Communications of the ACM
Snowden sed Low-Cost Tool to Best NSA
Edward Snowden's use of web crawler software to "scrape" NSA networks was hardly sophisticated and should have been easily detected, investigators say.
Credit: Channel 4 / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images
Edward Snowden used inexpensive and widely available software to "scrape" the U.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) networks, according to intelligence officials investigating the case.
"We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence," according to one official. The investigators say Snowden's "insider attack" was very unsophisticated and should have been easily detected. Web crawler software automatically moves from website to website, following links embedded in each document, and can be programmed to copy everything in its path. Snowden was able to use the software because he worked at an agency outpost that had not yet been upgraded with modern security measures.
Investigators have yet to determine if Snowden knew the outpost had yet to install the security upgrades that might have stopped him, and sought a position there for the purpose of scraping NSA's networks. Although the investigating officials declined to say which Web crawler Snowden used, they did say it functioned like a Googlebot, a widely used Web crawler that Google developed to find and index new pages on the Web. However, the officials have not been able to explain why the presence of such software in a highly classified system was not an obvious indication of unauthorized activity.
From The New York Times
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