updated Mon. April 15, 2024
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The Intercept
April 24, 2017
At Misawa, the NSA began integrating hacking operations into its repertoire of capabilities. One such method it deployed at the base is called a “Quantum Insert” attack, which involves monitoring the internet browsing habits of people targeted for surveillance, before covertly redirecting them to a maliciousÃâà...
WIRED
January 28, 2016
Joyce is head of the NSA's Tailored Access Operations—the government's top hacking team who are responsible for breaking into the systems of its foreign adversaries, and occasionally its allies. He's been with the NSA for more than 25 years but only became head of the TAO division in April 2013, justÃâà...
WIRED
January 27, 2016
But once spies home in on those they need to conduct more efficient and pinpointed intelligence-gathering. They do this by hacking a target's system. The NSA and its British spy partner the GCHQ use a system called QUANTUM Insert that involves a man-on-the-side attack and code injection. The systemÃâà...
CSO Online
April 24, 2015
A couple of years ago, among the trove of documents released by Edward Snowden, there was information about a "man-on-the-side" attack called Quantum Insert. The way it works is that the attacker listens in to the Internet traffic from the target organization and when an employee accesses a particularÃâà...
The Register
April 23, 2015
Security researchers have developed a method for detecting NSA Quantum Insert-style hacks. Fox-IT has published free open-source tools to detect duplicate sequence numbers of HTTP packets, with different data sizes, that are the hallmarks of Quantum Insert. The utilities developed by Fox-IT areÃâà...
Wired
April 22, 2015
Among all of the NSA hacking operations exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden over the last two years, one in particular has stood out for its sophistication and stealthiness. Known as Quantum Insert, the man-on-the-side hacking technique has been used to great effect since 2005 by the NSA and itsÃâà...
Wired
March 13, 2014
First, it's clear that the NSA has settled on a system called QUANTUM as its preferred, if not near-universal, internet exploitation mechanism. QUANTUM is vastly more effective than just sending spam. But since its launch at NSA, the program has clearly suffered from both mission creep and target creep.
Ars Technica
November 12, 2013
That allowed the NSA and GCHQ to perform "man-in-the-middle" attacks that let them install malware onto the target computers and gain access to OPEC's internal network—even gaining administrative privileges for the network and access to file servers. The attack, called a "Quantum insert," is just part ofÃâà...
Ars Technica
November 10, 2013
Der Spiegel suggests that the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British sister agency to the NSA, used spoofed versions of LinkedIn and Slashdot pages to serve malware to targets. This type of attack was also used to target “nine salaried employees” of the Organization of PetroleumÃâà...
The Guardian
October 4, 2013
An article in the German magazine Spiegel, based on additional top secret Snowden documents, mentions an NSA developed attack technology with the name of QuantumInsert that performs redirection attacks. Another top-secret Tor presentation provided by Snowden mentions QuantumCookie to forceÃâà...
Slate Magazine (blog)
September 20, 2013
The secret files, disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published by Der Spiegel Friday, show how the British spy agency GCHQ hatched a plot to infiltrate Belgacom, ... One of the tools used was a kind of specialized spy Trojan called a “Quantum Insert” to target Belgacom employees.
