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Head of the National Security Agency United States Navy Admiral Michael Rogers refused to give a comment about the reports that the US government has installed spyware applications on various computer hard drives in order to gather surveillance information. The admiral also added that his agency's practices "fully comply with the law."
On a Washington forum organized by the New American organization Rodgers said, "Clearly I'm not going to get into the specifics of the allegations. But the point I would make is, we fully compy with the law."
Rodgers' agency has been recently grilled by privacy advocates after the Russian security firm Kaspersky Labs delivered a report accusing it of covertly installing spyware application on certain brands of computer hard drives in order to obtain sensitive user information. The module only known as "nls_933w.dll" is the first of its kind to be released and has been known to be used by the EquationDrug and the GrayFish spying platform.
Another interesting discovery is that the module has the ability to create undetectable storage space inside the hard drive in order for it to store the data stolen from the system; this will give attackers a chance to retrieve it on a later date without the user noticing that its computer system has been compromised. This kind of integration process enables spy groups to bypass disk encryption protocol by storing the stolen data in the part of the disk that cannot be encrypted, according to Wired.
Another allegation concerning unsanctioned spy-activities was provided by a former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and was published on the website Intercept. The report claimed that the US agency along with its British counterpart hacked into the computer systems of Gemalto, of the world's biggest manufacturer of SIM cards, according to Reuters.
If this allegation is true, it would give the agency complete monitoring capabilities of calls, text messages and personal emails of billions of people.
