Researchers Solve Juniper Backdoor Mystery; Signs Point to NSA
Kim Zetter
Security researchers believe they have finally solved the mystery
around how a sophisticated backdoor embedded in Juniper firewalls works.
Juniper Networks, a tech giant that produces networking equipment used
by an array of corporate and government systems, announced on Thursday
that it had discovered two unauthorized backdoors in its firewalls, including one that allows the attackers to decrypt protected traffic passing through Juniper’s devices.
The researchers’ findings suggest that the NSA may be responsible for
that backdoor, at least indirectly. Even if the NSA did not plant the
backdoor in the company’s source code, the spy agency may in fact be
indirectly responsible for it by having created weaknesses the attackers
exploited.
Evidence uncovered by Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, founder and CEO of Comsecuris,
a security consultancy in Germany, suggests that the Juniper culprits
repurposed an encryption backdoor previously believed to have been
engineered by the NSA, and tweaked it to use for their own spying
purposes. Weinmann reported his findings in an extensive post published late Monday.
