John McAfee says he infected laptops with malware, spied and stole passwords from Belize officials

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Twenty years ago, John McAfee ran an anti-virus company.

He's not had anything to do with the company that bears his name (and was subsequently acquired by Intel) since the early 1990s, but that doesn't mean that his involvement with malware has come to an end.

Many people have been following the bizarre story of John McAfee, who has been on the run from the Belize police since mid-November, had his location leaked to the world in a photo's EXIF meta-data, and was hastily deported from his Guatemala hide-out to the United States.

Throughout his escapades, John McAfee has been keeping the internet entertained and informed of his swashbuckling exploits via his blog.

Most recently, John McAfee claims that he gave Belize officials cheap laptops that had been deliberately pre-infected with keylogging spyware.

I purchased 75 cheap laptop computers and, with trusted help, installed invisible keystroke logging software on all of them - the keind that calls home (to me) and disgorges the text files. It also, on command, turns on and off, the microphone and camera - and sends these files on command.

I had the computers re-packaged as if new. I began giving these away as presents to select people - government employees, police officers, Cabinet Minister's assistants, girlfriends of powerful men, boyfriends of powerful women.

I hired four trusted people full time to monitor the text files and provide myself with the subsequent passwords for everyone's email, Facebook, private message boards and other passworded accounts. The keystroke monitoring continued after the password collection, in order to document text input and would later be deleted. So nothing was missed...

67-year-old McAfee goes on to claim that he also hired 23 women and six men as operatives to seduce and spy upon his intended targets.

These men and women were given simple training on how to access and load software on someone's computer while they slept, or ate or made long phone calls etc.

It's dead simple if you're sleeping with someone - "Hey Babe, can I borrow your computer to check my email?" - A little more complex if you're not - but not much.

According to his blog post, the anti-virus veteran ended up living with eight of the female honeytraps, and was nearly killed by one who turned out to be a double agent.

John McAfee's spying didn't stop there, however. According to his blog post he also infiltrated two local phone companies, and paid workers to tap phones and provide lists of who his targets were in contact with.

Is John McAfee telling the truth? Or spinning a fanciful tale for his own entertainment? There is no way, of course, for us to verify John McAfee's colourful story - which goes on to claim that there is an international terrorist conspiracy run from Belize.

But if elements of this story are true (such as the deliberate spreading of keylogging malware and the snooping on sensitive passwords) that is unlikely to be popular with the-powers-that-be in Belize.

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Nasdaq Hackers Spied on Company Directors: Report

Hackers who infiltrated the Nasdaq's computer systems installed malicious software on the exchange's computers that allowed them to spy on scores of directors of publicly held companies, according to two people familiar with an investigation into the matter.

NASDAQ MarketSite Tower, Times Square, New York, NYThe U.S. exchange operator [.NDX  Loading...      ()   ] disclosed in February that it was investigating a breach into its network.

Nasdaq OMX Group identified that its systems were hacked last year, and removed malicious software from its servers in October. That sparked an investigation involving the FBI and National Security Agency that is ongoing.

Trading platforms were not compromised, the exchange said when it disclosed the attack in February, although an Internet-based software program was attacked.

Nasdaq sells that program, called Directors Desk, to listed and private companies, which use it to let board members get access to and share documents and communicate with executives, among other things.

While the Directors Desk was infected, hackers were able to access confidential documents and communications of the directors who got access to the program, said Tom Kellermann, chief technology officer with security technology firm AirPatrol.

Another person familiar with the investigation confirmed Kellermann's account of the matter, but declined to be identified by name because he is not authorized to discuss the matter.

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

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Nasdaq Hackers Spied on Company Boards

Hackers who infiltrated the Nasdaq's computer systems last year installed malicious software that allowed them to spy on the directors of publicly held companies, according to two people familiar with an investigation into the matter.

NASDAQ MarketSite Tower, Times Square, New York, NYThe new details showed the cyber attack was more serious than previously thought, as Nasdaq OMX Group had said in February that there was no evidence the hackers accessed customer information.

It was not known what information the hackers might have stolen. The investigation into the attack, involving the Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency, is ongoing.

"God knows exactly what they have done. The long term impact of such attack is still unknown," said Tom Kellermann, a well-known cyber security expert with years of experience protecting central banks and other high-profile financial institutions from attack.

The case is an example of a "blended attack," where elite hackers infiltrate one target to facilitate access to another. In March, hackers stole digital security keys from EMC Corp.'s

[EMC  Loading...      ()   ] RSA Security division that they later used to breach the networks of defense contractor Lockheed Martin [LMT  Loading...      ()   ] .

Nasdaq had previously said that its trading platforms were not compromised by the hackers, but they attacked a Web-based software program called Directors Desk, used by corporate boards to share documents and communicate with executives, among other things.

By infecting Directors Desk, the hackers were able to access confidential documents and the communications of board directors, said Kellermann, chief technology officer at security technology firm AirPatrol Corp.

Investigators have learned that hackers were able to spy on "scores" of directors who logged onto the directorsdesk.com website before the malicious software was removed, said Kellermann and another person familiar with the investigation who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

It was still unclear how long Nasdaq's system was breached before the attack was discovered last October.

A Nasdaq spokesman confirmed the investigation into the attack continues, but declined to give further details.

NSA Helps Nasdaq

Executive Assistant FBI Director Shawn Henry said the financial-services sector was losing hundreds of millions of dollars to hackers every year, and the attacks were increasingly "destructive" in nature.

"We know adversaries have full unfettered access to certain networks. Once there they have the ability to destroy data," he told Reuters in a phone interview. "We see that as a credible threat to all sectors, but specifically the financial services sector." Henry declined to comment on the Nasdaq attack.

U.S. Army General Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, said the NSA was working with Nasdaq to help protect its network against further attacks.

Alexander told security experts at a Baltimore conference that the U.S. was shoring up its defenses, but still had "tremendous vulnerabilities" to a growing number of increasingly destructive electronic attacks.

"Nation states, non-nation state actors, and hacker groups are creating tools that are increasingly more persistent and threatening, and we have to be ready for that," he said.

Amid a spate of high-profile cyber crimes, the Obama administration wants Congress to pass comprehensive cyber-security legislation that would increase the government's ability to thwart the growing threat.

Alexander and other top officials held a classified meeting with lawmakers on Wednesday and Thursday to discuss the issue, according to sources familiar with the meeting.

Nasdaq CEO Robert Greifeld said in July that the exchange is under constant attack, requiring it to spend nearly a billion dollars a year on information security.

"As we sit here, there are people trying to slam into our system every day," Greifeld said in the interview. "So we have to be ever vigilant against an ever-changing foe."

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

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Hackers Spied on Board Directors After Nasdaq Breach

Results from Nasdaq's investigation into a breach it disclosed in February are trickling out. The bottom line: The attack was worse than initially expected.

Fox News said hackers who infiltrated the Nasdaq's computer systems installed malicious software on the exchange's computers that allowed them to spy on scores of directors of publicly held companies. Fox cited "two people familiar with an investigation" as sources.

The target of the attack was a Web-based software program called Directors Desk. Nasdaq OMX develops Directors Desk, which serves as a communications and information management solution for boards. Security is touted as one of its benefits.

An SQL Injection?

Gunter Ollman, vice president of research at security firm Damballa, said the sparse public information available on the NASDAQ breach and the nature of the Director's Desk Web-based application leads him to believe that remote hackers probably exploited vulnerabilities within the application that allowed them to peruse information exchanges between various company directors.

"Gaining remote access to confidential data held within the Director's Desk application could have been through SQL injection, broken authentication and session management, and URL restriction failures," Ollman said. "In my years of running penetration tests against Fortune 500 companies, these were the most common vulnerabilities that could be exploited to reveal this level of confidential data."

Some security experts are reporting that the attackers successfully installed malware on the system. In order to do this, Ollman said, the attacker would need the capability to upload files to the application and/or break out of the application itself and gain access to the server directly. Interestingly, he noted, several Open Web Application Security Project top-10 attack vectors will allow this to occur.

Web App Vulnerabilities

Ollman, for one, is not surprised at the Directors Desk revelations. That's because vulnerabilities within large Web-based applications are increasingly common. Web-based software is under constant development and change, he said, which means that vulnerabilities can be unintentionally introduced at any time.

"If there are multiple development teams working on the same application portal -- all developing their own micro applications -- then the probability of new vulnerabilities being introduced grows considerably," Ollman said. "This is why Web applications need to be security-tested continuously. Regular security assessments and penetration tests are standard requirements for running large and important Web services."

Ollman said automated tests and change-control monitoring ideally should be conducted daily, and skilled consultants should manually assess the Web application monthly. What's more, he continued, given the human element in most advanced testing, it is a good idea to rotate between penetration-testing vendors so that the tests are not limited by the skills of the individual consultants they employ or the tool sets they use to conduct their tests.

"Access to Web-based applications by attackers is important for cybercriminals -- as well as state actors," Ollman said. "Again, it bears repeating that very little is known about the specific nature of the Nasdaq attack. But given the level of access to the application and the potential to modify content upon the Director's Desk application, likely consequences could include the ability to eavesdrop on company director communications and the ability to use that information for 'virtual insider trading' processes."

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