, Appelbaum delivered the above talk at the Chaos Communications Congress, a hacker conference held annually in Hamburg, Germany. Appelbaum describes in detail how the NSA's smartest hackers and engineers devise technologies and solutions to get inside the most heavily protected computers and networks, all over the world. (Here's a PDF file containing images Appelbaum showed in the talk, which come from an internal NSA catalog which advertises spygear for use by US government agents.)
But Appelbaum's contribution to the subject is only part of the story. Security researchers Claudio Guarnieri and Morgan Marquis-Boire, who have done extensive research on the Gamma corporation and its FinFisher malware product line, gave part one of the talk. Their session is the video at the very top of this page.
If you care about privacy in the digital world, find a couple of hours to watch these essential contributions, from practitioners doing the most cutting-edge, public research in the field of internet security and privacy. What you'll learn will shock and disturb you.
While you're watching, keep this in mind:

The NSA/TAO brochure revealing their cool hacking/surveillance products is from 2007. Imagine what they have now.
Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) December 30, 2013