The German news site Heise Online revealed late last week that British intelligence agency GCHQ has a “Hacienda” program to search for vulnerable systems across 27 countries that could be compromised by the British agency and its spy-counterparts in other countries, including the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The GCHQ reportedly used port scanning, which hackers used to find systems they can potentially penetrate, as a “standard tool” against the entire nations it targeted.
“It should also be noted that the ability to port-scan an entire country is hardly wild fantasy; in 2013, a port scanner called Zmap was implemented that can scan the entire IPv4 address space in less than one hour using a single PC,” according to Heise.
“The list of targeted services includes ubiquitous public services such as HTTP and FTP, as well as common administrative protocols such as SSH (Secure SHell protocol – used for remote access to systems) and SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol – used for network administration).”
The same argument holds for those who still harbor the self-comforting thought of being “nobody”, “just an ordinary law-abiding citizen”, “small potato”, etc and thus not a surveillance target: it may not be you that they are interested but the people you “know”, “work with”, “chat with”, “befriend with”, “live with”, etc.
“Using this logic, every device is a target for colonization, as each successfully exploited target is theoretically useful as a means to infiltrating another possible target” and “Firewalls are unlikely to offer sufficient protection”, said the Heise report.
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