NSA can hack your home Wi-Fi network from 8 miles away

By:  Jacob Siegal , http://bgr.com

This week began with a massive report detailing the NSA’s extensive spy operations in the United States, but the revelations didn’t end there. Jacob Applebaum, co-author of the original Der Spiegel report, took the stage at the 30th annual Chaos Communication Congress to discuss the specifics of the operations even further, including the existence of a device called “NIGHTSTAND,” which has the ability to infect a wireless network “from as far as eight miles under ideal circumstances.” Use of the device is employed by the NSA when a wired connection cannot be established. The leaked document also states that an attack by the device “is undetectable by the user.”

Applebaum says that he has heard of instances where the NSA has attached the hardware to drones in order to exploit the personal electronics of large groups of people. There are no documents to directly back up this terrifying claim, but considering the purported reach of the device, the potential for such an endeavor is hardly inconceivable. If drones seem a little drastic, Applebaum admits that NSA agents could simply park outside your house to gather the information they want.

The full video of Applebaum’s talk can be seen below, and discussion regarding NIGHTSTAND starts at 16:00.

SCP through SSH Tunneling

SSH tunneling can be used to secure copy (scp) files to the clusters from your local 
computer (and vice versa) without having to copy them on to the intermediary bastion host.
This page contains instructions on how to use SSH tunneling on the HPC clusters to
secure copy (scp) the files.


You can do one of the following two methods to secure copy (scp)
 the files from/to clusters to/from your home computer through tunneling.

1.     Put these lines in your ~/.ssh/config file on your personal linux machine. If you don't have this file "config", create one.

Host hpctunnel
HostName hpc.es.its.nyu.edu
LocalForward 8020 usq.es.its.nyu.edu:22
LocalForward 8021 bowery.es.its.nyu.edu:22
LocalForward 8022 cardiac1.es.its.nyu.edu:22
User UserName

Host usq
HostName localhost
Port 8020
ForwardX11 yes
User UserName

Host bowery
HostName localhost
Port 8021
ForwardX11 yes
User UserName

Host cardiac1
HostName localhost
Port 8022
ForwardX11 yes

User UserName

2.     Create a tunnel to the cluster you want to connect from your computer 
through hpc.es.its.nyu.edu. Keep this terminal window alive. It should be
open until you are done with scp or ssh. You should open a new terminal 
window for scp or ssh.

$ ssh hpctunnel

3.     Open a new terminal window.

4.     Copy the files from your desktop or laptop to
 the clusters. This will write the file filename to your /home directory
 on the cluster,  "." means to keep the same name on the cluster.
  Substitute bowery or cardiac1 for usqif writing to one of those clusters.

$ scp filename usq:~/.

5.     Alternatively, copy files from the clusters to your desktop or laptop:


$ scp usq:~/filename .

What is a VPN Connection ?

A virtual private network (VPN) is a method of computer 
networking--typically using the public internet--that allows users to 
privately share information between remote locations, or between a remote 
location and a business' home network. A VPN can provide secure information 
transport by authenticating users, and encrypting data to prevent unauthorized 
persons from reading the information transmitted.
The VPN can be used to send any kind of network traffic securely.

VPNs are frequently used by remote workers or companies with remote offices 
to share private data and network resources. VPNs may also allow users to 
bypass regional internet restrictions such as firewalls, and web filtering, 
by "tunneling" the network connection to a different region.
Technically, the VPN protocol encapsulates network data transfers using a 
secure cryptographic method between two or more networked devices which 
are not on the same private network, to keep the data private as it passes through 
the connecting nodes of a local or wide area network.