filipmaertens's comments

filipmaertens | 12 years ago | on: Britain's GCHQ hacked Belgium's telco Belgacom

The main target appears to be the BICS unit within the Belgacom's group, which is a wholesale operation with a strong division in Dubai (peering to du/EITC and Etisalat), covering Middle East switching/termination. Having access to BICS infrastructure could give potential to tier-1 interception of middle east peers. At least, that could be one of the many (many) motives for targeting BICS imho. While Belgium may be an allied country, it might supply/export services to other countries that may seemingly be other allied countries to the U.S. but where a hidden agenda is played out according to the age old saying "trust, but verify" :) Also, if designing attack trees, you take the weakest links in order to have a successful attack. Taking Belgium/Belgacom route may have proven to be a valid option so it seems ("hey, if the Belgians don't care to be without government for over two years, they sure as hell won't care about a hacking") :p

filipmaertens | 12 years ago | on: Britain's GCHQ hacked Belgium's telco Belgacom

Counterattacking is a big no-no in most countries, so I would stay from that offensive security stuff. Unless of course, you're working for a government, in which case you need to look at the conventions of warfare and see if you can declare war on another country where the attack allegedly originated from ;-))) Tough sell :-)

filipmaertens | 12 years ago | on: Two Providers of Secure E-Mail Shut Down

What he did was equally an act of heroism (in face of Internet history) and stupidity (in face of his own life). Perhaps, he should just have wiped and destroyed the disks, and have it "seemed like a system crash at a bad timing" caused it :)

filipmaertens | 12 years ago | on: Two Providers of Secure E-Mail Shut Down

I think you're absolutely right. The only effect that NSA/... (and let's be honest, any other country is just jealous they don't have the capabilities of an NSA :p) has on the Internet community is going to be a wider and further proliferation of darknets, P2P and F2F services.
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