3 Interesting News Items – Nov 2014

State Organised Cyber Spying ?
A highly sophisticated piece of malware known as Regin has recently been discovered. Thought to be used primarily for surveillance operations, it is believed that the development of Regin was state sponsored, but obviously no-one knows by which state. Highly customisable to attack a variety of targets and expert and hiding it’s presence, you can read more about Regin here. If Regin was developed by a nation state the reason given will be National Security. Perhaps it’s time to rename this practice as ‘National Insecurity’.

WhatsApp To Encrypt Message Data
WhatsApp, the mobile instant messaging service which has some 600 million users worldwide, is to begin to encrypt all it’s users text messages in a rollout that starts today. Wrapping data in hard to break encryption algorithms seems to be the way to go now for many messaging service providers and will cause large headaches for the state monitoring services whose job it is to police data.

SSD RAID 5’s
Data Clinic have recently recovered data from a RAID 5 array running SSD’s instead of the conventional HDD’s. It’s strange to think that with the price of SSD’s significantly higher than HDD’s why manufacturers are selling RAID 5’s with SSD’s in at all. Still if there’s a market… Read more about Data Clinic’s RAID 5 data recovery skills on this page.