Behind the smart World

Equation-Group: “Höchstentwickelte Hacker der Welt” infizieren u.a. Festplatten-Firmware

KairUs

Seit Jahren, wenn nicht sogar Jahrzehnten treibt eine Gruppe von Cyberangreifern weltweit ihr Unwesen und setzt auf äußerst hochentwickelte Technik, behauptet Kaspersky. Details bereits bekannter Malware impliziert Verbindungen zum US-Geheimdienst NSA.

Die russische IT-Sicherheitsfirma Kaspersky Lab hat Details zu einer Equation Group getauften Hackergruppe veröffentlicht, die mit ausgefeilten Methoden Regierungen und Unternehmen in mehr als 30 Ländern angegriffen haben soll. Auch wenn sie nicht direkt genannt wird, gibt es Hinweise, das die NSA oder ein anderer US-Geheimdienst dahinter steckt. Als besonders intensive Angriffsmethode hebt Kaspersky die Fähigkeit der Gruppe hervor, die Firmware von Festplatten bekannter Hersteller zu manipulieren. Die entsprechende Malware habe man in zwei Festplatten gefunden. Dass die NSA intern erklärt, dazu in der Lage zu sein, hatten bereits Jacob Appelbaum und Der Spiegel anlässlich des 30C3 in Hamburg öffentlich gemacht.

[Update 17.02.2015 – 11:05 Uhr] Betroffen sind demnach Festplatten von Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, Toshiba und Seagate. Eingesetzt würden eine Reihe nicht-dokumentierter ATA-Befehle. Gleichzeitig sei diese Umprogrammierung von Festplatten-Firmware so selten, dass der Schluss naheliege, dass sie nur gegen ganz besondere Ziele oder unter ganz außergewöhnlichen Umständen eingesetzt würde. Als Namen des Moduls gibt Kaspersky “nls_933w.dll” an. [/Update]

http://www.heise.de/security/meldung/Equation-Group-Hoechstentwickelte-Hacker-der-Welt-infizieren-u-a-Festplatten-Firmware-2550779.html

Data recovery Part I

KairUs

In a first test setup the harddrives were hooked up with SATA cables to two laptops, one running Ubuntu 10.4, a second one with Windows. If the HD booted and data was still accessible, an image was copied to a seperate harddrive. The seperate harddrive have a folder structure according to the HD number. We tried out several free software programs to restore harddrives and access data: Testdisk (Linux), Photorec (Linux, PC), PC Inspector (PC), Recuva (PC).

On this way, the content of 4 harddrives could be instantly accessed and copied.

 

Data recovery Part 2

KairUs

12th of February we continued with recovering data from the hard-drives (see first session here). This time with the help of Peter Wagenhuber from servus.at. The outcome of our two DIY-data recovery sessions was to extract data from 5 of the 22 hard-drives. One was a laptop hard-drive and the rest from desktop computers. Most of the hard-drives seemed to be physically broken. Some have a very bad ticking sound and others just don’t boot at all. The next step is to give over the hard-drives to professionals. We are working together with Datenrettung Österreich who will use professional tools to reanimate the hard-drives. They have a collection of spare parts and have the possibility of recovering data from damaged hard-drives as well. Though some of our hard-drives are quite old, from late 1990 or early 2000 which makes the availability of spear parts rather doubtful.

 

Videos of 2 Transmediale panels discussing aspects of electronic waste

KairUs

These two videos are panels from Transmediale 2014 both looking at the ecological aspects of the accelerating production of electronics and some of the known consequences this has on our environment. The first one concentrates on plastic and the second one on the effects of electronic and synthetic waste.

transmediale 2014 afterglow — An Ecosystem of Excess
With Pinar Yoldas, Heather Davis, Jennifer Gabrys, Bernd Scherer, Daniela Silvestrin

At Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
Sat, 1.2.2014

Starting from Yoldas’ project An Ecosystem of Excess and her artistic approach through speculative design and biology, this panel will analyze and discuss the impact on what we call “nature” and the term’s ontological crisis. In her exhibition, plastics are the starting point for thinking a new speculative evolution. Plastics have radically changed our environment and the ecological footprint we are leaving on the planet, and in big part contributed to the ecological turn that we are experiencing as one symptom of the anthropocene. But plastic seems to even have become a natural force of its own, unstoppable, invading every space, eliminating and ousting bit by bit the life that had been inhabiting these spaces before. Do plastics have their own agenda? If so, what do we find if we study the ethology of plastics? If there are more and more parts of the ocean where we find numbers of plastic molecules and particles that are many times higher than those of plankton, what is left of “nature” – and the world – as we know it? The ubiquity of plastic, mostly in the form of trash, is creating a new kind of “nature”, and therefore “environment”, which we will use as a starting point to rethink the term and its meaning today, as well as the geopolitical and ethical thinking related to it. In an attempt to overcome old habits of thoughts we will reflect on possible ways of positioning ourselves in relation to other humans as well as nonhumans in these “next” or “post-natural” landscapes surrounding us. (Source:  Transmediale archive)

 

transmediale 2014 afterglow — The Media of the Earth: Geologies of Flesh and the Earth
With Ryan Bishop, Sean Cubitt, Jussi Parikka, Denisa Kera

At Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin
Sat, 1.2.2014

Afterglow of The Mediatic conference stream

The panel focuses on the effects of electronic and synthetic waste on geological and biological bodies. The tissue and the soil effectively register the residue of scientific and technological processes, acting as inadvertent storage site and archival apparatus for our trash. The panel includes discussions of electronic waste, nuclear fallout as well as the global labour concerning the geology of media: minerals and material sciences. It is in this sense that it aims to address the media of the earth, and the earth as essential to the existence of media: issues which tie organic bodies with the non-organic reality. The speakers represent media and technology studies perspectives to what was often reserved as a territory of the sciences, namely geophysics. A geopolitics that is truly geo-based emerges from these engagements. (Source: Transmediale Archive)

Reading: Digital Rubbish: A natural history of electronics

KairUs

Digital Rubbish: A natural history of electronics by Jennifer Gabrys in the digitalculturebooks series.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
one: Silicon Elephants
two: exchange at the interface
three: Shipping and Receiving
four: Museum of Failure
five: Media in the Dump
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Newspaper Articles
Archives and Museums
Index

 

This book is attached as an appendix to Jussi Parikkas Medianatures mentioned in a earlier post. Yet this is a book in it self and can be read online as well. And while I am currently reading the second chapter I think that this book really deserves a post of its own.

Reading: In the Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method

KairUs

Hertz G., Parikka J. 2012, In the Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an
Art Method, LEONARDO, Vol. 45, No. 5, pp. 424–430.

Abstract:
This text is an investigation into media culture, temporalities of media objects and planned obsolescence in the midst of ecological crisis and electronic waste. The authors approach the topic under the umbrella of media archaeology and aim to extend this historiographically oriented field of media theory into a methodology for contemporary artistic practice. Hence, media archaeology becomes not only a method for excavation of repressed and forgotten media discourses, but extends itself into an artistic method close to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture, circuit bending, hardware hacking and other hacktivist exercises that are closely related to the political economy of information technology. The concept of dead media is discussed as “zombie media”—dead media revitalized, brought back to use, reworked.

Comment:
In this article Hertz and Parikka introduces the term zombie media as “media that is not only out of use, but resurrected to new uses, contexts and adaptations”. Even if the article is mostly concerned with circuit bending of consumer electronics it gives insights to think about our 22 hard-drives. The article describes how obsolete electronics are reused in new constructions in which “materials and ideas become zombies that carry with them histories but are also reminders of the non-human temporalities involved in technical media”. Gadgets and electronics are bought on flee markets or found while dumpster diving and repurposed in art works. Yet todays gadgets increasingly collect data of their prior owners. A blackbox that is broken (see figure 2 in the article) and abandoned will contain data of its prior owner. And if we continue the metaphor of the dead this data might be seen as a ghost that is now sealed in the gadget(hard drive) and can not be retrieved without expensive expert help. If this gadget was synchronised with other electronics or retrievable from the ever saving cloud the data is saved elsewhere and one might not make the effort to reanimate the machine thing just to delete traces of one self. Another scenario are all those old phones that sill function, but are somewhere in a shoebox now. During the spring cleaning it is for sure easy to drop them in recycling as dead shells while deleting personal contacts from it, would require to find the right charging cables which is of course lost. Though, as Hertz and Parikka argue, dead media is not always really dead:

Although arguments concerning death-of-media may be useful as a tactic to oppose dialog that only focuses on the newness of media, we believe that media never dies: it decays, rots, reforms, remixes, and gets historicized, reinterpreted and collected (see Fig. 5). It either stays in the soil as residue and in the air as concrete dead media, or is reappropriated through artistic, tinkering methodologies.

With the perspective of the hardware returning to be used in art pieces, likewise there is the chance that the media in the meaning of data resurfaces in the hands of artist or others. A haunting thought…

PS:
The Dead Media Lab (Garnet Hertz 2009) is also worth visiting. Here electronic waste finds the artist and dead media comes alive.

 

Reading: Medianatures

KairUs

A book on our reading list:
Medianatures
The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste
ISBN: 978-1-60785-261-2
edited by Jussi Parikka

It is divided into 4 topics: Materials, Energetics, Waste, Ecosophy. Here is a short description of each topic from Jussi Parikkas introduction:

This living book consists of three sections. The first, titled ‘Material’, engages with some of the processes and materials from which technical media is produced. This offers a new look at media materialism in a way that is slightly less McLuhanian (‘the medium is the message’) but that insists that the material is the message – or, as Fumikazu Yoshida has it: ‘the relationship between high-technology and environmental problems focuses on high-technology like microelectronics and new material, while biotechnology develops on the basis of new sorts of substances: this is contrary to the saying, ‘the message is more important than the material.’ These substances , even if they have little value in themselves, have long-term and combined effects on human health which are not yet sufficiently clear’ (1994: 105).

The second section, ‘Energetics’, focuses on energy consumption and includes various perspectives on hand-held mobile devices, data-grids and server economies. The key question is how such new forms of digital economy and energy use (on an abstract informatic level, computers are zero-entropy machines) relate to the old regimes of energy production, and, for instance, CO2 emissions.

Third, we focus on ‘Waste’ management – a growing part of literature on the materiality of electronic media and information technology cultures. It relates to the global distribution of electronic waste devices as well as the capitalist tendency to be able to recycle such uselessness (shit’) into economic value (Laporte, 2000). In spite of the increasing amount of international regulation since the 1990s, e-waste is still being exported to developing countries (to India and Pakistan, but still also to China). The process follows international labour trends: work in those countries is cheap. Or, as Pinto bluntly states, ‘The dumping of e-waste, particularly computer waste, into India from developed countries (‘green passport’ according to Gutierrez), because the latter find it convenient and economical to export waste, has further complicated the problems with waste management’ (2008). As work is becoming more expensive in China due to rising labour costs and wages, new countries will become the final address for the things which developed countries do not want any more.

The last section of the book is titled ‘Ecosophy’, following Félix Guattari’s (2000) concept. Ecosophy refers to the creative moment across the three ecological layers he identified as nature, the social and the human subjective ecology. As such, it refers to the creation of new practices and relations within and across ecologies, recognizing that the standard ‘environmental ecology’ perspective is in itself insufficient to tackle the links between capitalist modes of production and specific forms of living attached to that economy. This is why this particular section addresses some ethico-aesthetic perspectives that tap into ‘ecology’ and media in a different vein: it includes texts and links to projects talk about artistic, social science and media theoretical ways to rethink relations between materials, the environment and technologies.

Im Höllenfeuer der Hightech-Welt

KairUs

Tausende Menschen in Ghanas Hauptstadt Accra leben vom westlichen Computerschrott. Sie riskieren Leben und Gesundheit. Eine SZ-Wissen-Reportage.

Von Michael Bitala

Was für ein elender Ort. Der Rauch hier ist so dicht und schwarz, dass man das Kind zunächst kaum erkennt. Je näher man ihm kommt, desto mehr tränen die Augen, desto mehr brennt es in der Nase, im Mund und im Rachen. Dann aber sieht man, dass der kleine Junge auf einer Müllkippe sitzt, auf einem Berg voller Glasscherben und Computertrümmern.

Er hustet, schaut kurz auf, dann greift er nach einem kinderkopfgroßen Stein und haut ihn auf den Monitor, der vor ihm liegt. Beim ersten Schlag splittert das Glas, beim zweiten bricht es ein. Und als er den Stein wieder zur Seite legt, fließt dickes, hellrotes Blut aus seiner rechten Hand.

Er wischt sie kurz über die dreckige Hose, dann bricht er die restlichen Scherben aus dem Gehäuse. Kwaku Prince Yeboah heißt der Junge mit der blutenden Hand und dem traurigstarren Blick. Er gehört auf der Mülldeponie hinter dem Agbogbloshie-Markt in Ghanas Hauptstadt Accra schon zu den älteren Kindern, er ist zehn Jahre alt, viele sind auch erst fünf oder sechs.

Blutende Hände sind das kleinste Problem

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Sie zerschlagen Computerbildschirme mit Steinen. Schnittwunden haben sie alle, aber das ist das kleinste Problem. Der größte Elektroschrottplatz des westafrikanischen Lands ist eine gigantische Giftmüllhalde, eine, in der sich Konzentrationen von Blei, Kadmium, Barium, Quecksilber, Chrom, Arsen, Beryllium, bromhaltigen Flammschutzmitteln und anderer Giftstoffe wie polychlorierten Biphenylen oder Chlorbenzol finden lassen, die bis zu 100-fach die Normalwerte übersteigen.

Wie viele Kinder und Jugendliche schon erkrankt oder gestorben sind, weiß kein Mensch. Sicher aber ist, dass es diesen Ort nicht gäbe, wenn Exporteure in Europa und Amerika ihren giftigen Computerschrott nicht nach Ghana schicken würden.

Oft deklarieren sie ihre Profitgier als Entwicklungshilfe. Wenn nicht gerade der tiefschwarze Rauch ungezählter Feuerstellen alles verhüllt, dann sieht man die gewaltigen Ausmaße der Deponie. Tausende Menschen leben von ihr.

Ausgeweidete PC-Gehäuse und zersplitterte Bildschirme türmen sich bis zu vier Meter hoch. Der Boden besteht fast nur aus Asche. Überall liegen Kabel herum, zerbrochene Platinen, Tastaturen, Prozessoren, Transformatoren und Hunderte Kothaufen.

Auf Schlammlöchern und Tümpeln treiben Flecken, die grün, orangefarben oder blaumetallisch leuchten. Da die Ziegen- und Kuhherden auf der Müllhalde nichts anderes finden, saufen sie aus grell schimmernden Pfützen und fressen ascheverseuchtes Gras.

So sieht es also aus, wenn Europa und die USA vorgeben, die “digitale Kluft” zwischen der Ersten und der Dritten Welt schließen zu wollen. Rund drei Viertel der Desktops, Laptops, Drucker, Scanner und Kopierer, die als Secondhandware deklariert nach Afrika exportiert werden, sind schlichtweg Elektroschrott.

Jedes Jahr, so schätzt das UN-Umweltprogramm, fallen weltweit 50 Millionen Tonnen des giftigen Mülls an, allein in Deutschland sind es rund eine Million Tonnen. Und die Menge nimmt zu. Dafür sorgen schon die Hersteller mit immer schnelleren Prozessoren, noch größeren Flachbildschirmen und leistungsfähigeren Handys. Mit jeder technischen Neuerung wächst der Elektroschrottberg in Afrika, China und Indien.

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/ghana-im-hoellenfeuer-der-hightech-welt-1.689901