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particular laptop (for the sake of clarity, it was a MacBook Pro). Who’s familiar
with this type of laptops knows that a green LED is lit when the webcam is on.
Well, that exploit also allowed to turn the status LED off!
What can we learn from this story, then?
9.1 General Precautions
For example, covering the webcam when you don’t need it is not a bad idea
after all! Of course we can constantly monitor the network traffic to see if
someone is connecting to our notebook/computer, but this would distract us from
your tasks; furthermore, the attacker may use a backdoor installed in our
computer and then arbitrarily hide their data from our network monitor.
The same can be done with the microphone: in this case, the best option (if
possible) is to physically remove it from the device; alternatively you can also
deactivate it from the Operating System, but, in case of attack, it can be
reactivated with no effort.
Device monitoring is also feasible on a smartphone, and this can be a critical
problem. Unsurprisingly, the competent authorities can perform electronic
surveillance using the microphones (or getting images) on smartphones: the
problem is that using a phone with no mic would be pointless, furthermore I am
quite sure that not everyone is capable of disassembling it without damages.
According to some research taken from Wikipedia, electronic surveillance can
also be performed over a smartphone without a plugged battery
[142]
. In this case,
the simplest solutions would be leaving the smartphone in a microwave oven,
which isolates the electro-magnetic fields, blocking any transmitting wave.
Remember, don’t turn the oven on!
When it comes to the emails we receive, although it may sound redundant
after all we said about security, let’s face the truth: you should NEVER open any
attachment when your are not 100% sure of its origin.
And what about the Operating System? At the beginning of the course, we
mentioned that you can stay relatively safe with any Operating System; however,
you have to consider that GNU/Linux and *BSD are the only 100% trustworthy
operating system. Windows and OSX/MacOS are proprietary OSs and could
contain not only trojans and spyware, but also exploits the online community
may not be able to fix or aware of, since the source code is handled only by the
respective developers.
If you have even a small doubt about any file, you should always open it
from a Virtual Machine. This way, the opened files will be virtualized in an
external environment (unless the latter contains an exploit itself, capable of
“breaking the wall” of the Virtual Machine itself) and, if containing anything that
may compromise your privacy and safety, they will be restricted to that
environment.
If you don’t trust your BIOS, flash it: some malware can penetrate the BIOS
and, in this case, no Anti virus will be able to access it (remember that an anti
virus only works when the Operating System is launched or, in some cases, just
before the startup). Ensure the firmware in use matches the one provided by the
developers and never trust custom firmwares built by strangers or people whose
reliability is not acknowledged by the online community.
Speaking of Anti virus: are they truly useful? There are different
perspectives: someone think they don’t hurt, someone deem them as
indispensable, and there’s also who says they’re useless, following their instinct
and habits. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between: it’s all about what you
do, how much you trust Anti virus programs and your choices when you decide
whether to open a file or not. Certainly, Anti virus are not 100% perfect, since
they use shared databases and some heuristic search algorithms to figure out
what a file or a program will do once opened, but this is just statistics and they
may return a false positive (a non-virus seen as a virus) or ignore a true threat.
The truth is, when a devices gets infected or aimed by a governmental agency,
the chances an Anti virus detects it are zero. Furthermore, most of the modern IT
virus programs are obfuscated and modified at the source, in order to make the
AVs operations harder – or even neutralize them. These are some of the reasons
why we didn’t – and won’t – cover the most trusted Anti virus software.
Of course, it doesn’t mean that we won’t properly safeguard our Operating
System: it must be constantly updated instead, using the latest versions of
programs and technologies in general (do you remember the famous
Heartbleed?) and you should configure it to always stay under your control. For
example, the System may have a feature to automatically connect to a WiFi
network: it would be quite easy to expose it and compromise the user’s security.
10. Enhanced OSs
The GNU/Linux is fascinating for many reasons, including the extreme
customization possibilities that allowed entire communities to build their own
version and deploy it to the world. Today, we can find thousands of GNU/Linux
distros for any demand: among these, the anonymous distros world seems to be
one of the most flourishing.
10.1 Live OS
An Operating System you can launch from Hard Disks, as well as from USB
drives, CDs/DVDs and even from SD cards, as long as you have enough digital
space to allow the due operations. In years, a new usage method has been
developed: Live OS, a feature that allows you to use a GNU/Linux distro
without modifying your primary hard disks. We are offered such chance not only
to test the distro without harming our partitions, but also to leave no trace within
a computer, as it has been discovered.
Everything happening within a Live system stay in the Live system: no temp
files are saved, no permanent logs are generated and the full environment comes
to life and dies once the storage containing it is plugged in or removed.
However, you may need some files or programs to stay available even after the
system shutoff: the Persistence Mode was built for this purpose, allowing you to
store any preferences, files and edits even after the computer is powered off.
10.1.1 Tails OS
Tails OS
[143]
is a GNU/Linux Live distro available since 2009. It belongs to
the Debian family and perfectly works with all the commands we explained in
this course. Comes with all the tools you need to ensure a good anonymity and
security to your Computer; you will also find a pre-configuration that routes all
the connections directly to TOR, blocking the incoming ones. It’s certainly an
interesting distro, since it’s ready-made: all the possible configurations are
available in the Greeter, the pre-launch menu of the operating systems that also
allows to activate the I2P network, toggle the Mac Spoofing and the root account
on and off, create a persistent, encrypted space, establish TOR bridge
configurations and much more. LUKS is already built-in as a standard for
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