Image of the Day: NSA techs intercepting network gear and installing surveillance beacon before it reaches recipient

Glen Greenwald’s recently released book, No Place to Hide , contains a large amount of information regarding how the NSA spied on U.S. citizens. Perhaps most shocking out of this collection was a document that detailed how the agency’s Tailored Access Operations unit, as well as other NSA employees, went about with the unauthorized intercepting of routers, servers, and other network gear on its way to organizations targeted for surveillance, for the purpose of installing covert implant firmware prior to the technology reaching its final destination.

The image above shows NSA tech employees performing an unauthorized field upgrade to a piece of Cisco hardware in 2010. Specifically, they are installing beacon firmware with a “load station” designed to perform a specific task within a Cisco router.

The Trojan Horse-esque systems were described in the document by an NSA manager as being “some of the most productive operations in TAO because they pre-position access points into hard target networks around the world.”

The source of all this information is a June 2010 internal newsletter article by the chief of NSA’s Access and Target Development department. In the paper, the NSA manager describes the process as follows:

Here’s how it works: shipments of computer network devices (servers, routers, etc,) being delivered to our targets throughout the world are intercepted. Next, they are redirected to a secret location where Tailored Access Operations/Access Operations (AO-S326) employees, with the support of the Remote Operations Center (S321), enable the installation of beacon implants directly into our targets’ electronic devices. These devices are then re-packaged and placed back into transit to the original destination. All of this happens with the support of Intelligence Community partners and the technical wizards in TAO.

Story via arstechnica.com