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back to article Infosec bods can now sniff out the NSA's Quantum Insert hacks

Security researchers have developed a method for detecting NSA Quantum Insert-style hacks. Fox-IT has published free open-source tools to detect duplicate sequence numbers of HTTP packets, with different data sizes, that are the hallmarks of Quantum Insert. The utilities developed by Fox-IT are capable of exposing fiddling …

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  1. Graham Marsden
    Big Brother

    I'm sorry...

    ... but I've just been told that a new law has been rushed through making packet counting illegal...

    6 0 Reply
    1. Mark 85
      Reply Icon
      Coat

      Re: I'm sorry...

      There's no legislator in the world smart enough or knowledgeable enough to know what write a law for that. Unless somehow they screwed up law they wanted for counting cigarette packets for tax purposes...

      0 0 Reply
      1. Crazy Operations Guy
        Reply Icon

        Re: I'm sorry...

        You think legislators actually write laws? That is so cute... Nearly every bill in the legislature was written by a third party and handed to the legislator for them to present to the floor.

        They wouldn't need to pass a law for this anyway, they just need a judge to say that something like this would be violating some already-existing, broadly-written law (Like saying that this would be considered interfering with a police investigation akin to ratting out undercover agents)

        8 0 Reply
  2. Spaceman Spiff

    Cat's out of the bag

    Ok, the cat is out of the bag. Now they will have to come up with a new, less detectable attack... Sigh.

    2 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Cat's out of the bag

      Did it survive the NSA Quantum Insert?

      0 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The problem with their diagram is that the 'shooter' is in a room in the target's ISP's data center, so just by using a CDN won't prevent this.

    0 0 Reply
  4. Dazed and Confused
    Big Brother

    Latency

    Also using a content delivery network (CDN) that offers low latency can make it very difficult for the QI packet to win the race with the real server," he said.

    Does this explain why every time I read articles like this the latency on my link jumps up. Do they need to make O*&^%$£"!h insert a 10ms delay in the normal delivery to give them room to squeeze in their chicanery?

    0 0 Reply

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