Privacy Advocate Jacob Appelbaum Reports Break-In Of Berlin Apartment 194
Jacob Appelbaum isn't shy about his role as a pro-privacy (and anti-secrecy) activist and hacker. A long-time contributor to the Tor project, and security researcher more generally, Appelbaum stood in for the strategically absent Julian Assange at HOPE in 2010, and more recently delivered Edward Snowden's acceptance speech when Snowden was awarded the Government Accountability Project's Whistleblower Prize. Now, he reports, his Berlin apartment appears to have been burglarized, and his computers tampered with. As reported by Deutsche Welle, "Appelbaum told [newspaper the Berliner Zeitung] that somebody had broken into his apartment and used his computer in his absence. 'When I flew away for an appointment, I installed four alarm systems in my apartment,' Appelbaum told the paper after discussing other situations which he said made him feel uneasy. 'When I returned, three of them had been turned off. The fourth, however, had registered that somebody was in my flat - although I'm the only one with a key. And some of my effects, whose positions I carefully note, were indeed askew. My computers had been turned on and off.'" It's not the first time by any means that Appelbaum's technical and political pursuits have drawn attention of the unpleasant variety.
Re:For the Lulz (Score:5, Informative)
Common tactic of the German Stasi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Zersetzung
BIOS Attacks (Score:5, Informative)
Plug in UEFI bootable USB stick.
Turn off
Turn on
Keylogger and remote backdoor installed.
So those machines are toast. He needs new ones.
Re:BIOS Attacks (Score:4, Informative)
Or, he could be real savvy;
Use a computer of a different architectural type, (Say ARM or PPC) and an EEPROM programmer. Clamp the connector onto the compromised system's UEFI bios, and dump it.
Compare the dump against the vendor's stock image.
Note the differences, Decompile the differences.
Report on the hows and whys of the keylogger.
Reflash the bios with the vendor's stock image, then nuke all harddrives from orbit. (Harddrives also contain updatable firmware, which may be harder to ensure are in a sane condition.)
Re:Paranoia (Score:4, Informative)
He must be doing something right (Score:5, Informative)
By the sound of it, he's doing a lot of things right. Read his bio. I'm very glad and thankful there are still brave men left.
Re:Four alarm systems and not a single camera? (Score:5, Informative)