CIA Hacks Home Devices Worldwide

Gasp!  Shock!  <Stunned Face>!  The CIA is hacking your home devices!

OK.  We all know these things happen and nobody is really shocked.  It seems that everybody is hacking us and most people have given up on their privacy which is sad.  We have told you in the past how Bear can protect you, even on hacked devices.  This post provides some more details.

Bear controls all communications flowing in and out of a given device which means that Bear knows where everything is going.  With Bear rules can be set, even automatically, that allow communications to flow as you want while stopping unwanted traffic.  In the case of, say, a camera used to stream video through a service such as Skype or Hangouts to your friends and neighbors, we can go one step further as we know the initiating program.

A Bear-managed device can be running over Skype and Hangouts for a short or long period of time when the CIA hacks in and tries to gain control.  First of all, without hacking in prior to Bear being installed, good luck.  Your camera should never have somebody attempting to access it and thus Bear would have a rule setup to stop those individual packets of information before they ever reached your device’s operating system.

Suppose, however, that the nefarious government agency already has malware installed and that malware wakes up and tried to stream your video feed somewhere else.  Bear can detect the extra stream and stop that stream from ever leaving your camera.  Bear can detect the application, determine the app is not on your allowed list and stop the stream from ever leaving your camera.  Bear can determine that the IP address is not allowed and, again, stop the traffic from ever leaving your camera.

It sounds so simple – it did take us 6 years to build the technology – and yet straightforward rules that manage communications can render these types of hacks harmless.  Great for us and really bad for those unwanted government cyber-spies…