Spanish for estate, Hacienda can port scan all of the servers in a country to provide information on user endpoints and scan for potential vulnerabilities. The ability to port scan is not new, but the scale of its use by government spies, with 27 countries scanned by 2009, has shocked many familiar with the software.
"In 2009, the British spy agency GCHQ made port scans a 'standard tool' to be applied against entire nations," Heise reports. "Twenty-seven countries are listed as targets of the Hacienda [program]."
The process of scanning entire countries and looking for vulnerable network infrastructure to exploit is consistent with the meta-goal of "Mastering the Internet", which is also the name of a GCHQ cable-tapping program. Targeted protocols include SSH, HTTP and FTP, among others.Systems may be attacked simply because they might eventually create a path towards a valuable espionage target, even without indications this will ever be the case. Based on this logic, every device is a target.
Comment:
Say it with me..."Resistance is Futile!"