Snowden: IT Workers Are Now the Target of Spies

Spies are increasingly targeting IT staff to gain access to key elements of internet infrastructure and sensitive databases, NSA contractor-turned whistleblower Edward Snowden has warned.
    
"It's not that they are looking for terrorists, it's not that they are looking for bad guys, it's that they are looking for people with access to infrastructure. They are looking for service providers, they are looking for systems administrators, they're looking for engineers," he said, speaking at the CeBIT technology show in Germany via a video link from Russia.
He added: "They are looking for the people who are in this room right now: you will be the target. Not because you are a terrorist, not because you are suspected of any criminal wrongdoing, but because you have access to systems, you have access to infrastructure, you have access to the private records, people's private lives. These are the things that they want. It is important for us to come together and prevent that from happening."
Snowden isn't the only one to warn that IT staff can be the target of spies, although mostly the finger is being pointed at foreign intelligence agencies. For example, the UK's M15 security service warned last year that IT workers have been recruited to help overseas spies gain sensitive personnel information, steal corporate or national secrets and even upload malware to compromise the network. IT staff have also been warned to beware of 'honey pot' sex stings.
Snowden said the best way to protect privacy was through technology, because that remains a constant across geographical or political boundaries. "That means end-to-end encryption; we have to protect communications while they are in transit, we have to improve the security of the endpoints and make this transparent to users," he said.
When we look back at 2013 a decade from now, the one technology story that's likely to have the biggest long-term impact is the Edward Snowden revelations.
While there were major password breaches at Adobe, Evernote, and Twitter as well as the Healthcare.gov debacle, nothing rocked the IT world more than the 200,000 classified documents that Snowden leaked to the press, uncovering the NSA's startling digital surveillance programs that reach more broadly across the internet than even many of the most extreme conspiracy theorists would have feared.
While the U.S. government defends the program as court-supervised and a powerful tool that has thwarted terrorist attacks and protected citizens, there's no doubt that the Snowden revelations have had a chilling effect on the technology world.
Here are the three biggest impacts: 
    1. Organizations are re-thinking how to effectively encrypt their most sensitive data.
    2. International organizations are looking at ways to do less business with U.S. companies, since the NSA has direct backdoors into many of them.
    3. The brakes are being put on cloud computing by some organizations, as they consider whether they want their data so easily accessible to surveillance agencies.

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