Inside the NSA’s Secret Efforts to Hunt & Hack SystemAdmin

[Steadfast]

Inside the NSA’s Secret Efforts to Hunt and Hack System Administrators


Across the world, people who work as system administrators keep computer networks in order – and this has turned them into unwitting targets of the National Security Agency for simply doing their jobs. According to a secret document provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the agency tracks down the private email and Facebook accounts of system administrators (or sys admins, as they are often called), before hacking their computers to gain access to the networks they control.

The document consists of several posts – one of them is titled “I hunt sys admins” – that were published in 2012 on an internal discussion board hosted on the agency’s classified servers. They were written by an NSA official involved in the agency’s effort to break into foreign network routers, the devices that connect computer networks and transport data across the Internet. By infiltrating the computers of system administrators who work for foreign phone and Internet companies, the NSA can gain access to the calls and emails that flow over their networks.


Story continues at link below:
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/arti ... istrators/

[Steadfast]

Personally I am unfamiliar with The Intercept - where the above story was posted.