Dutch intelligence agency AIVD hacks internet forums

[BelgianMadCow]

From NRC Handelsblad, duthc mainstream newspaper.

The Dutch intelligence service - AIVD - hacks internet web forums to collect the data of all users. The majority of these people are unknown to the intelligence services and are not specified as targets when the hacking and data-collection process starts. A secret document of former NSA-contractor Edward Snowden shows that the AIVD use a technology called Computer Network Exploitation – CNE – to hack the web forums and collect the data.

Last week NRC reported that the NSA has infected 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software. According to Dutch law, the intelligence service is permitted to hack computers of people or organisations under suspicion. But the law is not prescriptive regarding sophisticated forms of computer espionage. These techniques allow the intelligence services to harvest, analyse and utilise computer data of a large group of people using web forums.
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The document summarizes a meeting held on February 14, 2013 between officials of the NSA and the Dutch intelligence services - AIVD and MIVD. During this meeting Dutch officials briefed their American counterparts on the way they target web forums with the CNE technique. “They acquire MySQL databases via CNE access”, the document reads.

MySQL is free open source software used to build databases for web forums. These databases contain all the posts of all the users of the forum and their personal data.

Note: though the article doesn't say it explicitly, what the NSA did to 50.000 networks was called CNE. Anyone thinking it's just the dutch, I have a bridge still unsold. The article doesn't say explicitly where the forums targeted were based, but from the context one can derive they targeted dutch forums.

The leaked source document can be seen here.