Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Snowden leak: Microsoft added Outlook.com backdoor for Feds...

There are red faces in Redmond after Edward Snowden released a new batch of documents from the NSA's Special Source Operations (SSO) division covering Microsoft's involvement in allowing backdoor access to its software to the NSA and others.

Documents seen by The Guardian detail how the NSA became concerned when Microsoft started testing Outlook.com, and asked for access. In five months Microsoft and the FBI created a workaround that gives the NSA access to encrypted chats on Outlook.com. The system went live in December last year – two months before Outlook.com's commercial launch.

Those Outlook users not enabling encryption get their data slurped as a matter of course, the documents show. "For Prism collection against Hotmail, Live, and Outlook.com emails will be unaffected because Prism collects this data prior to encryption," an NSA newsletter states.

Microsoft's cloud storage service SkyDrive is also easy to access, thanks to Redmond's work with the NSA. The agency reported on April 8, 2013 that Microsoft has built PRISM access into Skydrive in such a way as to remove the need for NSA analysts to get special authorization for searches in Microsoft's cloud. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Establishment hero Bill Gates sold you out to the NSA, but that's not all...
  2. Revealed: how Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages...
  3. How can any company ever trust Microsoft again?
  4. The NSA helped make Windows 7...
  5. Skype's secret Project Chess reportedly helped NSA access customers' data...
  6. NSA leaks hint Microsoft may have lied about Skype security...

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