Angrybirds.com became "Spying Birds" as a result of the defacement (Zone-h mirror here). Rovio has confirmed the defacement, the International Business Times reports.It's very interesting to see how companies are being punished by customers, the security community, and the hacker community for anything related to the NSA. Rovio almost certainly had no idea that the NSA would exploit their shoddy code - i.e. they're the victims here. It didn't matter: they were collaborators, at least until they could get their web server back in order.
The Angrybirds.com website was back to normal by Wednesday morning. The defacement, which Zone-h has yet to confirm is genuine, must have been brief. Defacing a website is an act more akin to scrawling graffiti on a billboard put up by a company than breaking into its premises and ransacking its files.
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Files leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden showed the NSA and GCHQ were slurping data from smartphone apps to harvest all manner of personal information from world+dog. This information includes users' locations, their political beliefs and even their sexual preferences.
Angrybirds.com was used as a "case study" in the leaked files, hence the hackers' focus on Rovio – even though a great number of smartphone apps from other developers are involved in the dragnet surveillance program.
The NSA is radioactive to anyone who's not bought and paid for. It's very likely that the next year or two will see a segmenting of the tech market into "Collaborators" and "Non-collaborators". The Collaborators will cluster in government services, and the rest will be everyone not taking the King's Shilling.
Interesting times. And we wouldn't know any of this without Mr. Snowden. I hope he wins that Nobel Peace Prize.
3 comments:
Hopefully people will think twice now when they're installing an app on Android and it asks for permission to raid their contact list, track their location, and monitor their network traffic.
Nah, not gonna happen.
And we wouldn't know any of this without Mr. Snowden. I hope he wins that Nobel Peace Prize.
Concur.
I very much concur that Mr. Snowden win the Nobel Peace Prize. He is a very brave patriot. He was not motivated by greed or power. It was the right thing to do. And, any other method of disclosure would have been covered up.
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