Docs Reveal 'Disturbing' Scale of NSA's Global Hacking Abilities

The “most significant revelations to date.”

“This is huge, in scale and in implications.”

“Disturbing.”

Those are just some of the ways people are reacting to the latest reporting by journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher at The Intercept on documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In a news story entitled, ‘,” Greenwald and Gallager explore a series of internal NSA slides and documents showing just how dramatically the agency is “expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale.” The revelations also show that the NSA has  “aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives” by supplanting operations once done manually by human operators with automated systems that “reduce the level of human oversight.”

Among the most searing aspects of the involved and technical of the review of the NSA material, Greenwald and Gallagher explain how a series of sophisticated hacking programs use malware to perform both targeted infiltrations of computers but also broader mass surveillance over entire networks. The Intercept reports:

Asked to comment by the journalists, Mikko Hypponen, an expert in malware who serves as chief research officer at the Finnish security firm F-Secure, said the implications of the NSA programs were “disturbing” as these kinds of clandestine manipulations can seriously impact the functioning of the web.

“When they deploy malware on systems,” Hypponen explained, “they potentially create new vulnerabilities in these systems, making them more vulnerable for attacks by third parties.”

The reporting also explains how the NSA has used what are called “man-in-the-middle” techniques as a way to trick computers into giving access to fake servers designed to look like friendly ones. In one example, under a program codenamed QUANTUMHAND, the NSA used a phony server that looked like it was a Facebook server so it could access users computers. According to the reporting:

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