PcTek9
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
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- Location
- Mobile, AL
By now we are all familiar with the invasive security threat called usb drive littering. Criminals who want to invade a system, may walk through a large parking lot dropping usb devices near employee cars with illegal intentions in mind. This type of seeding plays upon the natural responses of a given population of people through psychology. Some might turn in the usb drives to lost and found, others will be overjoyed at the prospect of a free drive, and some will out of curiosity go right into their work place and plug it into a computer in the hope of finding out who it belongs to, or what information it contains. We know about disabling the autorun functions of usb sticks in systems policy as a basic security precaution, but of course there are ways around that with some of the newest threats that have come out, simply completely disobeying the policy and doing what it wants outside the computers malware/antivirus grasp through specially designed self replicating malware that can infect other usb devices that affects a certain area of the usb hardware which is untouchable by current antiviral/malware software.
A new player has entered the field. Edward Snowden leaked nsa information which has been reverse engineered by several individuals to create usb sticks and other devices that have a micro radio transmitter/receiver built in, but it's made from... software. This technology possessed by nsa is called "software defined radio". Imagine a usb drive that can be changed on the fly to transmit am, fm, bluetooth, and even gsm. How is that possible? In the past we used to use discrete components such as transistors, resistors, capacitors, etc, to create radios. But now thanks to Edward Snowden, we find NSA has created such systems which by using software can create virtualized componentry using digital signal processing to change the waveform - this includes, the frequency, amplitude, broadcast power, etc, all from a software perspective. If a security analyst were to find a transmitter using a frequency scanner, the frequency could instantly be changed to another area of the spectrum through software, and the signal would be lost.
Radio transmitters originally worked by taking a signal and changing it from sound to electrical (with a device called a microphone) then sticking that signal to the input of a pre-amplifier, from there to a superheterodyne circuit (radio frequency modulator) which combines the original sound's electronic wave form with an oscillators high frequency output, and all this simply gets fed to a power amplifier and then to an antenna. But with virtual components, it's no longer necessary.
A new player has entered the field. Edward Snowden leaked nsa information which has been reverse engineered by several individuals to create usb sticks and other devices that have a micro radio transmitter/receiver built in, but it's made from... software. This technology possessed by nsa is called "software defined radio". Imagine a usb drive that can be changed on the fly to transmit am, fm, bluetooth, and even gsm. How is that possible? In the past we used to use discrete components such as transistors, resistors, capacitors, etc, to create radios. But now thanks to Edward Snowden, we find NSA has created such systems which by using software can create virtualized componentry using digital signal processing to change the waveform - this includes, the frequency, amplitude, broadcast power, etc, all from a software perspective. If a security analyst were to find a transmitter using a frequency scanner, the frequency could instantly be changed to another area of the spectrum through software, and the signal would be lost.
Radio transmitters originally worked by taking a signal and changing it from sound to electrical (with a device called a microphone) then sticking that signal to the input of a pre-amplifier, from there to a superheterodyne circuit (radio frequency modulator) which combines the original sound's electronic wave form with an oscillators high frequency output, and all this simply gets fed to a power amplifier and then to an antenna. But with virtual components, it's no longer necessary.
