AV Vendors supposed to be spied by NSA und GCHQ

[comfortablynumb15]

It's a damn good opinion and you're right really. The thing about the bad malware writers though, honestly Kram the best ones out there probably have already been thinking about it and may be able to do it themselves. They just don't have the extremely sophisticated tools and funds to go as far as the intelligence communities can. All of these attacks eventually trickle down to the small guys, because it eventually gets much simpler to pull these attacks off. The security industry isn't helping matters much because they're almost sitting still technologically, going with what brings in the easy profit. Not to mention it's becoming clear that they aren't all that fantastic at securing their own products. I don't know, while I believe the NSA and its counterparts are doing what they normally should be doing, this is all just getting very ugly. I believe that they too will sometime in the future get bit in the butt for their over-doing it and lack of oversight.

 

[FleischmannTV]

What bothers me most about all this is that the government has no interest in enforcing stronger information security by law, because it would be harder for them to compromise systems. In cars, for example, airbags, seat belts and other technologies that save your life or protect you from being crippled for life are mandatory and cars without them can no longer be sold. If a serious life threatening flaw is discovered in a car, it will be made public, the sale will be stopped and the already sold ones will be recalled. If an intelligence agency discovers zero-day kernel exploits in Microsoft Windows or any other critical flaw, they will keep it to themselves, in order to use it against their targets.

 

[Tony Cole]

Kaspersky will never mention the county/countries behind the recent attack, they know who it is. We can now see why Russia are so hostile against the UK/USA, what gives them the right to have free reign, oh yes I forgot, the war on terror. Personally I think President Dilma Rousseff summed up the above:

"In the absence of the right to privacy, there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion, and therefore no effective democracy." The Brazilian Presidents quote to the UN, who's phone and email accounts were hacked by the NSA, I'm sure she must be a terrorist. Total crap, the USA and my Government over stepped the mark, and should be held accountable.

P.S. they all thought human rights/privacy would improve under Obama, especially when he slated George W. Bush for such breaches.

 

[Der.Reisende]

I like your point of view very much kram7750, especially the last part when you describe how to support "Whitehats", especially in times where life is more and more digitally influenced. We probably all know what massive consequences calumny, data theft and so on can have. Once trust is gone, it's very very difficult to rebuild confidence, even if you became mistrust without reason. There's a movie which describes this one frighteningly well - The Net with Sandra Bullock.

Also I'd like to express my thanks for the lively interest and debate you guys pulled off. You shared some very interesting aspects