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The National Security Agency (NSA) collaborated with the governments of four other countries on a planned attack that sought to infect millions of smartphones with spyware, according to a new report. The program, with the codename Irritant Horn, was designed to hijack the phones’ connections to app stores operated by Samsung and Google that would allow spies to surreptitiously steal data from users’ devices.
The report, first published by Canada’s CBC network and the Intercept, a news site founded by reporter Glen Greenwald, was based on internal NSA documents provided by former government contractor and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The group behind the plan was the “Five Eyes” network, a collection of allied surveillance agencies from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand that regularly collaborate on cyber -espionage and spying.

Ministry of Misinformation

The details of the hack were laid out in the PowerPoint presentation “Synergising Network Analysis and Tradecraft,” which served as the basis for a series of workshops held in Canada and Australia from 2011 to 2012.
The presentation explained that the NSA had planned to use the XKEYSCORE hacking tool to launch a man-in-the-middle attack from Samsung and Google servers. The XKEYSCORE tool allows governments to wiretap any user for whom they have a personal e-mail address, according to previously published statements by Snowden.
While earlier reports had already disclosed that the NSA and the Five Eyes governments had created spyware to attack Android and iPhone devices, the latest revelation indicated that the espionage agency was also interested in using the technique to plant misinformation on users’ phones. The agency seemed particularly interested in the potential of the technology to disrupt and prevent protests and citizen movements.

UC Browser Exploit

The presentation also described a vulnerability the NSA had discovered in the UC Browser application . Although UC Browser is not widely used in the Western world, it reportedly has around half a billion users, mainly in India and China. The exploit would allow the agency to gather information that would allow it to accurately identify the user of a device, according to the presentation.
Alibaba, the online retailing company that is behind UC Browser, has since been made aware of the exploit, which was leaking search query terms, SIM card numbers and unique device identifiers. The company behind the browser said that the vulnerability has since been fixed.
The NSA’s decision not to alert UC Browser of its vulnerability once discovered may have exposed several hundred million users to attacks from criminal hackers, who may have discovered the exploit on their own, according to the Intercept.
While the exact technique behind the attack is a new development, this is not the first time the NSA has sought to launch widespread cyberattacks against computer users. In one instance, the agency reportedly disguised itself as a Facebook server to break into computers attempting to access the social media network.

The "chips" in question are indeed made mostly of wood -- but they are also computer chips.
As of 2007, about 3.2 million tons of electronic waste was being generated each year, the researchers noted. Again, that was eight years ago.
The good news is that in leveraging the promising principles of nanotechnology, the researchers proposed that CNF can alleviate the strain electronic waste places on the environment.

Don't Knock Wood

Most of a computer chip's material is designed to support the tiny transistors and calculator, according to Zhenqiang "Jack" Ma, University of Wisconsin professor of engineering and study author. Everything else accounts for only a few micrometers.
Paper is the most common product processed from wood fibers. Those fibers are what Ma called the "micron stage." But what if researchers went further?
When those fibers are broken down to the nanoscale, they can form "very strong and transparent CNF paper," said Ma.
Most other substrates for computer chips are derived from petroleum polymers, with half lives that indicate they can survive for generations. On the other hand, fungal colonies would feast on tech that employed CNF -- but that's also one of CNF's vulnerabilities, according to Ma.

"If the CNF is not sealed well, fungi may attack it," he said.
There are a great many potential use cases for such material, many of which would entail replacing nonbiodegradable substrates.
CNF "can be used for many things, including mobile devices, displays, solar cells and much more," Ma told TechNewsWorld.
However, it will be up to governments and other large investors to push CNF into fruition, he added.
"CNF is eco-friendly and is suitable for many of today's electronics applications besides other potential applications," he noted, but "governments may need to provide some incentive to encourage industry to adopt it."

Nanotechnology's Promise

While it may be a while before the researchers' CNF designs hit mass production, the technology "holds great promise," said Susan Eustis, president of WinterGreen Research.
Biodegradable tech could outpace environmentally harmful electronics "within 10 years," she estimated.
"Quite soon, we'll see about 60 percent of our tech [composed of sustainable material]," Eustis told TechNewsWorld. "That'll be facilitated by a huge breakthrough in nanotechnology, however."
That significant leap will come soon, Eustis predicted, noing that the sector has been struggling with migrating lab findings to mass production.
"It often works great in the lab, but it's been difficult to commercialize some of the breakthroughs they find, due to a lot of manual processes that they use in the lab," she explained. "In part, those struggles arise because they didn't pick the right nanoparticles to work with."