Breach of trust

[unixronin]

sierra_nevada found this Inquirer article, which claims that the popular ZoneAlarm personal firewall secretly sends data to Israeli parent company CheckPoint.

This, of course, leads me to wonder whether Checkpoint Firewall-1 has ever been audited for any malicious behavior....

Comments

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

*explodes laughing*

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Would you .... care to expand upon that? :)

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Ok, but it's one of those things that's only hysterically funny because it's so offensive it's surreally absurd.

Warning: the following link is genuinely offensive. But if you like laughing at the insane, it's funny, too.

http://www.nukeisrael.com/computers.htm

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That is pretty out there. :)

o/" Springtime for Hitler and Germany.... o/"

[ehintz.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't be in the least bit surprised. The Israeli govt seems to be notably worse than the US in ends-justify-the-means mindset.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

And of course, it'd be far from the first time our "friends" in the Mossad have performed an op against the US. (Any takers for Savannah River K reactor, 1968?)

"The real accomplishment of the Palestinians has been to make the Israelis as crazy as they are." -- Chris Baldwin

[ehintz.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the USS Liberty...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, I wasn't forgetting it.

[databeast.livejournal.com]

from what I know, yes, there's actually several places where FW-1 is banned for use, like on SIPR/NIPRnet.

FWIW: most of the CALEA units out there (the combined wiretap/E911 units on the phone systems) have been p0wned by Mossad for years. I saw this all the time working at Qwest, but didnt have the authority to touch those machines to do anything about it..

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. You'd think there'd be some official interest .....

[databeast.livejournal.com]

there is, I think it reads as follows

"We can't afford to piss off Israel too, let them do whatever they want"

[bfudlmint.livejournal.com]

Damn this is my favorite client side firewall software. Looks like I am going to have to set up smoothwall to block that server.

[databeast.livejournal.com]

bahh, zonealarm is broken as designed, go with Kerio Personal Firewall instead, seriously speaking as a security guy in the field, it's better.

better company to deal with too.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

This is hardly the first time that a privatized PTT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel) with ties to its national intelligence gathering agency (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DGSE) buggers CPE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_premises_equipment) that it manufactures with what appears (rather suspiciously) to be a cryptographically protected backdoor that allows monitoring of the traffic on all attached networks, undocumented, and unbeknownst to the large ISPs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_Bell) that were buying said CPE.

It's quite embarassing (http://web.morons.org/article.jsp?id=188) (not to mention expensive when your major buyer cancels $300m of orders) when you get caught out like that.