Mass surveillance leads into the rabbit hole :
Yes! Privacy is just an illusion we knew it for a long time but in this era where we are totally digitalizing and don’t tell me that you don’t have anything to hide?
Our emotions are attached to social media. People are fighting, crying over software (youtube vs TikTok), we are shifting totally into digital payments, Virtual reality, Augmented reality. With just a click we can order any kind of food and you also don’t need to step out of your house and think about our life when we were homo sapiens. We are the generation who saw the evolution of the internet.
Google collects a lot of user data to train its AI and algorithms so you can become a long-lasting consumer and attached to its ecosystem. This is not only google, We saw Cambridge Analytica one of the biggest data scams in this globe. Google even knows accurately when you wake up, where you are planning to go today, each and every activity of the user.
The competition is huge and if these companies can collect your day to day activities then think about government?
"We are not a consumer anymore , We are the products"
My Research :
If you read espionage stories of the past events where governments take so many risks to get each nation’s intelligence data.
In 2019, I did research on the TOR network and published a paper on how you can enhance your privacy with the TOR network where I mostly focused to tighten security by routing the traffic via political opposing nations nodes but after that research, I have completely lost faith on TOR project.
Whether you use TOR or other applications for securing your network and data link layer no one knows about the nodes that your traffic is routing. But ask yourself are you sure? No one is watching your other way around?
Backdoor in our processor :
Every computer builds on an Intel platform since 2008 or later there is a secret computer hidden inside their chips. It cannot be turned off, removed, disabled. It is the way beyond any user access.
It is the ultimate control of your device, It is totally invisible, the running processes inside that small computer can’t be accessed at all by the users. It can bypass any operating system or any CPU actions. This is not a fantasy from a spy thriller.
This is an Intel management engine, a substem of a microprocessor which is operating in every Intel CPU chip. There is very little information that has been disclosed regarding the Intel management engine and what it does.
The microcontroller works independently from the main CPU.It cannot be manually removed only Intel/vendors can able to remove it.
Even if your PC is off still it operates independently and does its operations. It runs an operating system called “Minix”.Many researchers claimed intel modified the Minix code and deployed it in their chipset. Not only Intel, but AMD Security platform also have the same story.
Is this a threat ?
This matter is so serious that the US government asked Intel to remove the management engine for all their govt systems. Security researchers wrote research papers about remote exploitation and also ME-based keystroke logging rootkit. By providing software updates for operating systems didn’t make the vulnerability patch, this need to be patch physically by the vendor. From 2008 to 2017 all the systems are still vulnerable.
NSA also asked to leave the vulnerability as it is so that they can spy over worldwide.NSA also asked Microsoft not to patch one of their vulnerability which has been exploited and kept secret by the NSA. Later the hacker group called “Shadow Brokers” exposed the NSA and the windows vulnerability public which leads to a global attack “Wanna Cry” ransomware and the malware damaged around $4 billion dollars around the globe.
There are lots of other vulnerabilities that still exist today in our system’s physical layer and only known to intelligence agencies so that they can exploit anyone from this world.
Next WW3 will be the Cyber War between nations.No one will go to the borders and fight with each other troops. It’s just one click to blew all the nation’s nuclear reactors.
So what can we do ?
Try to shift yourself into open source apps. If you are gifting a new system to yourself give a try on vendors like system76 etc, they design and build the system from scratch without using any proprietary drivers.
To be honest, there is no solution for this because the power of decision is not in our hands, we already lost our digital privacy.
Also, I am attaching a video that can help you to remove the management engine but who knows they are few other vulnerabilities present in our chips and these are being done intentionally because its the real business. DIY: Disabling Intel ME ‘Backdoor’ on your Computer
I will highly recommend you to watch the movie “Snowden” and also research on declassified papers of US Intelligence the project “Olympics” to understand the power of US intelligence and other intelligence agencies like CIA, MOSSAD, MI6, etc.
Thank you for reading, hope you enjoyed, stay safe. Also, DM me @instagram and tell me what are the steps you take to secure yourself and the alternatives of google apps which are open-sourced.