As a man who has been involved with computers for almost 4 decades, a question arises regarding these 3 unrelated parties, where Target is obviously interchangeable with Neiman Marcus, but so too is Healthcare.gov, the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), and every institution of government or private enterprise where we've had to give them identifying information of some sort.
We're told that the problem is that our credit cards don't have a “smart chip,” and that hacking in Europe is far less prevalent because of this. However, I think hacking needs a bit more discussion.
Some hackers make money on information by using it, more often they sell the information in seconds, or divulge it to a group, on Internet Relay Chat (or something similar). Then all these people use the information to buy some things they resell upon delivery.
What is overlooked, or often not considered when thinking about hackers, is the more valuable market: to find information that has more than pristine credit. Certainly credit has become a means of identity, but there are other mechanisms of identity as well, such as dental and birth records, or if the primary information ties to more than one social security number (which is common in say a GS 15 and above job). What I am explaining here is the purpose in hacking a Target and then a Neiman Marcus, to then hack a government agency, and it is important to note that of the hacking attempts caught or thwarted, the general rule is that this is 1 of the 10 hacking efforts that have been caught. So when someone says “we've had no hacking attempts that we know of” regarding Healthcare.gov, they've told you there have been at least 9 successful (undetected, uncaught, and unthwarted) hacks every day.
You see, by having data from different sources, and then using it to access even more data (the recent fake Target phishing e-mails to the very customers hacked Christmas 2013 are examples of that effort) these databases can be correlated to find those records that lead to profiles that can be sold to the likes of the Mafia, Terrorists, and a variety of government “intelligence” organizations such as our CIA. Those profiled identities that are in another country can be used by an agent to be that perfect persona for a mission, with all the social security numbers, dental records, and medical history, finger & hand prints, retina images, facial bone structure necessary for that person to completely take over another's entire life, to be them by the most generally used identifying markers our systems use (though most don't go to more physical investigation if the person can answer the questions properly such as filling in the proper social security number that is privy to those certain GS 15 individuals), currently with the exception of one being able to have another's DNA if identifying a person were taken to that extreme.
Thus we arrive at the consideration of the “how,” and I submit again the article of how the surveillance of us was begun on a worldwide scale via the agreements that instituted the NSA as we know it today in 1956, http://changingwind.org/index/news.php?item.250. This is to show how the legal framework was established between governments to achieve immunity for spying on their own citizens, the beginning of a mindset of a right of intrusion upon the sanctity of a person's home for the sake of “national security.” Of course all of this is hush-hush stuff, that, as you can see from the NSA website about the 1940s UKUSA/BRUSA agreement that had to be declassified, http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/ukusa.shtml.
The Echelon Program under Bill Clinton was based on this very system of surveillance, one that had no means of being brought into a courtroom until the Patriot Act's provisions of civil and criminal liability (see http://changingwind.org/index/comment.php?comment.news.142 and http://changingwind.org/index/comment.php?comment.news.249).
So now that we are reasonably informed as to the history of the NSA and the valued targets of data mining by hackers, we arrive at the necessity of backdoors in the most widely used product on computers: Microsoft Windows (From 1999 via Echelon exposer Duncan Campbell, http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/nsa_backdoor_windows.htm, 2004, http://www.angelfire.com/space/netcensus/backdoors.html, Windows XP http://windowxpforu.blogspot.com/2008/03/xps-built-in-back-door-and-its-security.html – note one can get an image of the install cd/dvd on the web and burn it themselves to use this one; windows Vista and 7 by using Linux, http://unlockforus.blogspot.com/2008/11/creating-backdoor-in-windows-vista.html, and, of course, Microsoft is reacting to reports they worked with NSA to build these in for Windows 8 – which appears a really feeble argument when you look at this history since 1999 of backdoors that have been in Microsoft Windows, http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-Slams-Windows-8-Backdoor-Claims-378239.shtml.)
Now, consider Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and their ownership in Skype as well when reading this:
“Rapid7, a security company, said it was a zero-day exploit making Internet Explorer 7, 8, and 9 vulnerable on Windows XP, Vista and 7 systems. Computer users can experience attacks if they visit a malicious website, which hands over privileges to the attacker. The attacker can run code of his choice in the context of the user. The attacker can delete or add files or change registry values. Security experts, like Rapid7, are advising business and general consumer users to avoid Internet Explorer until Microsoft issues a patch. Rapid7 offered advice for Internet users to switch to other browsers such as Chrome or Firefox while waiting for a security update. HD Moore, CSO of Rapid7, said, though, that avoiding the browser might not even be enough, as many applications rely on the IE engine to render HTML.” -- Emphasis mine, http://phys.org/news/2012-09-internet-explorer-users-poison-ivy.html.
So we've got software on our computers that can grant others the ability to affect our computers, even place bogus evidence of wrongdoing on our computers that “hackers” can gain access to from holes that no one seems to have known of on another iteration of Microsoft Windows that adds in the features necessary to hide government hacking surveillance accesses? While the ultra-Liberal Bill Gates and his Foundation with his wife seek and promote their benevolence, the software that's undermining our privacy and that aids and abets the government in stealing our money (a 5th amendment violation by government as they are using the bandwidth we pay for to spy on us without just compensation) is the engine of their generosity.
And yet, and this is the most aggravating aspect of this whole situation, the NSA, who monitors 5,000,000,000 cell phone calls a day, hasn't piped up at all as to who hacked Target, and Neiman Marcus, while the cost of this hack is said to be around 18 billion dollars so far (which would suggest this hack qualifies as economic terrorism, meaning it is something within the purview of the NSA's executive agreement-originated authority and should have been mined from the metadata of the 2013 Christmas buying season, right???). So what do we need the NSA for again??? Hello? *rap on skull* McFly???
Thank you for reading and sharing this,
Toddy Littman
