Inside the NSA’s Secret Efforts to Hunt and Hack System Administrators 20 Mar 2014 According to a secret document provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, the agency tracks down the private email and Fbook accounts of system administrators (or sys admins, as they are often called), before hacking their computers to gain access to the networks they control. The document consists of several posts – one of them titled "I hunt sys admins" – that were published in 2012 on an internal discussion board hosted on the agency’s classified servers. They were written by an NSA official involved in the agency’s effort to break into foreign network routers, the devices that connect computer networks and transport data across the Internet.
NSA hacks system administrators, new leak reveals 21 Mar 2014 In its quest to take down suspected terrorists and criminals abroad, the United States National Security Agency has adopted the practice of hacking the system administrators that oversee private computer networks, new documents reveal. The Intercept has published a handful of leaked screenshots taken from an internal NSA message board where one spy agency specialist spoke extensively about compromising not the computers of specific targets, but rather the machines of the system administrators who control entire networks.
NSA Spied on Chinese Government and Networking Firm Huawei –Source code breached 22 Mar 2014 The American government conducted a major intelligence offensive against China, with targets including the Chinese government and networking company Huawei, according to documents from former NSA worker Edward Snowden that have been viewed by SPIEGEL. Among the American intelligence service’s targets were former Chinese President Hu Jintao, the Chinese Trade Ministry, banks, as well as telecommunications companies… At the beginning of 2009, the NSA began an extensive operation, referred to internally as "Shotgiant," against Huawei, which is considered a major competitor to US-based Cisco. According to a top secret NSA presentation, NSA workers not only succeeded in accessing the email archive, but also the secret source code of individual Huawei products.