The ripples from the massive National Security Agency leak orchestrated by former contract worker Edward Snowden continue to be felt even now. While most of the eye-opening revelations are behind us, the sheer volume of confidential documents exposed by Snowden has resulted in a continued trickle of information. Now, a new report covering information pulled from leaked NSA documents reveals several encrypted services that the NSA has been able to crack in its widespread data collection efforts.
More importantly, perhaps, the report identifies a number of secure services with encryption that the NSA has been unable to crack.
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Spiegel Online has been one of several news sites that have repeatedly revealed various findings in the leaked NSA documents, and the site is back with some big new revelations as 2014 rolls into 2015. This time around, the site has obtained internal NSA documents that identify several encrypted communications services that have been targeted by the NSA.
In some cases, the NSA successfully cracked a service’s encryption. For example, according to documents revealed in the Snowden leak, the NSA was able to crack Skype’s encryption and spy on Skype conversations beginning back in February 2011. The “secure” HTTPS protocol is also apparently easy for the NSA to crack.
In other cases, however, the NSA was apparently never able to crack the encryption on some services.
According to this new report from Spiegel Online, the NSA has had far less success breaking through secure communications on the Tor network. It was also unable to crack files protected by open-source encryption solution TrueCrypt, or messages that use OTR or PGP encryption. The NSA also apparently had no luck cracking the encryption used by Zoho’s email service.
For more details, follow the link below in our source section.
