New revelations about the workings of the US National Security Agency ( NSA ). According to a publication by the Washington Post , new leaked documents show that the monitoring methods used by websites and advertising companies are also used as a tool for espionage.
The NSA and the British intelligence agency GCHQ use another method to analyze website cookies, especially Google's. This method is known to intelligence agencies as "PREF" and essentially looks for personal user information through cookies that allow websites to uniquely identify a person's computer.
This type of cookie allows the NSA to pick out a target’s communications from the sea of Internet data, which it can then use to send malware to the target computer.
The files leaked by the Washington Post say that the cookies are used to “enable remote exploitation of a computer,” but they don’t say what kind of specific attack.
The leaked files also say that the NSA uses commercial information to track mobile devices around the world. This is done by the many apps that run on iPhones and Android, or even by the operating systems of those devices. This way, the intelligence agencies track the user’s location, most of the time without any warning.
Google has not released a statement yet, but it certainly won't be too thrilled about this whole situation.
